[anthology] Darrell Schweitzer (ed) - Cthulhu's Reign Read online

  Staring down from the corner again as the insanely hideous thing lands on the debris and springs—and it is as if the creature strikes a wall where the outer circle is drawn, as if it crashes straight into curved aquarium glass. The creature is not repelled by the barrier, but hangs there in the air, sticking to the invisible wall like a tarantula hugged against a fishbowl, its dozens of limbs splayed out radially from its squirming core like a spider escaped from a schizophrenic’s most deranged hallucination.

  Delmar has released his daughter’s arm. He’s kneeling by the circle, the book beside him, cords standing out against his neck as he chants. And the little girl sees the horrid thing hanging in the air. And she screams. And she runs. Away from the center of the circle. She runs out of view of the disembodied ceiling observer, and the thing crawls so fast around and across the surface of the invisible barrier, scuttling spider- fast, as Lynda lurches too late to catch her daughter.

  All through this, Meaghan’s whisper has never stopped.

  “Don’t you want to know really why we love you so? Because you’re just like us, just one of us, all part of us and us part of you. We ate you all up, we did. You made the spell work, you made the monster back into mommy and me with that magic from my blood, but we’re still it and it’s still in you, it’s always been in you, changing you inside, one slow cell at a time, because your spell can’t protect you that small.”

  The dream camera coldly documents what follows. The burst of dark fluid that sprays into the circle. A woman’s severed arm lands on the floor, a foot lands another place, snakelike black limbs greedily snatch them up, gulp them down. The man’s face a mask of horror, but he doesn’t stop his chant, even as the multi-limbed thing joins him within the invisible aquarium, squeezing in through the opening made when the outer circle was fatally crossed. The dream- Delmar doesn’t stop his chant, even when the creature sends long hooked limbs around the burning inner circle to hook into his vulnerable belly, punch in and drag out the gray ropes coiled inside. The man’s face contorts in unspeakable agony and mystic ecstasy as he howls his final syllables. And it’s at that moment that the inner circle surges in a pillar of blinding fire, and the film changes to color, Wizard of Oz technicolor.

  “But, Daddy, the part of us inside you is going to wake up. And then we’ll be together like we should be and you’ll never be alone again. You’ll never, ever, ever be left alone. When you hear my voice, I’m saying other words too, words that you can’t hear, but the sleeping part of me that’s inside you can. It hears me and it wants to wake up. And when it does, that voice you always hear won’t really be yours. It’ll be ours. And we’ll trick you, and you’ll ruin the spell. We’ll trick you, Daddy, when we wake up.”

  The burning circle, now a blackened spot in a beautiful pasture. And the man, his body whole, his clothes changed to suit his surroundings, picks himself up as he watches a black mass shrink and thicken and transform into a new, familiar shape. But only one shape. Never two.

  And behind them, at the edge of the pasture, the fog. And above them, the grey clouds that will never, ever lift.

  A tickling at his ear, a whisper.

  “Wake up. Wake up. Wake up.”

  He springs awake and gropes for the lamp. The bulb casts its light across the comfortable contours of his bedroom.

  His wife lies on her side, sleeping peacefully, her back to him, the cartoon cat on her favorite nightshirt flashing its inane grin.

  From under her collar a dark tendril stretches, no thicker than a strand of yarn. Its end rests on his pillow, bulging out into a plush- lipped mouth that nestles beside the indentation where his head had rested. It continues to mouth words as if it doesn’t know he’s not there any more.

  Delmar trembles, staring at the tiny mutant mouth that mutters in his daughter’s voice. His eyes bulge. Tears smear his cheeks. All the barriers he’s built inside his own mind to survive day to day in this world he created for his family, for what remains of them, have crumbled. He comprehends everything.

  He only ever hears Meaghan’s voice when it speaks from Lynda’s body. Confronting this truth isn’t what was causing him such disgust and dismay. What rips deep inside him, aggravating once again that pricking beneath his skin: never before has that voice turned against him, said things that Meaghan herself would never have said.

  He leaves the bedroom, comes back with the book. Sets it down. Sits on the edge of the bed beside Lynda, sets to work with a blowtorch and knife. His tears never stop.

  He returns to the book, starts to read aloud.

  It’s dark beneath the ever-present clouds, but he knows the way. He walks across the verdant pastures that always stay green and thick with grass no matter how long the animals graze. He walks past the burnt circle, its ember glow patterns pulsating brighter than he’s ever seen, a silent blare of strident warning. He leaves the circle behind, strides into the fog, consumed by the message he needs to deliver.

  The rustling of his feet through the damp grass grows muffled in the dense mist, then fades altogether. It’s as if his steps alight on the fog itself.

  He takes ten strides, twenty, thirty, and then, as abruptly as a bird striking glass, the fog ends. His land ends. The entire world ends.

  Beyond the edge: an ocean of inhuman flesh, seen from undersea.

  Just as the protective circle he drew in his horribly failed attempt to save his wife and daughter gave rise to a clear fishbowl barrier against the things it was intended to keep out, so does this island of sanity built from his daughter’s blood and his father’s rambling stories terminate at a barrier, one that shuts out the madness that swallowed the earth whole. He and what’s left of his family—that disgusting black thing, forced to take the form of his wife when the spell touched her piecemeal remains, but not enough of his daughter left to take form too, only a voice—he and his family dwell now in this single pocket of peace, a bubble in the belly of the all-consuming beast.

  On the other side of that barrier, pressed hard against it, pink translucent ropes thick as tanker trucks pulse and swell as rivers of ichor flow through their veiny channels. These titanic kraken tentacles move slowly, like slugs on glass, and plasma churns and boils in the spaces between them. Sometimes the bubbles look like faces. Sometimes smaller things squeeze in between the vast squirming limbs, enormous urchins with eyes lining and crowning the spines, or amoebic creatures that spontaneously form mouths or multi-jointed arms as they flow bonelessly through the cramped liquid spaces. Sometimes gray skinless beings, sculpted crudely humanoid, emerge and scrabble desperately against the invisible barricade before the currents sweep them back into the sickening organic soup.

  Delmar understands all now. If the clouds ever parted above and around his farm, these sights would form his heaven and his horizon.

  He stares into the nausea- inducing chaos, unblinking, and speaks. “I’ll keep them alive, as long as I can.” He spreads his arms. “I’ll keep this alive, as long as I can. I’ll never, ever give you what you want.”

  Behind the sliding pink tentacles, a vast eye peels open. Even through the layers of wormy flesh, he can see it.

  And when it opens, pores gape all along the massed coils of pink, translucent flesh. They gape and flex like octopus siphons sucking water. Perhaps it’s these that make the noise Delmar hears as countless whispers speaking in one voice. Inside your shell, time still flows forward, but that time will end. Outside, time is still. Outside, your future is now. Outside, you are with us and have been forever and will be forever. Your future is our now.

  While the orifices whisper, an immense mouth yaws apart above the eye. Things crawl inside its lips. And somewhere inside the crawling darkness, a man screams. He howls in such a magnitude of pain that Delmar can’t begin to imagine what’s being done to him. The man screams and screams, over and over—then perhaps there comes a fraction of respite, for the howls crumble into high-pitched and pathetic sobs. Maybe there are words, repeated pleas, but Delmar can�
�t make them out before the screams start again, and the mouth closes, sealing them away.

  The voice of the screaming, sobbing man—it is his own voice. The voice of his future self, once his safe haven has perished.

  Delmar’s eyes are wet and bright and knowing. But his voice doesn’t waver. “I’ll keep them alive. As long as I can.”

  As he retreats into the fog, the million-strong voice whispers back. We wait.

  Light streams through the open kitchen window as Delmar slices onions for the omelets. The soothing breeze accepts his invitation to drift inside.

  Delmar has the vaguest memory of an upsetting night, but a voice whispers in his ear, his own voice, telling him he has to forget for now, compartmentalize, or the weight of knowledge will keep him from what happiness he has left, with what’s left of his family, in the time he has left.

  Whatever it was, it hardly seems to matter now. He breathes in the warm, sweet air that mingles with the smell of his own cooking and knows he can handle whatever life has to throw at him.

  The sizzle of the bacon in the skillet doesn’t completely drown out water rushing onto tile as Lynda showers. He can do this almost without thinking: the bacon first, then eggs to soak up the flavor. Lynda always tsked him for that vice, frying eggs in bacon grease, but she can’t stop herself from wolfing down the results. Just an evil way to show my love, he likes to tell her.

  He raises the knife above a helpless onion, then stops short. There’s singing, coming from the shower. He freezes, listening, because it’s Meaghan’s voice that sings, and that doesn’t seem right, and part of him knows the many, many reasons it’s not right, but that part of him refuses to share its concerns aloud. And so he shrugs it off. It’s not important.

  Back to his task. He realigns the onion and steadies it for the killing stroke. Then something catches his eye. He lifts his hand to his face. His heart starts to pound.

  A black growth shivers on the back of his ring finger, just below his wedding band. It extends as he watches, reaches out with twin protrusions akin to a snail’s eyes. They twitch toward him. He feels a painful, pricking sensation, but under his skin, and for a brief flicker another vision imposes over his own, a vision of his own face, monumental in size and monstrous. The inner voice he always hears, the one that comforts and warns him, speaks again, but only says, We wait.

  His wife’s singing has stopped. The bathroom door opens.

  “Sweetie,” Lynda calls from the shower, “can you bring me a towel?”

  “Sure,” he answers, as he positions his hand on the cutting board. “In a minute.”

  SPHERICAL TRIGONOMETRY

  Ken Asamatsu

  Translation by Edward Lipsett

  1

  What I saw just before I awoke—the mountain road, winding away beyond the front windshield of the car. Darkness crowding close to the left, the right. Bulging, pallid beasts appearing and vanishing again in the headlights, beams always stabbing on. Their faces, human, on the heads of wild-eyed, shambling things. The monitor built into the console and the scenes of the city it showed. The city was crumbling, turning to rubble from the sky down. The images, washed away under a flood of noise . . . noise wavering like jellyfish tentacles. The woman wearing glasses in the passenger seat, smoking. I could sense her irritation clearly. I glance into the rearview mirror, see the couple in the back seat. He’s mid-fifties, she’s maybe around thirty. His arm around her shoulder, he whispers something in her ear, then unexpectedly looking forward, speaks.

  “We’re here, Kanako. See, the Womb!”

  At last a giant white sphere, half-buried in the ground, looms ahead, then suddenly changes into a giant eyeball, staring at us. Their eye.

  I scream, half jumping out of bed. Nightmare. No, what I just saw wasn’t a nightmare, was it . . . it was a fragmentary memory. A memory of the night of April 30, well after midnight, when I arrived here at the Womb.

  The Womb, Manabe had named it, keeping the pronunciation even in Japanese. He said the name suited the birthplace of the next generation of humanity. Manabe never refers to it as a “refuge” or a “shelter.” Whatever. So I’ll call it the Womb. But the Mother who holds that womb within her is terrified, facing death.

  My name is Tatsuya Izumo. I’m a painter. Hardly the sort of person fit to be the “father of the next generation of humanity,” as Manabe says. He really wanted my wife, not me—I was just sort of baggage she happened to bring along.

  My wife Sayoko was a scientist and the architect of the Womb. When rich occultist Manabe asked her to design it, she accepted and took complete command of the project. Then, Sayoko had never thought that the Change he always spoke of would really come.

  After all, there were a fair number of rich men and women who believed Nostradamus’ prediction that the world would end in 1999, or the Mayan calendar’s prophecy of catastrophe in 2012. Rich people always tended to lean a bit toward the occult . . . In Japan, there was no shortage of company presidents who would consult fortunetellers to learn the most propitious date to sign a contract, or turn to feng shui when decorating their company headquarters. So when Manabe asked her to build a shelter without angles, in preparation for the coming “Change,” Sayoko figured it was just another wacky job and accepted. The money was excellent, and as a scientist and an architect she was intrigued by the challenge of building a shelter “without angles” where people could live in safety for fifty years.

  Manabe bought up a huge tract of land deep in the mountains of Nagano prefecture, the site for the Womb. The occultists, fortunetellers, and psychics hired by Manabe all agreed that it was the most sacred spot in Japan. In fact, a certain “new religion” had designated it as holy, building their headquarters and temple there. During WWII, their surging strength lead the feared kempeitai police to accuse the religion of lese majesty, destroying the temple and arresting all officials and believers at once. He said nobody had set foot on the land in the eighty-odd years since. And now Manabe was building his Womb on that sacred spot, no matter the cost.

  At the beginning, Sayoko thought Manabe was simply using a metaphor when he demanded a shelter without angles. She thought he just wanted a safe refuge. She realized he was speaking quite literally when he saw the first design drawings and refused them outright.

  With the haughty expression the rich reserve for their lessers, he berated her: “What do you call this? This is nothing more than a simple bomb shelter! And full of angles! The entrance, the walls, the ceilings . . . angles, angles everywhere! How could you possibly imagine this could be a shelter! Do it again, and better!”

  “Yes sir, President Manabe,” she asked. “Can you provide some specifics for the design?”

  “I need a facility without angles of any kind,” he answered, changing instantly from the president of a mega-corporation to an occultist. “You seem to be bright, but obviously haven’t a shred of esoteric knowledge. Fine. I’ll teach you.

  “Since it was created, our universe has been the battle-ground for a never-ending conflict between curves and angles. What we call ‘good’ is expressed in the abstract by curves, and what we call ‘evil’ by the angles. The black magicians of the West treasured the pentacle because it held five angles. The mandalas of the East were round, curves without angles. Atzous says that the purest evil in all creation is symbolized by the triangle: it is the evilest shape, because it is formed of the smallest number of angles. The ancient Chinese knew the esoteric meaning of triangles, and so named the triangle formed by the triangle of Sirius the ‘Evil Stars’ for just that reason. Even Homer knew Sirius was evil . . .”

  And he ordered Sayoko to build him a shelter without angles as quickly as possible, because there was so little time left.

  Sayoko thought it was just a figure of speech, his saying there was no time left. She didn’t worry too much about it, shrugging it off as just another obsession of an occultist client.

  A little less than a month after Manabe urged her to push ahead,
though, it happened. Four prefectures facing the Pacific Ocean—Ibaraki, Chiba, Kanagawa and Shizuoka—suffered a catastrophic earthquake and vanished. They didn’t burn down, or sink, they literally vanished. Naturally the government, the earthquake experts, the mass media, even my wife and I, believed it was the work of some giant earthquake and the resulting tidal wave.

  Manabe called us very early the next morning. I distinctly remember being rudely awakened at four in the morning by the phone. I picked up the receiver, and the first thing I heard was “Put Sayoko Izumo on.” Manabe was extremely excited, sounded almost furious.

  “It’s started,” he told Sayoko. “Exactly where Teizo Akechi predicted in his Traditions of Esotericism, and exactly as catastrophic. They are returning, and the Gods and Buddhas cannot save us any longer. It is the End Times. We must flee to the Womb in Nagano at once!”

  “Sir? Excuse me, sir?” Sayoko broke in. “The Womb is still incomplete. Your plan calls for fifty years, but I doubt it would support people for even twenty the way it is now.”

  “It’s too late now. Even twenty would be excellent. You mustn’t waste a minute—my wife and I are fleeing to the Womb at once. You and your husband should join us.”

  “My husband and I?” she countered, unable to stop herself. “But why?”

  “The more people we have, the better, for saving the human species. The ideal would have been to build a huge Womb, a colony holding ten thousand people, but no longer. You are healthy and intelligent, and from what you have told me your husband is as well. You will bequeath excellent genes to the next generation of humanity. . . . Make ready at once, and come with your husband to pick us up. Within three hours. And keep the Womb secret . . . not a word to your families!”