[anthology] Darrell Schweitzer (ed) - Cthulhu's Reign Page 3

  Anders Strandberg, bank manager, Swedish

  Selma Strandberg, financial consultant, Swedish

  Bruce Ballantyne, wine merchant, Australian

  Jack Ballantyne, teenage son, Australian

  Iain Mackinnon, gap year student of geography,

  Scottish

  Katie Drummond, ditto but archeology, Scottish,

  Iain’s girlfriend

  Laszlo Michaleczky, computer programmer, on

  honeymoon, Hungarian

  Zsuzsa Michaleczky, lawyer, on honeymoon, Hungarian

  Our ages ranged from a guesstimated 65 for our general down to 15 or 16 for the American girl Alice who kept chewing at her lip, looking scared, scythe in hand. Fortunately there were no small children among us.

  “Here is our defensible base,” announced Thomas Henkel, gesturing at the office and other structures beside the gate. “Next we must consider water and food and toilet facilities.”

  An enquiry by Gabriella quickly elicited from Rudolfo that only some bread and sausage and cheese was in the office, although of course the building contained a toilet. Gianni went back inside, and emerged to declare that a tap was producing water at about half the usual pressure.

  “At least there’s water,” said Gabriella.

  “Not to be wasted in a toilet,” said Henkel. “We shall resort to latrines in the grounds, behind trees or bushes. We have ample digging tools.”

  The two Scottish students had wandered, whispering, to the near end of the innermost gallery of slabs and statues.

  “Something’s coming!” the Scots lad called out. “Jesus Christ!”

  Most of us rushed to witness. What had come into sight at the far end of the sepulchral gallery had nothing to do with anything divine according to human understanding and everything to do with what we’d glimpsed on TV. Two and a half meters high, tentacle-faced, it was a human-scale iteration of one of those monstrous creatures from out of a nightmare, or from the warped mind of some special-effects genius on drugs, or from somewhere utterly other.

  As the thing proceeded towards us, we gripped our various gardening implements, in my case with trembling hands. A hissing invaded my awareness, similar to static on a radio or a breeze through holes in ancient stones on some windswept mountain: thoooo-loooo, thoooo-loooo, a mesmeric sound that seemed to be rustling within my mind rather than coming from outside to my ears.

  The creature’s great warty body was gherkin-green. Under the swollen, thick-veined dome of that pulpy head brooded baleful red eyes. Suckery tentacles or feelers dangled, writhing, from those inhuman, inhumane-seeming features. Webbed frills jutted where ears might be—or was I seeing some sort of fin, even a vestigial wing? The body seemed covered with rubbery warty scales. Two principal muscular tentacles appeared to serve as arms, branching at their tips, and branching again into clusters of anemone-like fingers. Huge triangular feet, that left a glistening snaily trail behind them, bore savagely hooked claws. . . . thoooo-loooo, thoooo-loooo

  A vile odor assaulted us, like the glutinous stench of some coral newly torn out of the sea, although more intense, a penetrating smell of primitive biological slime that oughtn’t to be released into the air but should stay masked underwater, a concentration of the reek of seaweed-coated rocks at low tide. thoooo-loooo, thoooo-loooo

  Abruptly the romantic novelist screamed, setting off likewise the Dutch art student. This broke a kind of paralyzing horrid enchantment, as felt in dreams where you can’t flee, or can but feebly and very slowly, from what menaces you. We retreated so as not to see what was coming—except for the Australian wine merchant, Bruce, and the burly Hungarian who must have felt that he was defending his bride. Those two stood their ground, armed with a fork and a spade.

  What happened next was abominable.

  As if the creature had speeded up, or even shifted instantaneously, all of a sudden it was upon the two jabbing men, its arm-tentacles wrenching their weapons from their grip with evidently great strength, to be hurled aside. A clawed foot casually tore open the Australian’s clothing and abdomen. A tentacle snaked into the bloody wound to jerk free the tubing of his intestines, hauling his bowels out and out, two meters, three. Bruce Ballantyne may have died of shock before his body hit the flooring, since it didn’t flop about like a beached fish. At the same time, the other tentacle gripped the Hungarian’s neck—and impossibly hoisted his head aloft atop his spinal column coming right up from out of his shoulders. No natural force could have done that to a man! Could the creature manipulate matter by thought, by malign imagination, as well as physically? Head and spine were discarded even as Jack the son howled, “Dad!” and the newlywed Zsuzsa shrieked.

  My list, drawn up only a few minutes earlier, began to seem futile except as a probable In Memoriam. Yet the creature didn’t proceed to hurl itself upon the rest of us as we variously cowered back or made a show of defending ourselves. It regarded us, almost as though the two hideous deaths constituted a demonstration of power.

  thoooo-loooo, thoooo-loooo

  The American evangelist and his wife sank to their knees, praying loudly, “O merciful God . . .” And the creature’s feelers began to move as though conducting an orchestra, almost as if it understood it was sardonically accepting obeisance and encouraging more.

  “Kneel and pray for salvation!” Pastor Jimmy Garrett urged us before resuming his chant. Although Rudolpho and Gianni probably didn’t understand what the American said, the two Italians collapsed to their knees, crossing themselves repeatedly.

  “Pray to that?” bellowed our general. “For that’s what it looks as though you are doing, sir! Come, we must retreat in an orderly manner! You,” pointing at the Swedish bank manager who had an avuncular look, “see to the Australian boy. And you,” indicating his wife, “guide the shocked widow. Signora Vigo, you take us all to some safer and higher place. From the look of it, the kraken may have difficulty climbing. Quickly now, but do not run in case instinct impels it to give chase.”

  Instinct? Or was that creature intelligent, maybe far more intelligent than ourselves, and cruelly so, so that we were to it as a rabbit or a rat is to a human being . . . ?

  Presently we’d cut across the huge open area of more modern and simpler graves, most with fresh flowers in vases, hoping that the closely-set white marble gravestones might obstruct the bulky thoooo-loooo creature (I still heard its whisper). And we were ascending that broad flight of steps we’d seen earlier—Selma Strandberg hugging and pulling bereaved Zsuzsa—towards that scallop-tiled pantheon from which colonnades stretched away, behind which, and beyond, groves of cypress and juniper and other trees rose steeply and extended afar, innumerable tall mausoleums poking up amidst the foliage like miniature churches topped with small domes, stone lanterns, finials, crosses, so many ornate habitations of the dead. Could we take refuge in one of those; achieve sanctuary?

  Shady pathways wound upward through the groves. As a child, how enchanted I would have been to explore this place, thinking of it as a secret garden. But now . . . !

  At the top of the flight we paused to regain our breath.

  Thomas Henkel, unwinded by our journey, surveyed where we had come from. He was a field marshal, if the grave-crowded expanse beneath us were a field. He should have worn a monocle and pointed with a swagger-cane.

  “Straight over there!”

  Where a broad, tree- lined pathway led from the triple rank of galleries abutting the threefold principal arched gateway stood the thing that Henkel chose to call a kraken, gazing at us from afar and directly opposite. A shiver ran down my spine, for in that moment, despite the distance, the creature seemed to fix on me, like the pin that fastens a butterfly in a display case.

  Just then—could it possibly be by the agency of that beast?—a giant oval lens opened in the pearly mist that cloaked the cemetery. From this elevation we could see right over the high perimeter wall. Far beyond the roofed gateway where the creature lingered, beyond where I knew the city�
�s wide shallow river curved, part stony, part vegetated, I saw part of the raised riverside roadway and many of the apartment blocks, their concrete faded yellow or faded rose.

  “Traffic!” Yes, others saw the same. Shimmering, cars and trucks and buses were driving along the highway, undisturbed by any trampling behemoth. No police vehicles nor ambulances were racing, emergency lights flashing. Nor trucks of armed soldiers. Normality, so it seemed. A vision of this part of the city as we’d seen it just an hour or two before.

  Or as it was right now, yet in some other reality . . . ? The lens closed up, having taunted us.

  “We’re no longer part of that reality!” I said to Henkel.

  “We shall talk of this later,” he told me.

  Zsuzsa was still sobbing inconsolably. The Australian adolescent was trying to behave like a man, although I saw him quiver. We needed protection.

  I pointed at what appeared to be the topmost ten meters or so of a Gothic cathedral amidst trees, the railed area around it apparently choked with bushes.

  “Could we take shelter in that spire, for instance?”

  “Most of the mausoleums are locked,” observed Gabriella.

  “A spade can break a lock.”

  “Forget all those pseudo-buildings,” said Henkel. “Anywhere with only one entrance is a trap. We’d be fish in a barrel.”

  Of course he was right. The yearning to be inside protective walls had made me stupid. My orderly world, my past, was melting away like wax. What twisted shape would result?

  Henkel conferred with Gabriella sotto voce, and we set off, presently to arrive at a tall gap where a wall several meters high, inset with caskets, confronted an equally high blank wall, coarsely plastered with concrete except where the covering had cracked off, exposing bare mortared stones. This narrowest of alleys extended for maybe forty meters, and only one body’s width, terribly claustrophobic—what if something appear at the far end when you were halfway along? To relieve slightly the intense gloom, quite a few lanterns, each containing a battery-powered Pope candle, hung from caskets at various heights. Our field marshal ordained that we should each take one of the feeble lanterns with us, along with our gardening weapons—maybe, if lucky, we might later take the monster by surprise.

  And so we came, passing by grieving statues, to a most unusual part of this singular cemetery. Although we were still quite high above ground level, we entered a labyrinth of several balustraded levels linked by stairways, walled with more caskets. On a dismal midway level Henkel decided that we should settle ourselves upon the paving stones.

  “We shall take turns to be lookouts at the up-stairway and at the down-stairway. I think the kraken may find those stairways a hindrance. If it does come from one direction, we shall escape the other way.”

  To sleep eventually on the hard stone floor in our fairly lightweight clothing? After no food or drink? Meanwhile, doing nothing but wait?

  “Signora Vigo,” asked Henkel, “are there water taps nearby in the area outside, to fill flower vases?”

  Seeming uncertain—does a tour guide pay much attention to taps?—Gabriella asked Rudolfo, whose response was obviously positive.

  “Ask him to go, Signora Vigo, to show where . . . Jack Ballantine, would you go with two or three others to bring water back?” Yes, give the shocked lad something to do; already he was nodding yes.

  “But what do we carry the water in . . . ?”

  “Why, in vases which you empty and rinse out. Mijnheer Ruyslinck, will you go too? And Mr. Goldman, to keep watch?”

  “No,” said his wife Betsy.

  “I’ll be all right, honey.”

  “But the other Italian guy knows the cemetery.”

  “Precisely for that reason,” said our field marshal, “he must remain with us as a source of information in the temporary absence of his superior.”

  Just in case Rudolfo met his death vilely outside . . .

  As soon as this little expedition departed, to loud prayers from Jimmy Garrett, Henkel came and sat by me.

  “So,” he asked softly, “you think there may now be two separate realities? In one reality our world has been invaded by these multiple iterations of krakens, on various scales? And in the other reality, another world carries on as normal?”

  “It was you who mentioned recreating the primitive earliest state of the universe . . . before physical laws became fixed. A sort of no-time when a different sort of universe could have burst forth and inflated instead.”

  “And maybe that universe did come into a parallel existence, remaining faintly linked to our own universe by early . . . I think the correct word is entanglement.”

  “By and large I know what that means, but I’m only a bureaucrat, as you pointed out.”

  “Never mind, at least you know something! Maybe as much as I know. If our physicists have recreated that earliest stage of the cosmos in miniature, does this permit a kind of bridge between two possible cosmoses? Or rather a hole, which can be forced open by a powerful and evil intelligence?”

  “How do I know!”

  “Miss Hughes, surely it’s better to think rationally along such lines than to imagine that hell has invaded us, especially as that creature corresponds to no religion that I know of.”

  “At least we won’t die deluded.”

  “We mightn’t die. If those krakens are all linked, and are aspects, avatars, of the same entity, we might come across a tinier iteration of the beast and stamp on it!”

  Was our field marshal himself deluded, or was this for the sake of morale?

  “If they’re all aspects of the same, what did you say, evil intelligence, that must be one very highly developed intelligence.”

  “Compared with which we are stupid? Maybe so, maybe not. But maybe we are very stupid to bombard the consituents of matter into a state which hasn’t existed since the dawn of creation, alien to the universe we know today. Stupid to meddle with the fundamental basis of reality. Maybe that’s how the rift happened, when something broke through—something which may even have been able to touch our world in the past by entanglement, though not as sustainedly as now. Supposing that at the beginning the cosmos divided, one of the twins pursuing our own everyday course, the other cursed twin torn away from its mirror image into a ghastly dimension or between-dimension where vile intelligences arose hungry for the substance of our world. How the invaders are reveling now.”

  I thought that Henkel too was reveling somewhat in rhetoric, but I had to ask, “What about the normality we saw through that lens? Which cosmos is that in?”

  “I think that was an illusion, a lure to attract us back to the gate, as if we are sheep. The kraken is experimenting with us.”

  “If the creature can create illusions . . . and you saw how impossibly it pulled the spine out of . . . ” I couldn’t continue.

  Thomas Henkel patted me on the shoulder. “There now, be brave. As you have been until now. If the kraken possesses such powers, which seem to us paranormal, well, it isn’t exerting them all the time.”

  He stood up, and addressed our huddled company, declaring his theory that we might come across a much smaller kraken and be able to destroy it, thus striking a maybe mortal blow at the larger one which menaced us in the cemetery.

  Personally I thought that, if what we’d witnessed on TV was authentic, then nuclear weapons would have destroyed at least several of the greater monsters. Unless of course the monsters could neutralise missiles.

  At least our group seemed somewhat comforted by Henkel’s idea.

  I’d often wondered in what way I would die one day. That’s the big question which most people avoid asking themselves, not least because there’s no answer until it happens, and even then you mightn’t know the answer, supposing your mind has degenerated prior to death, as my mother’s did. Whereas the truck that skidded and mowed down my dad from behind might have obliterated him before he could even realize. So somehow—due to family history—I thought that I wouldn’t
know about death when I died. I would simply cease, the way I once ceased due to anesthetic when I needed a kidney stone broken up by laser. Did I hope simply to cease or alternatively to know the very threshold of death? Had the creature come to teach me?

  “There’s still no mobile phone signal,” said Wim Ruyslinck’s girlfriend.

  “Did you just try to call Mijnheer Ruyslinck?” demanded Henkel.

  “Yes, but his phone’s set to vibrate, not ring. I wouldn’t draw attention to him like that.”

  “Wise. However, we should conserve batteries, in case there’s any future use for them. Everyone should switch off their phones. I’ll keep mine switched on in case there is any change. When my charge runs out, I’ll appoint someone else.”

  “Runs out?” queried Betsy Goldman, who was plump. “When’s that? In a week or a fortnight? What do we eat till then?”

  “The human body doesn’t normally die of hunger for forty or fifty days provided it can drink. Fasting is normal for many people in the world, often involuntarily.”

  “You mean I’m starting from a good baseline?” Betsy laughed, perhaps a shade hysterically, but others chuckled or grinned, the first hint of good spirits.

  “Very good!” Henkel said approvingly.

  Fortunately, her husband and Rudolfo, Jack Ballantyne, and the Dutchman all returned safely soon enough, bearing vases brimming with water.

  That, comparatively, was the good time, the time when there was still some hope, even if meager . . .

  We’re allowed our sanctuary, here in this dusty shadowy minor labyrinth of stairways and galleries where the warped oval sun only reaches through a grimy round skylight or so at the top. A place resembling a library, except that instead of books on shelves there are almost identical caskets containing the dead, blessed to have died when they did.

  Maybe the creature cannot easily mount or descend the stairs, though I doubt it. So far at least, Cthulhu hasn’t done so. There comes a click in our minds, and the drawn-out whisper inside us, of thoooo-loooo, thoooo-loooo : that might be its name, or maybe a call of power akin to an abracadabra.