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

  Then he cut the phone, leaving us no chance to refuse.

  “He’s out of his gourd,” said my wife, putting the phone down with a frown. “I’ve been playing along with him until now, because he’s an important client and a sponsor for my research . . . but this! This is just insane! I’m not going to work for someone who’s plain nuts!”

  “Of course you can’t! Even painters wouldn’t work for anyone that far ’round the bend! And especially . . .”

  The world shook around me, and nausea and dizziness cut off my words. I thought for a second I must be having a stroke, but then the books began falling off the shelves and the paintings on the walls began banging. It’s an earthquake! And even as I framed the thought, the shaking intensified. It was like no earthquake I’d ever felt before, more like standing on top of a record player and spinning around and around and around . . . and counterclockwise, at that! The feeling of rotation jumped yet again, and suddenly I felt as if I were standing on the deck of a wave-tossed ship at the mercy of the storm.

  And my brain was shattered by a piercing impact. Pain seared through my head, as if a thick nail had been driven into my brain through my retina, bringing a host of visions. The waves of the nighttime sea, rolling back as the seabed surged to the surface. Soft mud, seaweed, flopping deep-sea fish unable to escape in time. Like flash shots in a movie, the pictures appeared and vanished again, a bursting flood of imagery. Giant structures rising out of the ocean depths, covered in millennia-old mud. They looked as if they were of ancient stones, but the structures themselves writhed and quivered constantly like something alive. And from the shadows of the columns something crawled out, something shining . . . something that could only be called the natural enemy of humanity itself.

  Sayoko shrieked before I had a chance to. When I saw her white face and hollow eyes, I knew she had seen what I had, in that brain-shattering instant.

  No, not only Sayoko.

  In that instant all of humanity saw the same visions, the same horror—the instant when the Damned Gods returned.

  2

  Sayoko always wore glasses, suffering from both near-and far-sightedness. Even so, her face was attractive, the type you’d describe as an intellectual beauty.

  Maybe Manabe brought Sayoko and me with him to the Womb was because he had some plans for her.

  Whatever disgusting plans he might have had, though, they were shattered before she ever entered the Womb.

  What am I saying? Every time I think of it I lose it again . . . cool, gotta stay cool . . . calm, rational . . .

  Reeling from illusionary visions, attacking my senses like some cerebral stroke, I turned on the cable TV and clicked to the all- news channel. The newscaster who popped up on the screen looked almost like he was smiling.

  “The Tokyo city government office building is collapsing.”

  Simultaneously the screen switched to a video feed, showing City Hall shining metallic blue under dozens of searchlights in the early morning dimness. Covered in metal frames and huge sheets of glass, City Hall’s surface was covered in angular shapes, a huge crystal reflecting the searchlights. When it was built people had laughed, saying the mayor had built a modern pyramid to cover his own underground mausoleum, or Godzilla had come out of the ocean and turned into a robot. That had been back in the ’90s . . . a gigantic building fusing postmodernism with New Gothic architecture in the height of the economic boom years.

  And now from protruding angles covering its surface, hundreds and hundreds of yellowish ropey things stretched out, quivering up into the pre-dawn sky. Semitransparent tentacles like some huge jellyfish writhed and slimed from angular alcoves and setbacks inside the building. A newspaper copter drifted in a bit closer, trying to capture the metamorphosis of City Hall more clearly, and suddenly a piss-yellow rope snapped up, whipping around the copter and yanking it from the sky. The blades snapped off, still whirling as they flew toward City Hall, smashing into the side of the building in a glittering waterfall of glass shards. The waterfall poured down on the heads of the emergency personnel clustered below—police, JSDF, fire and ambulance—slicing through heads and hands and legs with bloody abandon. The tentacle obliterated their screams in an explosion of greasy flame as it smashed the crumpled helicopter down on top of them, smoke and fire shooting up the walls.

  “. . . a monster movie . . .”

  I turned the TV off.

  “It’s just special effects, computer graphics. Things like that just don’t happen!”

  Behind me, I heard Sayoko hang up the phone.

  “That was President Manabe. He said to come to his house at once. He said he was watching City Hall on the TV. He said they attack from other dimensions, through the angles . . .”

  “They?”

  Her face began to crumble, tears and fright shining through.

  “He said something . . . something about Tindalos . . . and, I think, Atzous . . . Who cares? It’s THEM! Those things! Those tentacles, reaching in through the angles and killing and killing and killing! He said we have to escape to the Womb, with him and his wife, before the invasion really begins. He said right now!”

  The shock of a distant explosion rocked the building, and I instinctively looked toward the sound. South. I could see brilliant orange light there, through the curtains. I ripped them open, and heard Sayoko gasp at my side. Huge pillars of flame rose from the bustling city center of Ikebukuro.

  3

  As I drove toward Manabe’s mansion, my wife switched the Garmin over to TV and sat eyes glued to the screen. As a scientist, I guess she couldn’t wrap her mind around what was happening. She was whispering to herself, and when I glanced at her, her profile was beaded with sweat, feverish. I noticed she had starting smoking. She said she’d quit, but I guess she still had some hidden away somewhere. I didn’t say a word. If I smoked I’d damn well have wanted one myself right then.

  It was stop-and-go all the way to Manabe’s mansion west of Tokyo. I wondered what was happening. No more details showed up on the TV, the radio, even the Internet sites, after that first flash. I did see a column of JSDF tanks racing along the expressway, and here and there police were out setting up roadblocks and inspection chokepoints. I didn’t stop to look, just kept on driving, silent.

  When we got to Manabe’s home we switched to his shiny van. He said it could carry a lot more stuff that little Prius we drove. I guess his housekeepers and employees had all fled, because he was loading the van himself.

  The boxes he was loading so lovingly, though, weren’t crammed full of cash or securities or food or clothing or medical supplies, but moldy old books . . . a pile of occult rubbish, magic, sacred texts from bizarre cults, collections of forgotten myths and the like.

  That was when I met Manabe and his wife for the first time. He was in his mid-fifties, a striking, tall man with graying hair and a pale face. Had I met him under normal circumstances, his piercing gaze probably would have made me think of a successful entrepreneur, a fine judge of people. These weren’t normal times, and what I knew of him showed me nothing more than an eccentric millionaire.

  “We can exchange greetings later,” he snapped. “We have to get out of Tokyo at once!”

  And, taking his wife Kanako by the hand, he slid into the back seat.

  As I slipped into the driver’s seat, I asked “Wouldn’t it make more sense to use a company helicopter than have me drive all that way?”

  I wasn’t trying to be smart, I was serious. I thought Manabe could flee Tokyo faster that way.

  “Even if we did go by chopper we wouldn’t be able to land near the Womb, up in the mountains like that. We’d have to land at a local airport and drive . . . and there’s just not enough time before They come in force. The government has begun quietly flying officials out of the country in Self Defense Force choppers and military transports, too, and if we happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time they’d shoot us out of the sky.”

  A laugh bubbled up from
the seat next to Manabe. Hysterical, forced laughter . . . I glanced back, and Kanako Manabe giggled, “Funny, isn’t it?”

  “What is?”

  “It’s all just so unreal! Like a shot from a movie, or a play. I mean, it’s like we’re on Candid Camera, right? Or I’m having a really bad dream . . . That must be it. This can’t be real! It’s just too impossible!”

  “Sorry, it’s real. Unfortunately.”

  Manabe’s voice was as flat as his expression. Then he told me to drive on.

  4

  And I kept driving, no sleep and no rest.

  We couldn’t stay focused on news broadcasts on the TV, radio, and the Internet sites on our cellphones throughout the whole long drive to Nagano. We began to talk, slowly. Manabe and my wife didn’t want to say much at first, but Manabe’s wife turned out to be a real chatterbox and I finally learned a little bit about her. And him.

  She said she’d be thirty-three soon. A little short, maybe about five feet, but she was the embodiment of female beauty: jutting breasts, slender waist, firm ass. My dad would have smacked his lips and called her a hot dame. She was beautiful, and the coquettish smile never left her round face. She always seemed to be smiling in invitation, I thought. And it turned out I was right, I guess, because until last year she had been a hostess at a Ginza club, until regular patron Manabe snapped her up.

  Manabe described her quite a bit differently, though, in his disinterested tone: “I needed a healthy woman, with a healthy womb.” It sounded to me like he was just being bluntly honest, no more, no less. He hadn’t said a single kind or loving word to her since we left.

  And when Kanako glanced at him, from time to time, I thought I could see cold disdain shining through.

  Manabe had taken over the company founded by his grandfather about twenty years before, when his own father has suddenly died. He had been studying ethnology at the university then, he said. He had spent vast sums from his inheritance on occult books, and seemed likely to spend the rest of his life locked away in research by himself. Maybe because he hadn’t come down out of his ivory tower into the real world until his thirties, or maybe just because of his rich boy background, his insufferable attitude made it impossible to get along with him for more than an hour or so. His total lack of human warmth, his coldness, really got under my skin. He suddenly ordered the rest of us to “Stay away from angles!”

  After a half a day in the car together, I was through with him. I spoke only with my wife, and Kanako.

  Our flight continued, and as we crossed into Nagano prefecture I noticed that there weren’t any other cars on the roads. Driving up the winding mountain roads, there were no people at all. In fact, there were no deer, or bears, or squirrels, or even a single bird. But as dusk that day approached, we began to catch glimpses of grotesque creatures in the woods around us.

  We saw a group of four- legged beasts, with hides the color of human skin, huge bodies lumpy with roiling fat, distended bellies swaying. And though many of them had brown hair on their heads, their faces were bare.

  “They aren’t people . . .” whispered Kanako, voice trembling. “But their eyes and noses and mouths were . . .”

  I ignored her and kept driving. My wife sat in the passenger seat, cigarette lit. Uneasy silence filled the cabin, pressing down on us all.

  Manabe shattered the silence with his monotone. “The locals are regressing, just as Atzous wrote.”

  I stepped on the gas a bit harder.

  As the sun set, the darkness along the narrow road grew even blacker. There were no more houses visible, no fields, just the depths of the mountains. Sometimes we saw a pale shadow passing in the dark, a four- footed nightmare with the face of a human being . . .

  When we finally reached the Womb, the world was wrapped in iron blue, the darkness just before dawn.

  The Womb looked like a giant tennis ball half buried in the earth, I thought, seeing it for the first time. It didn’t seem to have any windows or doors.

  “The surface of the sphere irises open and shut, like a camera shutter,” explained my wife. “I’ll tell you where the door is. Go ahead and get out.”

  “Um,” I mumbled, opening the door to an uncanny, bestial roar from the forest. It sounded like a wild beast, but at the same like a cry of anguish a child might make.

  “I hope there aren’t any juvenile delinquents up here!” half-giggled Kanako as she got out, clasping her shoulders and shrinking.

  Manabe’s lips twisted. I think it was the first time I saw him smile, if smile it was. Perhaps he meant it as a wry grin, but all I saw was a sneer, disdain for his wife.

  “If they were here we’d be eaten by now,” he said, smiling more broadly than before.

  “Stop it!” she cried, terrified.

  Sayoko had been walking toward the Womb, and now stopped to take a remote controller from her handbag, pointing it at the dome. No doubt built to Manabe’s specifications, it was a rounded, triangular shape covered with round buttons. She pressed one, and a black hole appeared in the face of the Womb, irising open rapidly to create a circular doorway big enough to walk through.

  “We can get the baggage later. First we have to get Kanako to safety,” said Manabe, prodding her toward the circular doorway.

  “Not alone!” she wailed, shaking her head violently.

  “Izumo, go with her and carry her bags, then,” he ordered.

  “There’s a switch on the right just inside for the lights,” added my wife, and I nodded thanks as I picked up one of the huge clothing cases Kanako had brought and began walking toward the Womb. Kanako, relief clear on her face, came with me, and as my wife had said, there was a light switch just inside. The lights snapped on, blinding, white . . . and illuminating the side of the Womb, tiny glyphs and symbols cut into every inch of the walls.

  “What is all this weird stuff?” shrieked Kanako, eyes flying.

  “I had them specially carved into the walls to make sure They can’t come in from another dimension,” said Manabe. “Walls, ceilings, even the floor are covered with runes, Naacal and Pnath script. And the sigils and seals they fear have been carven here and there as needed, too. Our magical defenses are perfect!”

  “Isn’t that right, Izumo . . .” he began, turning back to Sayoko, and suddenly stopped, speechless, transfixed by the thing that had snuck up behind her.

  I saw it, too. So did Kanako. Only Sayoko didn’t see it.

  She saw the horror in our eyes, and even as her own face began to twist, the white thing leapt on her, hammering her to the ground, atop her. Her handbag and the remote fell from her outstretched hand, and as she reached for them instinctively the white thing leaned over, teeth still showing their human origins chewing into the back of her neck, stripping off skin and flesh. Her screams snapped me out of it, and I dropped the bag to run to her rescue.

  . . . Except that Kanako grabbed hold of my arm, hard, shouting at me: “Stop! No! It’ll eat you too!” “Let me go! It’ll kill her!”

  But she didn’t. She wrapped her arms around me, holding me, leaving me no way out but to strike her down. I drew back my fist to punch her away when suddenly Manabe moved.

  I thought he was running to save her. But he . . . Manabe was a man without a single shred of humanity in him. My wife was still alive, even with that white monster sitting on her back, shredding her neck. Her hand was still reaching toward the remote, twitching. And Manabe, instead of turning to her, snatched up the remote controller, leaping back to the safety of the Womb. He punched a button on the remote as soon as he was inside, and the shutter began to iris shut; like watching my wife through a camera.

  “Sayoko!”

  And the shutter irised tighter in front of my eyes. My wife, being eaten alive by that damned white thing squatting astride her: the image pierced my eyes, my heart, my sanity. I could see other white shapes rising from the darkness, my wife lifting her bloody face, looking up at me. Trying to say something, and vanishing under a vast rush of grunt
ing, squealing, hungry flesh.

  And the shutter closed, searing my wife’s end into my soul.

  5

  The three of us—me, Manabe, and his wife—descended into the Womb. My wife’s design was perfect, with not a single angle anywhere. Chairs and tables stood perpendicular to the floor, but surfaces flowed seamlessly together, as if they had grown from it. Floors and table legs of such were of course rounded, no corners anywhere. Lights and furniture were circular, but so were cutting boards and knives and forks and even the screens of the TV and the computer . . . Everything was circular or curved, everything. It was monomaniacal.

  “They come in through the angles,” repeated Manabe again and again. “They can invade anything through the angles, but not here! They can’t get inside the Womb!”

  Kanako and I already knew it far too well . . . the radio, the TV, the Internet all told us how bomb shelters, even secret military bases, has been effortlessly invaded, their human occupants torn to bloody shreds. Usually it was tentacles, like a squid or a jellyfish, seeping in through an angle, but sometimes there were reports of the white beasts, or speaking mold, or huge mobile plants with human eyes.

  “It’s all over,” laughed Kanako, laughter breaking into jagged shards.

  We lived on in the shelter, no angles and no knowledge of when it all might end. We continued to receive reports from the outside world for three days, then suddenly the TV stations went off the air. The Internet continued until the fourth day, but that night the remaining few blogs and boards began displaying meaningless strings of consonants, or rows upon rows of unreadable characters, until dying completely on the fifth day.

  On the sixth day Kanako began acting strangely. During meals or while drinking coffee she would wait until Manabe was looking elsewhere, and flash desperate glances in my direction. Her expressions were not wholly sane, but were packed with pheromones by the abnormality of our situation. I ignored her, shutting myself in my room, and painted. Driven by hopelessness, I felt that only by painting could I retain even a shred of my sanity.