by Michael Shea
As if still wracked with shame and reticence, I led her far before I spoke again. We crossed the gardens enclosed by the wings of Sternbrucke and were well down the sloping sward beyond before I continued. At the foot of the slope, whither we tended, was the arboretum, and just beyond that was my beloved rose garden.
“The terrible thing, my dear,” I said tremorously, “the shocking thing is that Roger’s profit, which he took in such unfair secrecy from the rest of you—but I insisted on it, you see!—the shocking thing is, he will never spend this profit. For Roger is utterly outside of earthly space and time. Yes, Natalie—he has been rapt away by an Entity older than this very globe—and it was an Entity I summoned.”
Here I went so far as to clutch my temples and hurry ahead, like a distracted man trying to flee his own thoughts, groaning in fitful soliloquy, seeking the merciful shadows of the arboretum. She plunged into the leafy shade after me, catching up with me where I leaned against a fragrant jacaranda tree, weakly shaking my head.
“What is the matter with you? Monty! What incredible crap are you talking? Answer me! Where’s Roger?”
I turned tear-bright eyes upon her. “Oh, Natalie, Natalie! I have so much to confess to, and it is all so hard for a normal man or woman to grasp! I am a warlock! I am more than two hundred years old, and through that time I have had deep traffic with a race of beings that only the maddest visionaries have even guessed at! And by one of these beings Roger has been taken! Oh, try to believe me, Natalie. Difficult to believe, I know, but I can show you proof. My roses are proof that can be seen and touched.”
Perhaps because her powers of comprehension were so painfully overloaded, her temper snapped. “If you think I’m going to stand still for this unbelievable bullshit, Monty, then you’ve made a big mistake. You’re going to tell me all about it right now or I’m going to have Kamin and Bo shake it out of you.”
I drew myself up, my features stiffening to a mask of glacial scorn. I spoke with slow fervor: “You pitiful fool. And I counted on your intelligence. I could put in your hands a bouquet of my roses, my transcosmic Yuggothian roses, all tagged, their extraterrestrial provenance precisely described—I even have a monograph, written in my own hand, upon their nature and substance. I see how grossly I overrated you. You are ignorant, of course, but ignorance is not the mark of stupidity. No, the Dunce’s signal trait is the refusal of knowledge when it is offered, the rejection of plain evidence!”
Natalie had, from our very first meeting years before, misread in my natural reserve a cold, professorial contempt for her mental powers due to the fact that she was a woman. If I had bestirred myself to greater vigor in admiring her pronouncements and “insights” (as she called them) we might have been friends, but as it was, she had cast us from the first as adversaries. I had now struck the perfect note to bring her into accord with my design. While waking her to a fury of self-vindication, I appeared at the same time to be giving into her hands quaint proofs of lunacy with which she could make me the laughingstock of whatever audience she could assemble for them. A grin of fierce irony dawned on her face as I spoke, and when I had done she said, fairly vibrating with happy anger: “Will you do that, Monty? Will you really give me a bouquet of them, and tag and classify them in your own hand? Well, I say, right on. I say lead me to ’em. Let’s just have that evidence, yeah!”
So we hastened on down the arboretum path, the leaf shadows sliding off our shoulders like a gentle, ghostly rain, while the breeze shook down on us a dry, rainy whisper. We marched to the trees’ farther fringe, where the land falls away to the little valley that Beck and I had lately walked beneath. Just below us, on the crown of the slope, we beheld the acre of roses where they glowed in their wrought-iron palings.
Did I say glowed? I said too little. The red of them, lush and varied—it reverberated in the golden dusk, it devoured the eye and set the nerves afire. Just so, across light-years of space-time, must alien sunsets blaze in gorgeous, toxic atmospheres. More shameless than whole Babylons of fragrant odalisques, those swollen, carnal blossoms lolled, fattening like vampires on the sun’s saffron and copper.
No one in his senses could fail to feel the Otherness of my garden. Natalie found herself on a threshold where her reality, believed boundless, suddenly terminated. Yet, for all that it stunned her, she ran forward, seizing the lead. For this Strangeness must be attacked. Advance, Natalie! Make it give way to your own Righter Way! Such roses must not be under your own pet earthly sun. Fly down to them, Natalie. Make them flee before you like a flock of geese, and make the world the way you like it once again. She fled through the gates, baroque masterpieces of iron. I shut them after me as I followed her into that rich wilderness of barbs and satin.
She stood slackly, turning with a kind of drunken abruptness to gape at the surrounding host. When I spoke to her I was bland and grandfatherly again. “The generation you see here is of Yuggoth, but the race is provenant from vastly more distant places. I say race, for they are sentient.”
My words seemed not quite to reach her. She spoke in a musing, almost tender key: “They’re bigger than cabbages. They’ve got thorns all in their petals.”
Gently, I resumed: “Do you realize, there is not one of them that does not antedate this planet’s Age of Ice by whole millennia? And yet they are the very image of fresh spring.”
Natalie shuddered, a deep, fluid movement, uncharacteristically graceful. “Their color,” she said. Her quiet voice began taking on a small, mournful emphasis, a complaining whine. “Their color is…not possible. It’s…it’s feeling up my mind. It’s groping my brain inside!”
“Yes!” I cried. “How well you put it! They’ve been my guests for more than a century, and still I feel it every time as freshly as the first—by the Old and the Elder Ones! Look! Look above! Can it be?”
I could not believe my luck, and in another instant saw that this could not be mere fortuity. Clearly, Great Tsathoggua was pleased with my little dramatics, and in an awesome antic mood had done this to set the seal of masterwork upon my little scenario for Natalie. Straight above us in the sky a flaw appeared in the dusk’s smooth, brazen light. This flaw gaped and windowed out, showing us a little lake of stars studding black space. And out of this rift a tiny shape came sprawling down. A splayed, pallid, broken doll it was that grew smoothly overhead, plunged down in a climactic surge of acceleration, and crashed meatily into the roses.
Their gnarled black stalks flexed limberly, swallowing the shock and hooking the figure in a thousand places, while the smash of impact, by some delicate transmission, crossed the entire garden like breeze on a wheatfield, and the blossoms stirred. There, hung nude in the thorn thicket, was Roger himself, a torn and emptied bag who did not bleed where the thorns caught him, and whose dozen ragged wounds were not even red at the rims. No painted martyrdom, of even the greatest period, could match the funereal splendor of the tableau that Roger made there, sprawling amid the wakening, shivering flowers. Natalie’s voice caught in her throat. Her knees buckled, and she fell to them.
“They’re opening,” she complained, in a whine that was more than even a child’s. “They have yellow eyes! They’re eating him.”
She spoke the truth. The petals were dilating slickly, like slowed camera shutters, and my guests’ eyes, bulbous gems of glee and greed, were disclosed. Meanwhile, at a dozen places Roger’s frost-seared pallor was dissolving pinkly in the ample toothed kisses of the blossoms. I judged it was time to leave the garden. As I turned, Natalie discovered that the flowers everywhere had shaken the loam from their roots and begun a mincing, elegant advance upon her from all sides. Her scream was like a parting gift. I latched the gate behind me and hurried back up to the arboretum, to watch the spectacle from above. It was a gorgeous one, extravagantly musical.
I turned away sooner than I wished and hurried back to the house. The full moon of May Eve would shortly rise, and in its light my dearly beloved must speak her lines.
What a c
onvenience was Valerie’s and Kamin’s contempt for me! They had me identified as a pitiable old voyeur. I would not dare, would not presume to lie to them. Their world was so charmingly simple, really. The possession of personal beauty was its full scope and purpose. Others made efforts, had plans, and pursued complex goals involving boring details. Valerie and Kamin were beautiful. Satis est! Existence required no disfiguring strenuosities from them.
And thus, I was simply believed when I told them that we must hurry upstairs for the shooting—that Bo was coming and Natalie had yielded to necessity but was still off sulking to herself. Valerie made a charming little grimace of revulsion at the repulsive dialogue, and they trooped upstairs. They left behind a mirror-and-razor on the mantle, as well as a chased silver hash case and pipe, recently used. I followed them up, deferentially far behind. I fairly floated in the buoyant certainty of success.
We entered the “chapel.” Koboldus, now departed on another errand, had just lit all the censers, and all the resin-lamps dispensed their polychrome abundance. The window was already coming to shifty life, its graphic ambiguities more aswirl now, though still the unobservant would see only the multicolored air of the room at work. The camera, and the mikes on their booms, stood ready.
Valerie sang, “Lights, camera, sack out!” and danced with little mock pirouettes up the carpet while she shed her cloak. She always had such fey grace! Kamin shed his boxer’s robe and likewise stepped forth in his costume, a gaudy loincloth and no more. There was a horned rune on the loincloth which the uneducated would see as vaguely satanic, and in which the initiate would instantly recognize the Tyndalon, which is the summoning symbol of the Hounds. Similarly, Valerie wore the slender gold fillet that compels Araknadd to crawl down from his place at Azathoth’s side and scuttle obediently into earth’s space-time. And yet these entities would come as but the attendants upon One far greater than they.
Just then, the moon’s sweet, silver cutting edge notched the sky’s eastern horizon. They moved to the dais, whereon the window’s wheel of light lay, like a pool. The dais was a four-poster altar, cornered with Cthulhuic totem shafts capped in turn by bawdy Priapic finials—a lustful couch more than a shrine. Valerie lay back upon the color-splashed velvet, taking the posture of the splayed sacrifice. Kamin, his movements looking wooden next to hers, knelt beside her.
With the first direct light of the moon, the window had unmistakably vitalized. Some of the Visages in it were fleetingly embodied and then dissolved, and only a kind of unconscious enthrallment could account for the pair’s not being at least vaguely alarmed. The first giddy effluxions of the alien sphere can have this effect, and doubtless the pair, from the formless aesthetic excitation of their drugs, found the transition to cosmic rapture a smooth one. It was, in fact, this seizing-up of the spirit that I was counting on to buoy their memory for the difficult lines they had to speak.
Nevertheless, until the moon had ripened to our purpose there was great danger of awakening the lovers’ fears, plucking them from their light trance and rupturing the delicious rhythm of this ultimate sacrament. When Bo Beck’s flabby and morose bulk shambled into our rainbow gloom and marched (not uncharacteristically reeking of whiskey) to the camera, I looked sharply to them. But already their hectic blood had beguiled the lovers—they nuzzled and nudged in their ensorcelled daze and scarcely looked up!
It went so perfectly! They couched there, working up their passions with playful frictions; I looked on as one mesmerized; in the dark behind the camera, the latest arrival absorbed himself in stiff-fingered adjustments of the apparatus. And the moon—that giant, cosmic coin, new-minted—seemed amicably to thrust its wealth upon the world with greater than wonted swiftness, until at last its lower rim slid free of the far hills. From the camera came some decisive clicking, and the order to begin was grunted. The pair resumed their postures—he kneeling and she sprawled—and lifted their voices.
They were as if transported. Their memories never faltered. And truly, if the words of summoning have made any slightest impression upon a man’s memory, then Those Outside, if they are very near, will all but pull them out of his mouth, such is their eagerness to cross and enter. The young lovebirds’ performance was truly phenomenal. They struck the intonations with uncanny verve and felicity, as if they were, like myself, grizzled adepts of that crabbed and horrific tongue. Their human throats gasped and clutched with the punishing labor of its barbaric utterance, and in the gruntings that it compelled them to articulate, like Circe’s charm, converted them to animals, swine that spoke. Those flawlessly sung syllables horripilated my spine’s length. The window began to change spectacularly.
It became a seether of shapes, a swirling bestiary of savage forms. Just as quickly, the seether became a boil too swift for anything to coalesce within it. The boiling became a kaleidoscopic blur, a plunging blur, as if we fell into the sky through maelstroms of color. And then we skidded to monstrous, stable focus, and we in that room were like men in a puny glass-bottom skiff who discover a vast-eyed head engrossing acres of the abyss beneath them and find that they float upon the lake of the lens of the eye of a sentience that mocks and leers.
Oh, then they turned on their couch of awe, finding that their bodies could not leave the altar (truly and wholly an altar now!). They glared back at us with bulge-eyed pleas that we should prove it an hallucination, that cephalopod leviathan of boiling arms that pressed its colossal scrutiny upon them through the dizzying wheel of moon-fired glass!
And as they looked beggingly back to us for sanity, for succor and reassurance, I stepped forward and bowed to them. Their throats corded and fingers clawed with the frenzy of their appeal, but the thought-destroying, pan-chromatic shrillings of unearthly flute music swallowed their voices and turned their screams to mute gasps.
Bo Beck’s hulk shambled to my side. It collapsed to the floor like a blubbery overcoat, and Koboldus stepped out of it, in his true form, his scales and talons shining wet from his disguise. I raised my arms to Him who peered through the glass, and I cried out the Syllables of Consignment, whereby the offering is yielded to the Power:
“Thragg-nun Azathoth! Hyurrnim dhal-lad Azathoth! Nnngyah! Nngyah! Han-gnad, Cthulhu! Han-gnad Yog-Sothoth! Thragg-nun Azathoth!”
Then a very Ragnarok surged through the window, which burst to scintillant atoms before it! The Hounds crowed big-shouldered through the sparkling chaos and joyously sank their bristling snouts into Kamin. Tarantulaic Araknadd vaulted to Valerie’s golden head and pierced it like an orange rind with sleek, hypodermic fangs.
And yet our sacrifices scarce had eyes for these lesser horrors. They lavished all their howlings and, pleading contortions, like tribute gold, upon the giant of boiling arms whose beaked mouthparts had pecked away the window and which now, after one voluptuous pause, pinched those two squalling morsels from the gory, glass-littered velvet!
Adieu! Adieu! O glorious departure! I relive it still each day, and though the seasons have come fully round again, I find the sweetness of the memory still fresh and the image undimmed. And so shall it prove, I think, to the end of my days, for few such triumphs as that May Eve are granted an artist, and he does well to treasure those which are.
• THE POOL •
The jobsite was beautiful in this early morning sun. Daryl’s crew was up in the hills of Marin, working behind an upscale development. The grassy slopes blazed in the slanting light. Great stately oak trees perched here and there on the rolling terrain—a scattered multitude that bestrode the slopes like gnarly titan surfers perched on a golden tsunami.
But down in this pit for a swimming pool, Daryl, carrying fifty years and wielding a forty-pound air-hammer with a dirt chisel, was feeling he’d irrevocably run his life into the ground.
Twelve years ago he’d amicably dissolved his marriage, given Julie the house, the cabin, and the cars, and left his copywriting job, turning to a simpler life of manual labor. He’d enjoyed his no-maintenance life in cheap residence ho
tels, books, movies, his occasional lovers, his occasional trips. He was a sociable man with a selfish core, who liked the luxury of doing exactly what he wanted, when he wanted. And digging had long satisfied something in him, always an adventure to open the earth, uncover the compacted secrets it concealed.
But today he was a mass of achy muscle and tired nerves. Sweat stung his eyes. The generator growled, the compressor roared, the backhoe grunted and stank, and the jackhammer bucked in his hands, punishing his back and shoulders as he trimmed the surfaces of the pit’s wall. Daryl had not been entirely heedless. His lifestyle let him save half his yearly income, and he had enough for a major down on some two- or three-acre fixer-upper in West Marin. But to pay off his mortgage, to secure his old age…could he make it through ten more years of this?
This morning’s pace was relentless. The concrete crew was already here, waiting to swarm down into the hole and drape it with lumber and re-bar. The dirt crew was supposed to be done yesterday—thanks to the general contractor’s overzealous schedule. There, indeed, was the man himself, Mike Love, standing out on the terrace behind the big house with Mrs. Robideau, the homeowner. He chatted her, jollied her, and goaded, by his mere presence, the Hoe-Down dirt-crew to hurry up.
Actually, the Hoe-Down boys weren’t that far behind. They were even now wrapping the job and doing the last clean-out of the hole. Rick, on the backhoe, reached down its arm and laid its bucket on the pit’s floor, and everyone scurried around with shovels, scooping up loose spoil, carrying it over, and dumping it in the bucket.
At the very end of the operation, as the bucket was just lifting out, Rodge—a guy too fat for an undershirt that always wore one—old Rodge pulled a closing stunt: he ran after the rising bucket with a last clod of dirt in his hand and leapt up, as if for a lay-up, to hook it in…