by Michael Shea
But even as she advanced, a glittery black hugeness erupted near the boat, and overturned it. Two human shapes thrashed spray and foam and were engulfed as one by wide, inhuman jaws.
It was He, and his feeding was her own—she felt it in her own bowels, and her unborn young rejoiced in the feast. Maureen and He were already one, were two halves of a host on the very threshold of being born. Maureen slid down into the lake.
In the silken dark, buoyant as bubbles, they met. They clasped fore claws and spun and tumbled and spiraled in the satiny deep. For the first time in her life, Maureen knew Love, and knew its consummation was at hand. She broke their grip and swam towards the lake rim. A muddy cove she found, curtained by leafy vines, and into this she climbed, leaving only her hindquarters in the water, and waited His advent.
His great smooth underbelly surged onto her back. He locked his forelegs round her throat, his hindlegs round her mighty thighs. His cloacum hung just atop her own, still shallowly submerged.
In a delirium of fulfillment, Maureen unpent her eggs, and felt them bubble unendingly from her cloacum.
Each bubble was an atom of her own raging hunger, and that hunger in herself was not diminished by its ejection, its diffusion over the black lake. With this birthing her own hunger was vastly magnified, enlarged into this spreading fan of spawn.
For as she spawned, her mate’s sperm joined its stream to hers, the sperm like a gelatinous explosive, a viscous dynamite that individually detonated each little globe of her greed, and woke it to life.
Long was their transport! Long their embrace! Long and long the sweet effusion of their kindled brood upon the waters!
Until, at length, they lay spent, lay piggybacked as one in a curious, tingly hiatus that became a growing expectancy of something else, something more awaiting them, something vastly larger than the miracle they had just performed.
Maureen knew they had just begun, not ended, something grand and glorious. Of course her tadpoles even now a-forming, would within this very night sprout limbs and disperse into the surrounding greenery, would radiate from the park in all directions and find their way into storm drains and sewers and backyards and gardens all over San Francisco. But none of this now seemed half as important as what lay before her.
She and her mate crouched, cold to the wonder they’d worked. A greater marvel beckoned them now, a radiant immensity drew them to itself, commanded their nearness as a shining planet commands its moons.
Her mate unclenched her, and slid crunching away through the foliage. Maureen followed him.
Leon led them along the path he had shown Maxie this morning. They talked low, and interruptedly, for by moonlight the path was even trickier. ”The thing to hold onto,” Dee said, “is to know they can be hurt. Can be fought.”
“I have to be honest,” said Maxie. “I don’t think I quite believe what you’ve told me.” Back in the Gin and Beer It, Dee had told her a very great deal indeed, as night fell outside, and the time drew on to come here.
Ahead, Leon growled, “No problem. You will.”
They smelled it just before they reached the gully’s edge: a coldly yeasty breath of swamp. He brought them to a place where the rim of the gully shelved slightly. There was crouching room here where the scrub grew more sparsely. The seam was a darkness below them, save at its upper end where the moon angled in and glinted on the seepage from the cleft clay there.
Too old to crouch, Maxie sat on the coarse grass, and set Ramses down between her legs on a pad made from his folded pouch, for he whined to be set free. He sat there alertly, still galvanized by that vitality he’d shown all day.
“Just remember,” Leon growled. “Don’t do anything. We’re just here to see. So you’ll know.”
Maureen had seen a print of a wonderful religious painting somewhere, where all these souls were rising up a shadowy shaft, rising into a circle of glorious radiance above, their faces and arms lifted in love and acclaim towards the eternal light that drew them up to Itself.
That image had stayed with her for years, sometimes made her eyes misty; just thinking of that moment when God lifted his chosen ones straight up to His everlasting bosom.
And this was happening to her. The shadowy shaft was a dense night-black undergrowth she climbed through, and her mate, some ways upslope, climbed before her. She toiled her bulk up through the lightless tangle of this World Below, and there was a great light, a sun above her that she climbed to. Its radiance had not yet burst forth, but it was near, so near! Just ahead up this steep bluff at whose foot they had emerged from the sea.
Tears welled from Maureen’s huge globular eyes. She had always known this was coming to her! Yes she had! Not out of pride, but because she had always taken the teachings of her church to heart, had always done the right thing, had walked steadfastly on the higher path.
Now the foliage yielded to a deep bare gully, an incision up the flank of the bluff. Ahead there in its blade-shaped pool of shadow, was her mate: a mottled, muscled sheen toiling toward the apex of the fissure. The gibbous moon peeked in up there to show his goal: a muddy seam in the clay not unlike her own cloacum.
There lay her re-birth. Her life unending! She climbed in awe. Her mate thrust himself into the fissure, his great bulk smoothly, incredibly received by the dense earth, till shortly only his herculean hind legs were visible. They pistoned once, twice—and he had vanished into the cliff side.
Maureen’s heart took wing. She leapt forward, but was still some thirty yards short of her own apotheosis, when something small and snarling hurtled down upon her from the gully’s rim. Agony collided with her left eye, and tiny teeth tore at it. This dwarfish but excruciating assault severely trauma-ed her ecstatic soul. She seized the attacker in her foreclaws—a tiny dog!—and crushed its life out, even as she thrashed and rolled side to side, battering the walls of the gully in her pain.
It caused a kind of rapture, to see the Impossible so plainly. As Maxie watched the huge amphibian claw its way into the earth, something stirred far away inside her, a primitive jubilation in her soul. It was true! The life in her exulted to know for a fact that the universe was a miracle in progress.
And then she realized there was another monster, following the first one up the gorge. In her rapture she rose to her feet—all three of them were standing, as if they were invisible, looking on from another world. There was a commotion in the grass at Maxie’s feet, and suddenly there was Ramses, a stripe of moonlight across the last glimpse of him Maxie ever saw, diving into the dark, his little fangs bared. The dauntless whippet plunged straight down upon one of the second monster’s eyes!
The brute thrashed explosively, down there in its darkness, its glossy hide flashing in its throes. “Ramses,” Maxie whispered, seeing her little friend killed then, stepping to the gully’s extreme brink.
Up where the first brute had penetrated, the moonlit earth moved. The clay tremored, and the seam in it spread, and from this aperture, a geyser of glittering flesh erupted into the moonlight. An immense tongue leapt ninety feet down the gorge and snatched back from it, and into the moonlight, the titan toad that seemed titanic no longer: the brute Ramses had died defending her from was mummied in tongue up to its eyes. The moonlight flashed on the trail of blood that glittered from its wounded eye, and then it was snatched peremptorily into the cliffside.
In a dim green light, in an immense cavern within the cliff, Maureen—so silkenly bandaged in tongue, like a fetus undelivered!—was lifted higher, higher, to hang above an alien planet, a single cyclopean Eye. Its pupil was a tarn of absolute black, ringed with a thin golden iris. The black void fractionally contracted as it studied her, making the pupil seem like an unearthly maw taking tiny bites of her.
And perhaps this was the mouth that spoke to her, for its words murmured stickily in the very center of her mind:
All you’ve seen and done is mine. All you know I will forever know.
And then Maureen was snatched into a differen
t cavern, a Carlsbad of unearthly flesh, where a sunless sea of acids foamed.
There followed a dreadful passage for Maureen, a purgatory really. Wherein she swam in acid in perfect darkness. Wherein her meat and her blood and her bones turned to smoke, and drifted away from her thrashing and astonished soul.
But then she was whole and calm. She was cleansed. Was purely and only her own immortal soul! In fact, she was Reborn, as her pastor had always promised! And all her memories, all her feelings, were still minutely, eternally hers, delivered out of the body’s griefs and woes.
For an immeasurable time she lay in this blissful revelation. But gradually, a tiny question kindled. Why was Eternity so dark?
But no. No, it was not dark exactly. Dimly intricate visions swarmed round her, dizzying glimpses that her reaching thought could touch in all directions. Dear God! There was a multitude around her. No darkness this, but a matrix of other souls. Wherever she turned, she met a streaming traffic, a mob of other minds.
Wonder filled her, followed by the remotest little tingle of unease. This wasn’t exactly like paradise. Wasn’t it a bit more like being stored in a tank? Maureen struggled to understand the Benign Intent here.
Perhaps the fault was hers. Yes. She was supposed to reach out completely, to participate in her apotheosis. She must really look about her. Really commune with her angelic company.
And when she really reached, dear God, she found a wealth indeed! She entered an astonishingly detailed landscape, sunsets on planets unknown, wars fought in alien bodies, unspeakable grapplings of these indescribable bodies. Entered grieving reminiscences, entered the beloved winds of a carven ice world where wolvish beings skated on paws of polished bone and exultingly drank moonlight forever gone, entered amoebic manta-rays winging like gossamer through maroon oceans of methane, balletically copulating within a gas-giant home world forever gone, entered long- fingered saurians, graceful as butterflies on water wings like great ribbed fans, farming the continental shelves of amber seas forever gone.
And suddenly she heard, understood the ghostly tumult of remembered voices arising from this multitude. It was a stentorian chorus of woe everlasting.
As this understanding dawned, an alteration moved through this whole mosaic of pent minds. An impalpable wave arose, and its front was sweeping towards her and seized her. She was lifted, was hung in an acid bath of searing light, and every instant of her sixty-five years flashed through her, was lived again in one unending moment. And with her own life, all the lives she had collected were also evoked within that searching illumination—King, Wyatt, Eve, the little jogger, the kicking cop—each intricate detail of their being flowered in her devourer’s possessive gaze.
And then Maureen subsided again into that vast anonymity of captured lives, that universal hubbub of unsleeping memories.
Now she understood. Now Maureen knew it all. Oh, how they had lied in that church of hers! How blackly and solemnly and piously her Pastor had lied! This was not an eternity in glory! This was not a Beneficent God!
The sun was well up. They sat on a slope below the Legion of Honor, backs leaning against different sides of a cedar’s trunk. They had fallen asleep in these postures some time near dawn, and now awake, they still sat silent for a long time, gazing into space. At length Dee sighed, and took out her battered gray book. “Margold says some things about Tsathoggua.” She turned pages. ”Yes. Here, right after this passage about Dagon. I told you I’ve seen Dagon myself, or part of him.” She read aloud. “ ‘Dagon has cruised our world before, came up into the Sunless Sea beneath the Mountains of Madness and fed upon the Elder Race, and in another eon he dived from the skies upon Earth in the ancient Deluge that drowned it, and swam in those storm-tormented waters, snatching into his jaws the flood-doomed nations clawing at the surface, clinging to their rafts and spars and shards.’ ”
Silence fell. Dee’s eyes were somewhere else.
Maxie prompted, “That’s Dagon.”
“Yes.”
“And Tsathoggua?”
Dee blinked. Again she read aloud. “ ‘But of these Titans, Tsathoggua’s is the deepest, most chthonic hunger. His meal is meat and minds. The populations he’s plundered seethe in his belly, time without end, their spirits intact, a mighty choir of woeful souls, each life a self-knowing cell of the toad-god’s entrails, wherein the greedy movement of their devourer’s mind sweeps through them, as Tsathoggua, again and again, relishes each life individually, like a miser gloating on his hoard.”
They sat propped against the tree as on an axis of sanity, remembering the night just past. A very old tomcat stepped out of the bushes: tattered ears, shabby white fur with tabby patches, he came up slowly but purposefully, mere locomotion clearly enough work for him that he wasted no energy on cautious approaches. Came up to Maxie and stood looking at her.
“I wonder if he likes cheese,” she said, dubious. Cats weren’t her animal. She peeled open a cheese-and-cracker packet from her knapsack.
“Cats love it,” Leon said.
This one seemed to. And it turned out he didn’t mind Ramses’ bed-box either, nor the rattle of the cart, once he realized he could lie safely at ease in it and look around. He had very scrutinizing yellow eyes. Maxie, looking back into them, was thinking, Why not? He needs a friend.
It was a long walk to Pete’s, but no one objected to it as a destination. None of them thought of separating, of being alone with what they had seen.
The bar was empty, and Pete agreed to let her park her cart in the back corridor to the restrooms, so the cat wouldn’t be startled into running off. Not a word was said of Ramses—Pete appeared to understand.
They took a table, three doubles, and a pitcher of beer. They drank in sips, looking into one another’s eyes from time to time, wordlessly, just confirming what they had seen last night, what they sat there still seeing, again and again.
In walked Vera, purposeful, climbed a stool and pointed at the bar in front of her with a look at Pete. Swiveled the stool and sat looking thoughtfully at Maxie and her two new friends. Maxie gestured her over, but Vera stayed on her perch.
“I was just over at Butler looking for you,” Vera said. “Big to-do. Copcars in the parking lot. Down in the laundry room this morning? Still dark? That Dawg and his twin, that Carne creep. They were clocking smack down there—Community Market night down in the laundry, right? You know that Ramon asshole from up on four? Well he said he was goin’ down to do laundry, but of course he was goin’ down to cop was what it was. He told the cops when he went in, he saw some big animal eating Dawg! Eating him whole! And Carne nowhere in sight—just one of his kicked-off shoes!”
No one said anything, though behind the bar, Pete’s hands froze for a moment on the glass he was polishing. Vera gazed with dawning surprise at the unsurprised gazes of the three tired old folks staring at her from the table.
Leon said, “You ought to come over, sit here with us, miss. Set here by me why doncha?” Maxie and Dee looked at him. In the bony terrain visible behind his great shaggy mustaches and eyebrows, they were amazed to discern an attempt at suavity on Leon’s part.
The four of them talked for a considerable while, during which Pete gave up on the glasses and just leaned there on his bar, listening to them. A short silence followed.
“I think I’ll have to move out,” Maxie mused.
“Move in with me,” Dee said. “A room to yourself, though you might share sometimes with my young friend Scat. We should all be drawing together anyway. All of us who know.”
• DAGONIAD •
Dee guessed that being fifty-five meant that your thighs and your butt were just going to be a little thicker than you liked, no matter how much you strode up and down the hills of beautiful San Francisco. You just had to settle for being tight-muscled but no longer looking it so much. At least the aerobic high was the same as ever, powering the slopes, a nice blue flame of oxygen in your lungs. She was moving through the upper Haight now, aiming to c
ut across steep Buena Vista Park, thence steeply down to Divisadero. Her dear old friend Babs had told her to take a hike, that she would mind the store for the last three hours—a gift Babs offered frequently, and Dee too often accepted. She guessed she was having age issues. Testing and training her strength was a growing concern. Babs, five years farther along, was helping her through it.
Actually, Dee looked pretty good, if she only knew it. Had vigorous gray hair worn neck-length, and out of it thrust her strong face, wide intelligent gray eyes, her seamed cheeks gaunt, her mobile mouth quirky with thoughts as she strode along. And she had a walking stick, which gave her a certain style. She’d found it years ago in a Mission District thrift shop—a stout yard of hardwood headed with a brass knob and tapering to a weighty ferrule. It was a stick unmistakably, on hefting, weighted with a core of iron. A wonderful implement, she often thought, fraught with socioeconomic significance. She imagined a late nineteenth-century gent out for a long perambulation through Dickensian streets. Feral dogs and Cockney thugs stepped from foggy alleys, and the gent (she imagined him fifty-five years old, gray-haired but sturdy) was ready to deal with them. Dee liked dogs. She had an easy authority with them bred of her liking them, and she could pet and converse affectionately with big wandering strays of all breeds. But she could also imagine meeting a mean one and, at need, bashing it silly with a stroke of old Rod (as she’d named her stick). Could imagine bashing a thug, too, at need.
She carried Rod gripped low-center at present, like a cudgel, and she occasionally gave him a little twitch, as if thumping something. Although she’d been walking wanderingly for hours, getting her workout, drinking in her gorgeous City, this evening she had a destination. She was going to see Susy, her bedeviled ex-lover still loved. Dee was always more or less pissed at Susy for her reckless living, but on most occasions tried to lighten up and just enjoy her company. This evening, however, Dee had to talk some hard truth to that sweet but silly bitch.