Cthulhu Land of the Long White Cloud AU

by Cthulhu- Land of the Long White Cloud (retail) (epub)

  I lifted my little brother to my hip, “Look Jamie, a forest has washed up overnight.”

  James frowned at the tangled branches and seaweed in all direct­ions, some shadow of his nightmare still lingering around his eyes. “R’lyeh,” he whispered.

  “Who knows what treasures me might find?” I suggested to Ruth and set James down again. She had a magpie’s eye for shiny things. After every trip to the beach, she brought home shells, shards of eroded glass and exotic stones with stripes and veins.

  We selected the best wood, as large as each could carry. James, as usual, tried to lift wood bigger than he was, and Ruth found the distraction of coloured stones and pretty shells impossible to resist. The sled had half a load and the chill of the morning was gone from my bones when I fetched upon a twisted limb. I pulled it free from the tangle and it resisted. I pulled again, with half a mind to abandon it as there were other, easier logs to collect, and the driftwood shifted in my hands. A moan, unlike any sound I had ever heard, came from the storm-tossed pile.

  I dragged a clump of thick brown kelp aside, thinking that some lost sheep had become trapped in the tangle of flotsam. As I considered calling Ruth and Jamie to share my find, I lifted more tendrils of kelp aside and found a man’s boot. I held my shout in check.

  I had never found a body on the beach, though father told of coming across a fisherman washed up dead, still tangled in his net, his exposed flesh eaten by the tiny sea-lice. I nudged the sailor’s boot with my foot. There was weight to it, suggesting it contained a foot. My hand flew to my mouth as the boot moved of its own accord. With a quick glance to ensure the children were well away and occupied, I hurried to excavate my find.

  With effort I heaved the haphazard cast of driftwood aside. Beneath, I found a man, face down and moaning as he grovelled with his hands and head, burrowing into the soft gravel.

  “Sir?… Mister?” I wanted to reach out and touch him, to put a hand on his shoulder and tell him that he was safe from the sea and that the storm that had delivered him unto us. But there was a smell about the fellow, a stink beyond salt and despair, a stench reminiscent of an offal pit on a summer afternoon.

  I stepped back and took up a discarded stick with which to poke him and gain his attention. I jabbed him at first tentatively, then with determination.

  He cried out, squirming like a freshly landed fish until he turned onto his side and shielded his face with one filthy hand.

  “Are you injured?” I know my tone sounded aloof. I might have been asking him if he wished for sugar in his tea. I could see his right foot impossibly twisted and the taut fabric of his trouser leg strained under the pressure of infected flesh.

  “R’lyeh,” he moaned. “Oh God… The stones are opening…it sees us!”

  This being my first encounter with a true lunatic, I found my­self at a loss on how to respond. “Should I fetch my father, sir?”

  He sat up with a swift motion that startled me terribly. I readied my stick to thrash him should he prove violent. Instead he made an imploring gesture, “Water… Please, I beg you.”

  A gasp from behind told me that my discovery was no longer a secret. Young James peered from behind his older sister’s dress, his thumb firmly in his mouth, his eyes wide.

  “Ruth, take Jamie back to the house. Do not tell anyone of this until I have spoken to mother.”

  Ruth stared at the ragged figure with a morbid curiosity.

  “Now please, Ruth.”

  She departed, leading her brother, who for once did not protest at having to hold her hand.

  “What is your name?” I asked the destitute sailor. It felt like a grown-up question, one that father would ask if he were here.

  “Pa…Parker…Joseph Parker,” he whispered as if afraid his voice would be heard.

  “Are you a fisherman, sir?”

  “No such luck,” he tried to laugh, and wheezed into a phlegmy cough instead. “I was crew on the Emma, out of Auckland.”

  “Were you wrecked in the storm last night?” I looked out to sea, searching for evidence of a ship, or other survivors.

  “Storm? It was no storm.” He tried to stand and his leg refused to take his weight. He fell heavily, cursing and muttering. “Water, damn you, water!”

  “I will be back shortly.”

  I fled then, running over the dunes that marked the border between land and sea. Ruth and James of course dithered in the way of children given clear instruction, and I flew past them as I ran to the rainwater barrel next to the house. I filled the bucket and, struggling with the weight of it, I made my way back to the beach.

  The man lay still, muttering to himself and responding to un­heard voices.

  “I have brought water,” I said.

  He jerked as if struck and then crawled to the bucket where he ducked his head and slurped the water like a pig at a trough.

  My feelings of fear at his strangeness evaporated into pity and disgust. He was alive, and a living person has little of the dread majesty of a corpse.

  “I will tell my mother you are here, she will know what to do with you.”

  Parker’s face lifted from the bucket, his straggly beard and ragged fringe dripping water and catching the glint in his eyes as he stared at me.

  “I see you, Hannah, the one they call Half. The better half long dead, I see. All that you hide. I see it.”

  My name was common enough and perhaps Ruth or James had said it within his earshot. The rest of his words were spiteful and uncouth, the sort of foulness to be expected from a rough sailor.

  “Your leg is hurt. My father will be home soon, he will help you.”

  “You will tell no one—your father especially. You, who told the truth once before. You, who bears such scars. There is much I would tell you of elder dreams and formless seas. Of the infinite that draws breath but once an aeon, and the secrets of stars burned cold in ancient times.”

  “I don’t understand…” my voice came from far away. In the sunshine, I felt colder than I ever had.

  “The babe died,” he said, his words a statement of the inevitable. Words carved in stone as an eternal testament to shame. I wanted to run again at those words. Driven by a rising scream that came from the deep dark where memories are cast, that bottomless pit of the mind where things we wish to never think of again are exiled.

  Parker continued, his voice a rasping sound that cut my resolve to ribbons. “Do you see it in your nightmares, a slug born in a torrent of blood and cramping pain? Not the usual monthly courses. No, this was anger and vengeance, the blood of shame and sin. You were bound in darkness, adrift on the dark sea, in the chasm of your depravity, the abyss of your mind. What did you see there, so deep, so dark? Did it drive you back towards the light?”

  My feet were bound in the smooth gravel and I desperately wanted to run, to never hear this man’s voice again. To run so far that memory and shame could never find me.

  “You opened yourself to him, like a whore on the waterfront. Pale and shaking you drew him inside you. Burning with your desire and the power you held over him.”

  My throat went dry, binding my tongue to the roof of my mouth. I could barely breathe as his foul words fell like hammer blows.

  “Words of love…” Parker sneered, snorted phlegm deep into his throat and then spat. Black-green and vile, I am sure the slime slithered of its own accord away from the light of the sun and into the cold comfort of the rounded beach pebbles.

  “Shut…shut up.” My arms were locked to my sides, numb as driftwood and unable to cover my ears against his litany of awful utterances.

  “Did he seduce you, or did you pursue him? The haymaking season was nearing end, a celebration in the district. A church gathering with fine food, warm beer, and distilled spirit. Your head filled with romantic nonsense. One kiss and you fancied yourself in love.”

 
My legs moved of their own accord, carrying me across the grinding surface of the pebble beach and onto the ancient dunes. I had abandoned the wood-sled, the bucket and my composure, running blind with tears streaming down my face. I fled past the house, setting the dogs barking from where they were tied under the pine trees. I ran around the vegetable garden and over the wire fence at the bottom of the hill. The scrub and bush on the steep slope were a place to hide. We played here often; filling the time between chores with complex story-games of knights and damsels, brave explorers and the mysterious natives of lost kingdoms. I threw myself down on the damp earthen floor of the hut my brothers had built in the bush. Swept away on an unstoppable torrent of sorrow and pain, I howled and wept until my stomach cramped. Curling into a ball, gasping and dry in my misery.

  The devilry wrought by the strange sailor washed up on our beach terrified me. There had indeed been a young man, I had been in love, and to my eternal shame and despair I gave myself to him at the end of last summer’s haymaking. When all the local families gathered around the white-board parish church to share and celebrate the end of a long month’s work, my heart was lost in a swirl of romantic fantasy. He wooed with his sweet words. Nothing would have come of it, nothing but my shame. Our tryst would be a secret kept, as many are, until the confines of the grave allow it to finally return to the darkness of rot and hearsay. But my secret would not be so easily contained. At first, I gave little thought to the absence of my monthly cycle. It had been two months since that summer’s in the manuka and ferns behind the church, and my heart’s desire was fading, as I had not seen the young man since. Each morning I found myself rushing outside and retching thin bile into the dry, sandy soil. After the fourth such incident, I wiped my mouth and straightened, only for my heart to stop as I saw mother standing on the kitchen step, her arms folded and her face stony.

  “You’ll want some tea,” was all she said.

  I followed her indoors, meek and silent. She served tea, the black leaf from a store box, normally reserved for visitors.

  “When did you last have your monthly, Hannah?” Mother asked.

  I blushed deeply. Though matters of birth and death were an everyday occurrence in a farming community, to speak of menses was rare.

  “I don’t remember,” I mumbled.

  “You’ve not used your cloths in weeks,” she said.

  I looked up, surprised that mother would have noticed such a thing. I kept a handed-down supply of absorbent rags in a drawer in my room and had not imagined mother would have noted the pattern of their use.

  “Who was it?” Mother had her back to me, standing at the stove, stirring the morning’s porridge and giving no clue as to her expression or thoughts.

  “I…” I did not dare betray him. My heart still held on to hope that he would come back and take me away to a new life where I would be his wife and we would live in comparative luxury.

  “You will tell your father.”

  In all things my father had the authority and wrath of the Old Testament God. Mother’s words were tantamount to an order of execution. I had been thrashed before for my daydreaming and other transgressions, though to be unwed and with child would be far beyond any wrongdoing in the history of my family. If I were not the one facing his unimaginable fury, I would have been fascinated to see what form his rage would take.

  My nausea returned with a vengeance, and I fled to the garden to retch acid.

  That evening father came home from the sea, only Peter old enough to aid him in drawing in the net. The catch had been poor and father’s mood was as dark as the southern sky with an approaching storm. I waited until he had eaten his fill of supper and his second pipe load wreathed smoke through the kitchen.

  “Father,” I whispered.

  “What is it Hannah?”

  “Please…please forgive me,” I felt the strength of prayer in my voice. I was beseeching an omnipotent figure to show me mercy after all.

  “What are you mumbling about?”

  “Father, I am going to have a baby.” My words tumbled out in a flood. My confession pouring out in a gush, like the lifeblood from a slaughtered beast’s throat. In its wake I was left pale and shaking.

  “What?” father asked. “Helen!” he roared. My mother appeared from where she had been putting the children to bed.

  “Yes?”

  My father rose to his feet, his pipe falling to the floor, the embers of tobacco scattering on the boards. “Hannah…” was all he said.

  My mother nodded, her hands clasped in front of her own belly. With my head bowed I watched her knuckles knead white against themselves.

  “I only found out this morning,” Mother said, absolving her­self of any complicity in my crime.

  “Who is the father?” my own father asked.

  “She will not say,” Mother accused.

  “By God, Hannah. You will tell me his name!” Father’s anger exploded out of him.

  I shook, but whispered, “No.”

  My father took up the poker from beside the stove, a finger of iron as thick and long as my arm. I had often imagined it to be a rapier or enchanted sword for slaying dragons or evildoers that may invade our castle during my games.

  Father raised it to his shoulder, his face darker than night, lips pinched thin in his fury. “Tell me his fucking name!”

  Such a word had never been uttered in my presence before. To hear my father scream such profanity shook me to my core. I trembled and remained silent.

  The half-remembered dreams that came to me that night were dark and wild. When I awoke in my bed, I remember being thirsty, my throat drier than the dirt track that ran past the house. I was as the ship of the Ancient Mariner; my boards had shrunk. So much so, that my body was skin and bone. Mother came into the room in response to my mewling. She hugged me, weeping tears onto my shoulder, and then she brought me thin soup. I was fed like a child, and after my famishment was absolved, I noted the small boy watching with large eyes from the doorway.

  “Jamie,” Mother said, “Come and see your sister, Hannah.”

  “Hello Jamie,” I said, though I could barely speak through the remnants of sleep. He regarded me in fearful silence. I wondered why he seemed so uncertain.

  “I have slept late, Mother,” I started to apologise, and the words, came out, jumbled and malformed from my throat.

  “You’re alright now,” Mother reassured me. “Your father will want to see you.”

  The fear in my eyes was apparent enough for mother to pat me gently on the shoulder. “He has forgiven you.”

  I did not know my father was capable of forgiveness. He had never expressed such sentiment in my hearing before, not for his fellow man, nor for the vagaries of fate and nature that he believed conspired against him in matters financial, and the gathering of provisions.

  “I need to visit the lavatory,” I went to leave my bed and found my legs in a weakened state.

  I had no strength to refuse mother’s aid and she tended me like a youngster struck with a winter fever; soup and bed rest, with no demand that I rise and complete my chores. Father, to my surprise, was almost affectionate that first evening after my confession.

  During the month following that strange morning, my const­itution slowly refreshed. No one in my family spoke of my sin, and when my cycle arrived with its customary inconvenience, the memory slipped into shadow.

  This was when the blinding headaches made themselves known for the first time. Under their dark spell I would lose my sense of place and time, awakening on the beach, or down the track that led to town, with no memory of how I came to be there or the purpose of the errand that had sent me on the expedition. Mother, or one of my siblings would meet me on the return journey and, usually without comment, they would take my hand and we would walk home. Embarrassed that I had reneged on my chores, I would remain silent, and yet wa
s never scolded.

  I do not know how long I lay on the dirt floor of the hut in the bush. I dozed and daydreamed, my mind swept up in the vagaries of clouds, the myriad patterns in the sun-lit leaves, and the sharp-edged echo of the sailor’s cruel words. Then, through the haze a shadow appeared. I wiped my face and blinked. “Jamie?”

  “Hannah,” he spoke with the voice of the little boy, though his eyes were dark like the storm. “Cthulhu fhtagn.”

  His meaningless utterance stabbed through me as though I was the boy, Kay, in Andersen’s Snow Queen, and my heart was turning to ice.

  “Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn.” Jamie intoned, his eyes rolled up in his head, the whites turned smoky grey.

  My demand that Jamie cease this foolishness came out as a moan. I got to my knees, fists curling through the dirt. “James!”

  The boy raised his thin arm, pointing towards the sea, “The sleeper awakens.”

  Jamie took my hand and marched down the hill towards the house. Mother stood in the dusty yard, Ruth tugging at her skirts and pointing at us as we climbed through the fence.

  “Half!” Mother shouted. “What are you doing?”

  “Mother! There’s something wrong with Jamie!”

  Mother’s face twisted, “James, what is your fool sister doing?”

  Jamie ignored her and continued his march towards the sea, dragging me with him, leaving mother and Ruth in our wake.

  At the beach Parker had dragged limbs of driftwood together. I thought it was a strange pyre he was building, then it seemed to shift, as if twisting in the early evening’s light, and I saw he had made an edifice like a door; a high and rectangular portal through which only darkness could be seen.