The Book of Cthulhu

by Neil Gaiman

  And sitting before him was the only link to his past he’d every met. Ever heard of. He was here for money not to face his past. Will tried to keep his nights full and avoid solitude or any point in time where his mother’s ghost would sit across the table or at his elbow and watch him. It was like surf, rising, a great weight pulling him from his mental steeping stones toward… Outside. The zone of stark, lonely dunes no drug could cure, no woman could kiss away.

  What the fuck is this shit?

  “I said everything.” The rules are simple the 9 said. “And I meant everything.”

  A delicate, hollow blind man lost in the echo of a love song frightened to death by evil, Daniel Washington went down in the dark place of cold rain better left undisturbed.

  “Back then I had nothing but her smile and my dream. She gave me so much love, made me so very happy, then they told me she was… When she wouldn’t talk to me, see me, I searched for details. When you take Valentine’s Day from a man he seeks redemption. For me it was in facts.”

  All the horror came out. Fact after fact. The ones carved in stone and the ones his heart knew but could not prove.

  “I own a gun, but have never had the guts to shoot him.”

  “Who?”

  “I can prove nothing.”

  “Give me the fucking name.”

  Daniel Washington was trying to make sense of this, but couldn’t get his mind around it. All these years he’d been faithful to her memory and now this man he thought might be her son was going to kill him. How? Why?

  “The fucking name.”

  “Albert Bergin raped her. Left her for dead.”

  Will tried to catch his breath. He’d sat in a room face to face with the monster that had killed his mother and sent him into the tombs.

  The two men in the room were stone. Outside the world in an episode of cursed sensations. In a distant valley, naked, raped, no roof or sky, only despair… And anger. Crawling from the labyrinths of heart and mind. Claws bared. Hate sharpened and raw. Hate and claws becoming the everywhere. The red wind screamed the monster’s name.

  The gun lowered. Eyes choking back tears.

  “I can’t be completely certain it was him.”

  The room the contract was written in was in Will’s mind. The face, he studied it and studied it. Took it apart. Something about that face. The set of the jaw. The nose… It was like… Looking in a mirror.

  The gun almost slipped from his hand. Will had never known a single fact about his father until this minute. Now he knew too much.

  “Look at me. Can you see him in my face? Do I look like him?”

  Daniel Washington strained to see through his tears. And it was there.

  “Exactly how old are you?”

  Will told him. Washington’s expression told him the final fact.

  “Your jaw, your nose—he’s your father. You’re the product of—”

  “Rape.”

  The air was almost too solid to breathe.

  “Can I tell you something?”

  “Sure.”

  “Albert Bergin and I were rivals in school. We were both studying the same subject. I was a better student and quicker. Our professors favored me. I know Bergin disliked me and was jealous… Everyone knew how in love I was. I think he raped your mother to unseat me. If I stumbled in my studies he could catch up, maybe surpass me. He destroyed her because of professional jealousy. I always knew he had a black heart, but… I can’t believe I never saw this before. Guess I’ve always thought he was drunk or something and lost his temper.”

  “But why do you think it was him?”

  “Once in the library he was a little drunk. He was reading the newspaper. He had this, almost triumphant, grin on his face. I don’t know, the cat that ate the canary, maybe? It was pleased with itself, and evil. Cold. It was very cold. And I thought I heard him say, ‘She should have shut up.’ When he got up he left the paper and I went over and looked at the article he had been reading. It was about your mother and the rape. I should have went after him and killed him. I went to the police but they didn’t believe me. A friend of his family was the investigator on the case and thought because we were rivals in school I was trying to tarnish him.”

  Will wanted to be out in the cool night air. Running. Running from the photos, running to someplace where he could get a drink and his bearings.

  “I’m not here for the reason you think. Bergin sent me to get something and bring it to him. And to kill you.”

  “What are you to get for him.”

  “A book. Faded red leather with a scorpion-like emblem on the cover.”

  “The Navarre. It all makes perfect sense. We both studied philosophy, religion, and metaphysics back then. Do you believe in magic or the supernatural?”

  “No.”

  “I do. And so does Bergin. That’s what we pursued in our studies.”

  “Ghosts and shit?”

  “No. More like a little-known religious belief. There is a race of terrible beings who once savaged the universe. Somehow they were imprisoned, awaiting a time when they would be free. We tried to separate myth from fact regarding these entities. As a believer I have always sought to understand as much as I can to keep them imprisoned, if that’s possible. Bergin had a jealous nature and was power hungry. His lust led him to dark places and darker studies. The book he wants is said to contain rituals and spells to free these otherworldly beings.”

  “Like bring the things here? He wants to tear the roof off Hell and let these monsters out?”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s fucked up.”

  “I’m going to kill him.”

  “No you’re not. My mother, he owes me for her. And for my life.”

  “Then let me have some retribution too. Your gun is too merciful. I know a way.”

  “I’m listening.”

  Daniel Washington stood, he seemed dry, a faded summertime photograph, and walked to a bookcase. The ghost hand, now off its knees, deliberate, pushed a hidden button and a door opened. There sat a book and what looked like a rusty iron can.

  “Take these items to him.”

  “Is that the book?”

  “It’s an exact copy. The real one is locked up.”

  “And that thing.”

  “Something he will think is one thing, but it is something entirely different.”

  “What does he think it is?”

  “He will think it holds magical vapors which grant vision. A mage who studied the things Bergin and I have studied once said, ‘Great Cthulhu sleeps in his house and shapes the dream of what shall be, dead Cthulhu waits dreaming.’ Based on an incorrect translation, Bergin believes with these vapors he’ll be able to see into the dreams of this being.”

  “Shit’s poison. Ain’t it?”

  “Something far worse.”

  “You sure he’ll be dead?”

  “Yes. Certain.”

  “What do I do?”

  “Just give him this and leave.”

  “Huh?”

  “Tell him I’m dead and give him this copy of the book—tell him it’s the only one you found. Tell him as compensation you picked this up, thinking it might interest him. Tell him you saw the sigil and it being the same as the one on the cover of the book you thought they might be related in some fashion. Then leave. Do not stay there. You do not want to be in the house when he opens this.”

  “Why? Is it going to blow up?”

  “Something like that.”

  “I’ll be back.”

  Will rang the bell. Albert Bergin answered. Will’s gun backed the older man up.

  “There’s your shit. Where’s my money?”

  The 9 was heat-soaked stone ready for blood. Bergin knew it.

  “He’s dead?”

  “No, Fuckhead. I put him on a plane to Vegas with a blonde. Yes. Dead as yer grandmother’s pussy. My money—now!”

  “Of course. I just want to see the book first.”

  “Then look.�
�

  Bergin opened the backpack.

  “This is not it.”

  “It’s all I could find. The thing on the cover looks like you said it did. You said it was written in French. That looks like fucking French to me. And there’s no fucking doubt it’s old. The fucking thing’s falling apart. The old fuck was crying before I shot him, said it was a copy. Look at that can-thing I grabbed while I was there.”

  Bergin removed the object from the bag. If a demon could be delighted with an unexpected present, his eyes said he was.

  “This is… Navarre’s. How? Where was this?”

  “With the book. It’s got the same logo thing on it as the book. Figured they went together or something. Now where’s my money.”

  Bergin began to open the container.

  “Fuck that! You ain’t openin’ that fucking thing while I’m here. I seen shows on TV about when they opened those old tombs in Egypt and I ain’t breathin’ in any old germs that would lay my ass over in Potter’s Field. You can wait ’til I count my money and leave.”

  Bergin sat the container on his desk.

  “It’s all there. Count it. And leave.”

  Will picked up the brown manila envelope and began counting.

  “We’re square. You have fun with yer fuckin’ shit there and forget my name and that you ever saw me.” Will leveled the 9 at him. “You understand?”

  “Yes.”

  And Will was gone.

  Bergin’s hands opened the vessel containing Navarre’s Vapors. Coughed. His hands burned. Cold and shadows came into the room…

  Tentacles of yellow/greenish curling smoke. A burnt odor. The sound of roaring fire in howling wind and a great grinding. Albert Bergin has It in his hands and It has him in its hands…

  Will had been locked up in labyrinths and abysses for years and years, passed from hand to hand by creatures with demonic faces and demonic hearts of utter blackness. Cast into a life of Hell by the demonic hands of his father. Will heard a scream inside the house. Remembered the first time he’d screamed when the creatures had him in their hands…

  Will remembered some bookworm in a bar once saying something about the child is the father to the man. He wasn’t sure just what the guy meant by it, but he knew his take on it. “Just returning the lesson, Daddy.”

  The real world in slow motion. Will lit a cigarette. Starting walking away from Back. “Who says that’s just the way it is? I’ve never hit a woman or sold dope to kids.” Never killed anybody that didn’t have it coming. “Maybe I still have options.”

  He took a drag off his smoke. The sun was out. He started walking toward Daniel Washington’s house…

  ∇

  The Shallows

  John Langan

  Il faut cultiver notre jardin.

  —Voltaire, Candide

  I could call you Gus,” Ransom said.

  The crab’s legs, blue and cream, clattered against one another. It did not hoist itself from its place in the sink, though, which meant it was listening to him. Maybe. Staring out the dining room window, his daily mug of instant coffee steaming on the table in front of him, he said, “That was supposed to be my son’s name. Augustus. It was his great-grandfather’s name, his mother’s father’s father. The old man was dying while Heather was pregnant. We…I, really, was struck by the symmetry: one life ending, another beginning. It seemed a duty, our duty, to make sure the name wasn’t lost, to carry it forward into a new generation. I didn’t know old Gus, not really; as far as I can remember, I met him exactly once, at a party at Heather’s parents’ a couple of years before we were married.”

  The great curtain of pale light that rippled thirty yards from his house stilled. Although he had long since given up trying to work out the pattern of its changes, Ransom glanced at his watch. 2:02…pm, he was reasonably sure. The vast rectangle that occupied the space where his neighbor’s green-sided house had stood, as well as everything to either side of it, dimmed, then filled with the rich blue of the tropical ocean, the paler blue of the tropical sky. Waves chased one another towards Ransom, their long swells broken by the backs of fish, sharks, whales, all rushing in the same direction as the waves, away from a spot where the surface of the ocean heaved in a way that reminded Ransom of a pot of water approaching the boil.

  (Tilting his head back, Matt had said, How far up do you think it goes? I don’t know, Ransom had answered. Twenty feet in front of them, the sheet of light that had descended an hour before, draping their view of the Pattersons’ house and everything beyond it, belled, as if swept by a breeze. This is connected to what’s been happening at the poles, isn’t it? Matt had squinted to see through the dull glare. I don’t know, Ransom had said, maybe. Do you think the Pattersons are okay? Matt had asked. I hope so, Ransom had said. He’d doubted it.)

  He looked at the clumps of creamer speckling the surface of the coffee, miniature icebergs. “Gus couldn’t have been that old. He’d married young, and Heather’s father, Rudy, had married young, and Heather was twenty-four or -five…call him sixty-five, sixty-six, tops. To look at him, though, you would have placed him a good ten, fifteen years closer to the grave. Old…granted, I was younger, then, and from a distance of four decades, mid-sixty seemed a lot older than it does twenty years on. But even factoring in the callowness of youth, Gus was not in good shape. I doubt he’d ever been what you’d consider tall, but he was stooped, as if his head were being drawn down into his chest. Thin, frail: although the day was hot, he wore a long-sleeved checked shirt buttoned to the throat and a pair of navy chinos. His head…his hair was thinning, but what there was of it was long, and it floated around his head like the crest of some ancient bird. His nose supported a pair of horn-rimmed glasses whose lenses were white with scratches; I couldn’t understand how he could see through them, or maybe that was the point. Whether he was eating from the paper plate Heather’s uncle brought him or just sitting there, old Gus’s lips kept moving, his tongue edging out and retreating.”

  The coffee was cool enough to drink. Over the rim of the mug, he watched the entire ocean churning with such force that whatever of its inhabitants had not reached safety were flung against one another. Mixed among their flailing forms were parts of creatures Ransom could not identify, a forest of black needles, a mass of rubbery pink tubes, the crested dome of what might have been a head the size of a bus.

  He lowered the mug. “By the time I parked my car, Gus was seated near the garage. Heather took me by the hand and led me over to him. Those white lenses raised in my direction as she crouched beside his chair and introduced me as her boyfriend. Gus extended his right hand, which I took in mine. Hard…his palm, the undersides of his fingers, were rough with calluses, the yield of a lifetime as a mechanic. I tried to hold his hand gently…politely, I guess, but although his arm trembled, there was plenty of strength left in his fingers, which closed on mine like a trap springing shut. He said something, Pleased to meet you, you’ve got a special girl, here, words to that effect. I wasn’t paying attention; I was busy with the vice tightening around my fingers, with my bones grinding against one another. Once he’d delivered his pleasantries, Gus held onto my hand a moment longer, then the lenses dropped, the fingers relaxed, and my hand was my own, again. Heather kissed him on the cheek, and we went to have a look at the food. My fingers ached on and off for the rest of the day.”

  At the center of the heaving ocean, something forced its way up through the waves. The peak of an undersea mountain, rising to the sun: that was still Ransom’s first impression. Niagaras poured off black rock. His mind struggled to catch up with what stood revealed, to find suitable comparisons for it, even as more of it pushed the water aside. Some kind of structure—structures: domes, columns, walls—a city, an Atlantis finding the sun, again. No—the shapes were off: the domes bulged, the columns bent, the walls curved, in ways that conformed to no architectural style—that made no sense. A natural formation, then, a quirk of geology. No—already, the hypothesis was unte
nable: there was too much evidence of intentionality in the shapes draped with seaweed, heaped with fish brought suffocating into the air. As the rest of the island left the ocean, filling the view before Ransom to the point it threatened to burst out of the curtain, the appearance of an enormous monolith in the foreground, its surface incised with pictographs, settled the matter. This huge jumble of forms, some of which appeared to contradict one another, to intersect in ways the eye could not untangle, to occupy almost the same space at the same time, was deliberate.

  Ransom slid his chair back from the table and stood. The crab’s legs dinged on the stainless steel sink. Picking up his mug, he turned away from the window. “That was the extent of my interactions with Gus. To be honest, what I knew of him, what Heather had told me, I didn’t much care for. He was what I guess you’d call a functioning alcoholic, although the way he functioned…he was a whiskey-drinker, Jack Daniel’s, Jim Beam, Maker’s Mark, that end of the shelf. I can’t claim a lot of experience, but from what I’ve seen, sour mash shortcuts to your mean, your nasty side. That was the case with Gus, at least. It wasn’t so much that he used his hands—he did, and I gather the hearing in Rudy’s left ear was the worse for it—no, the whiskey unlocked the cage that held all of Gus’s resentment, his bitterness, his jealousy. Apparently, when he was younger, Rudy’s little brother, Jan, had liked helping their mother in the kitchen. He’d been something of a baker, Jan; Rudy claimed he made the best chocolate cake you ever tasted, frosted it with buttercream. His mother used to let him out of working with his father in the garage or around the yard so he could assist her with the meals. None of the other kids—there were six of them—was too thrilled at there being one less of them to dilute their father’s attention, especially when they saw Gus’s lips tighten as he realized Jan had stayed inside again.