by Michael Shea
There was still enough light they could see it was empty. As they slid in behind it, they saw some agitation in the high weeds growing just beyond the curb.
They got out. “Tye?…Tye?”
There was no answer, but they heard movement deeper in the weeds, which crackled at the passage of some dense mass.
“Tye?”
No answer. The crackle had receded down to the waterside. They stepped into the weeds, Dee gripping her stick. The weeds were torn up and trampled here, and even more so just downslope, where there was something sprawled, a shape.
Dee’s free hand found Scat’s. They did not so much step down toward this form, as it and the earth on which it lay rose toward them under their soles. A sticky red skeleton of hand and arm reached toward them as if it still strained for the refuge of that black Impala up on the pavement. His back was a tree of spine and webby ribs, all tissue-tattered; his lower legs, too, were wreathed in a trench of unsleeved bone. His head was untouched, his face to the earth…and they did not lift it up.
“We’re gone. Now!” said Dee, voice quavering with awe––and yet it was Scat, hauling at her shoulder, who actually got them moving.
They drove back up Sixteenth, the streetlights now shedding their disinterested glow, the neons scattering eye-candy here and there, and the breath of the dusk pouring into their windows felt like cool soft ashes on their skin. They hooked south through the Mission, meaning to pick up Mission Boulevard at Army and take it to the freeway. As they drove along a side street, Scat shouted, “There’s Mishou!”
The young man was running, and darted into a narrow, heavily parked alley. “Swing around the block and we’ll catch him coming out!” Dee whipped the bug round the next corner, charged down to the next cross-street, and hooked back. They both jumped out and stepped into the alley mouth.
“Mishou!”
But there was no movement in the long alley, just parked vehicles and dumpsters and back fences. “Mishou?” They advanced into it.
“Mishou?”
“He couldn’t have beaten us.” But they were fifty yards into the alley, and still not a sound in the shadows.
But there was a sound, sudden sounds, back out on the empty street. A drain-grate erupted from the curb and rang dancing across the asphalt. A sinuous mass poured up from the curbside vent––this the two women saw with their nerves alone. They felt this cold outpouring bulge into the night air, felt it approach, felt the delicate bow-wave its smoky advance sent before it. It was in the same air with them, and somehow this meant it was already touching them…
“Go for the car!”
“It’s cutting us off!” And its advance had begun to sound like footsteps, soft, damp footsteps with a rattly sound, as of claws, briskly advancing. And here around the corner it came.
A tall, wide shape of…a man? In a long, dripping overcoat. Drenched hair hid the cavernous eyes and the coat…the coat was a glittery, rubbery fabric…was seaweed, and filling its long sleeves were something not quite like arms, which extended webbed claws like great dripping baskets of drowned bones. It advanced on them fluidly, and the fleshy wet wings of its overcoat opened and displayed a long, lean plated midriff like a reptile’s, down which were ranked, like teats, a double row of sharp-toothed reptile mouths.
“Son of a bitch,” quavered Scat in awe. They spun and sprinted up the alley, and instantly on their heels it came, a leathery friction of clawed feet, and a drizzly wet noise in its wake. And as it gained on them, they felt a terrible tireless lightness in the speed of its pursuit.
“The next street!” squealed Scat. “The market! Light!”
Dee slammed into the very limit of her lungs and muscles that she’d flattered herself were so fit, and then burst through that limit on a cyborg surge of screaming adrenaline, yet even so, as they reached the alley’s opening on the next street, she knew the nightmare was too close, could feel its seizure of her seconds away, and in blind panic she whirled and swung a two-handed blow with her stick.
Her shoulders felt a strange, cool shock of impact. The creature’s substance had an airy density that slowed her club as it tore through. The towering figure staggered, its torn thorax clouding like smoke out into the wake of the blow, but even as it did so, coiling back to recoherence, the tall shape straightening and regathering to pursue. They took to their heels, pistoning toward the far block, toward the aging supermarket with its half-lit, half-empty parking lot. Its illumination seemed the only help it offered…and already they heard the swift clawed feet loudening behind them, eating up their slender lead…
Again Dee whirled and struck, feeling in the instant of her swing a freezing paralysis flood down her body from the single bony fingertip that had just touched her shoulder. But as her blow was launched, it tore through the outreached arm, her self-command was restored, and with a burst of kinetic inspiration she spun all the way round and smote it again, this time in the leg.
It seemed about to topple, the two struck limbs jutting awry, tenuously jointed with coiling tissue…then in an instant more, that smoky stuff, like ligament, grew taut, and the dripping lich drew upright. Dee gaped at it, still frozen to the marrow by that touch, until Scat seized her shoulder, and they spun away again.
This time building a slightly longer lead, but their muscles, pierced by red-hot wires, told them that if it overtook them again their reflexes would be exhausted, they would be gripped, and taken.
“The hands!” gasped Dee. “They freeze you!” Already the swift clawed tread was loudening, loudening behind them…They pelted across the market’s parking lot. Dee saw a woman pausing at her car to stare, groceries in arm—stare at them, her amazement only at their haste, and Dee thought: Of course, she just sees us, she hasn’t heard.
As they neared the pneumatic doors, they saw they would be seized in that slight pause required to actuate the entry––and then a bag-laden man emerged from the exit, and they tore round him and inside just before it closed.
After the darkness of their flight, the riot of color stunned them. Everyday reality, with all its dazzling labels, rank on rank of them…How could their semi-solid nemesis have substance, be real, in the face of this technicolor sea of mundane groceries?
They turned, and from across a bank of shopping carts it faced them again. Towering and cadaverous, its flabby, briny garment drizzling on the floor, the Taker confronted them. Behind the wet weed of his drowned hair, the dead black buttons of a shark’s eyes glinted, yet in the wrinkled orbits of those eyes, in its barnacled brows of reptilian scale, the women saw an ancient grief unutterable, and a fury at their unfettered lives, and a hunger for their world, their time, their flesh…The black crater of its maw, sunk in its chelicerate jaws, echoed this hunger, as did the toothed mouths down its midriff, all making some mute carnivorous utterance. He raised his dripping talons and beckoned.
The women looked wildly around. There were two or three people at the checkout stations, three or four red-vested staff in view, and these all had eyes––some oblique, some openly staring––only for Dee and Scat, only for their haste and fear, and none for the cause. And Dee stood imagining that if the Taker seized them here, then all these onlookers would see their devouring, see the carnal channels spiral through their flesh, but still not see the Thing that carved them.
“I need a club, too,” hissed Scat. “When it’s torn it slows. We have to tear the fucking thing to pieces!”
“Hardware!” said Dee, and they ran for the aisles. Now everyone stared at them openly, though none looked behind them, where the Taker overleapt the shopping carts, his weedy garment winging out from his gaunt midriff, whose tiered mouths gaped greedy as nestlings. His clawed feet seized the polished floor and he launched after them.
Soup cans and jars of gem-bright jams fled past them, Produce, with its butchered green heads and fingers, flashed past, and Dairy streamed by. They cornered hard at the Pharmacy, heading for Hardware, and heard the Taker’s feet slip and scrambl
e for footing before he came on.
“Turn again and hook left,” gasped Dee.
The only things weaponlike, at the aisle’s far end, were the green and yellow staves of kitchen brooms. As they dashed for these, the Taker’s tread came fleetly––scarcely time for Scat to seize one and swing. So Dee turned again to swing a warding blow, and the gaunt raptor dodged past her and seized Scat’s shoulder before the girl could raise her weapon. The girl’s legs crumpled, and she hung slack-mouthed from that bony grip. Her whole body looked saggy and weightless as an empty sack.
Now, so effortlessly dragging his first prey, the Taker held his free talon high, poised and dancing like a snake, advancing warily on Dee, awaiting her next blow to dart around and freeze her in her turn. Now, warding him, backing before him, Dee saw his face as the dripping grave-weed hair curtained off it with his weaving, saw his cheeks two barnacled pits, saw charnel lust now in his eyes, black lamps of hunger. Woe unutterable, woe and rage undying flowed from that face like an icy current.
Exhausted, her legs like lead, Dee retreated, far too spent for a grapple with the gaunt, quick thing. He moved in tandem, answering her every retreat with his lithe advance, and she saw with horror how weightless Scat dragged after him. Her substance seemed absorbed in him now, his speed and strength augmented.
Dee kept retreating, staggering backwards past the meat counter, because she could not fetch the strength to fight…Could no one see, at least, Scat being dragged along by no visible agency? But not another soul appeared, as if the timid few others in the building unanimously shunned the region into which the two running madwomen had vanished. And so Dee retreated in perfect privacy, past banks of plastic-wrapped raw flesh, while the Taker pressed her close, his talon darting at her face.
Behind the shelved carnage, the metal swinging door of the butcher’s workroom caught her eye. She thought of cleavers and big knives––her pursuer would have her cornered in another moment anyway. She backed round the cold shelves and butted backward through the door.
A long, guttered cutting table. Sinks. A big glass-doored freezer with sides and quarters red and white hanging inside. Knives and cleavers there, racked beside the table. She bolted for a cleaver, and the Taker––dragging Scat doll-like––leapt after. She plucked the cleaver, whirled and flung it.
It tumbled slicing slantwise through the Taker’s face. And in the instant when she saw its sight obliterated, seized with inspiration she stepped in, swinging a two-handed blow with her stick, like Babe Ruth sending one out of the park, and sliced straight through the narrowest part of the Taker’s midriff.
Then dived, hooking one arm round his thighs and hauling his legs out from under him. Scrambling, worming across the floor, dropping her stick for a two-armed grip round its waist, she wrestled his lower half out from under him, bulldogged the kicking legs to the side, while the upper half dropped to the floor, thrashing, releasing Scat to scrabble with both talons after its stolen limbs, still blinded by the cleaver, but sensing its lost substance and trailing ghostly entrails from its gut-stump as it crawled.
Dee gained her feet and manhandled her staggering demi-captive back towards the freezer. Scat was rising, shaking off her paralysis. “Open both freezer doors!” Dee cried.
Scat overtook and overleapt the still-blind Taker’s scrabbling talons, pulling the doors open. Dee wrestled the legs inside and crouched there waiting, feeling their struggles diminish in the cold, though still it took all Dee’s bear-hugging strength to keep her kicking prize captive as the seeking torso crawled into the nearest door, pursuing. Here it came, groping under the bulky carcasses, its eyes at last recohering within their nest of snaky hair…
“Close it!” she shrieked, and dove, with the legs still captive, out the other door, surged up, and slammed her door in turn.
The Taker clawed the glass, gazed out with eyes that, only now re-forming, were swiftly frosting over.
“Look how it’s slowing,” breathed Scat. “It’s water, mostly…”
They waited to be sure, during which time they took turns using the stick like a bat, on the staggering legs, smiting now one, now the other, crippling it in what became like clockwork…until the imprisoned upper half had frozen solid, its frosty mask of woe staring sightless from the glass.
Dee and Scat looked amazed in one another’s eyes. Their victory seemed an impossibility as great as the existence itself of their otherworldly enemy.
“This isn’t Dagon. You understand that,” said Scat.
“We beat it, though! We kicked its ass!”
“You know what we should do? We should defy him.”
“Dagon.” Dee said it dully, not quite asking.
“Dagon. Look at this thing! What good could meekness do us against its master? I say fuck him! What right does he have to our world? To our lives?”
They stood, still more amazed to find in themselves this same feeling, a resolve to match the dire miracle that had reached out for their souls. Dee took the stick and crippled yet again their captive’s relentless circling search for the rest of itself.
∴
The hardest part was getting it back to the car. When both its legs were broken and its leverage reduced, they could just manage to wrap their arms around it and carry it, staggering against its spasmodic strength. When its legs had reknit, it was too strong, and they must drop it and cripple it again. They had to do this three times to get it out of the market––the last time in full view of the checkers and customers still present, who stared in undisguised astonishment at what must have seemed to them the most incomprehensible mime act they had ever witnessed.
But once the pair had it in the back seat of the bug, things got easier. Dee drove, while Scat knelt in the passenger’s seat and clubbed the captive with measured, strategic blows that kept its substance in a constant low boil of recoherence. She soon found just the rhythm, just the force needed to keep the demi-demon discohered.
It was well they had this surreal activity to engross them, because the Bug’s rattly progress back to the Bay, back to the black water’s brink, gave them a sinking feeling, while fear, like a weight of dark water, rose over them…
At last they rolled slowly along the weedy shoreline, all deserted now, rolled past the skeleton piers, their engine muttering like a low soliloquy of doubt and terror. Did they dare this? They did not dare to pause and ask the question.
Dee killed the engine. They stepped out into the breathing silence of the shore and dragged their trunkless captive from the car. At once, drawn to its element, it staggered away from them, kicked tangle-footed through the weeds, and down the bank towards the water. The women followed, slow with awe and dread.
The light-crowned bridges, the long dazzling shorelines––these seemed for all their expansiveness a trivial, weightless decoration, a constellation of fireflies hanging between the abyss of night above and the oceanic gulf below. And that gulf breathed, as the sea always breathes, but this respiration thrummed with an added presence almost as titanic as the waters themselves, filling those waters with a darker, mightier will than their own, a lurking purpose, the waiting hunger of Something that wore the ocean like a garment.
They came within a few yards of the water, stood watching the ghostly amputee hasten into the sea, as if it sought a thing it dreaded and yet must obey.
“Look!” hissed Dee.
The water just offshore swelled, bulged up in a broad, low dome. The hair rose up on their necks––they crested like fighting cats. And as the Taker’s remnant kicked into the tide, from the swollen water the oily sheen of black knuckles as big and barnacled as boat-hulls bulged from the skin of the Bay, and huge, tentacular digits slid into a snake-knot round the Taker’s legs. The vast hand, snatching back its messenger, submerged.
The plane of the whole Bay seemed then to sag, and that subsidence dented the watery floor of the night.
They stood there a long time. “Let’s get away from the water,” said Scat at last.
Half an hour later, Dee parked the Bug at the lookout up on Twin Peaks. They got out and went to the parapet. They gazed on the down-flowing hills all mantled with lights and brave architecture. They scanned all the glittering shorelines nibbling at the water’s black rim.
Out of their long staring silence, Dee said, “What keeps him from just coming ashore and taking it all?”
“He’s locked out. With the other Great Old Ones. But…”
“But what?”
“But I’ve been hearing things. Before all this I mean. I’ve been hearing about shoggoths. I’ve been hearing about Cthulhu himself…”
“What are you telling me?”
“That somehow, this is a focus. That the Great Old Ones are…at the gates. Are picking the locks.”
Another silence passed as they looked some more upon all the dazzlement and darkness.
“Well, I’ll tell you one thing, girl,” said Dee. “Be all that as it may, to hell with running. I’m not running anywhere. This is my city.”
• COOPING SQUID •
Ricky Deuce, twenty-eight and three years sober, was the night clerk at Mahmoud's Mom and Pop Market. He was a small, leanly muscled guy, and as he sat there, the darkness outside deepening toward midnight, his tight little Irish face looked pleased with where he was. Behind Ricky on his stool, the whole wall was bottles of every kind of Hard known to man.
This job was easy money—a sit-down after his day forklifting at the warehouse. He already owned an awesomely restored '64 Mustang and had near ten K saved, and by rights he ought to be casting around for where he might take off to next. But the fact was, he got a kick out of clerking here till two a.m. each night.
A kick that was not powder nor pill nor smoke nor booze, that was not needing any of them, especially not booze, which could shine and glint in its bottles and surround him all night long, and he not give a shit. He never got tired of sitting here immune, savoring the unadorned adventure of being alive.