Cthulhu Lives!: An Eldritch Tribute to H. P. Lovecraft (18 page)

“Hey!” Wesley said.

Icke shied away, started to slink around him.

Wesley stepped into his path. He was breathing heavy, like he’d run to get there. “Where d’you think you’re going?” he demanded.

“Home,” Icke muttered, turning to go down the steps. Wendy was already out of sight.

Wesley grabbed his shoulder and turned Icke around. The boy wasn’t big, didn’t play sports. In fact, Icke knew that some of the guys laughed about beating Wesley, the same way they laughed about beating him. But Wesley was still stronger than Francis.

“I heard you were bugging my sister. Is that right?”

“No,” Icke mumbled, looking away, stepping back, trying to reclaim his sleeve from Wesley’s grasp.

“Don’t
lie
to me, you freak!” Now Wesley had both his shoulders, and Icke realized this wasn’t going to be the same as the other times. The boy wasn’t going to hit him for fun, or to make himself feel better, or to look tough. Wesley was going to do it because he was revolted, because Icke disgusted him and he needed to face it.

“I’ll leave her alone,” Icke said, getting his hands up into a too-familiar cringe, “I won’t talk to her again.” He knew his assurances would do no good. Wesley had to do this. Icke could almost understand, even through his hatred. He hated the boy in that minute, and all the people who’d made Wesley hate him, all the people who’d made jokes and made fun until Wesley couldn’t stand the thought of Icky polluting his sister. For just a moment, his hate of them eclipsed his hate of himself.

Wesley hit him in the head.

Icke hadn’t expected that. It usually started with punches to the belly, or the kidneys, or somewhere that wouldn’t leave a mark. It was an unspoken rule. The head was for slapping or spitting. You only punched the head with a closed fist against a worthy opponent, or at the end, as a final statement if you were really wound up. Wesley didn’t seem to know the rules. He pulled Icke in by his shoulder, reeling him right into the blow. Icke stumbled back a pace, and had time to see Wesley’s knuckle bleeding from a tooth-cut before he took a step into open air and crashed ass-down on the concrete stairs. His head whipped back against a painted-steel stair rail.

♦

The night of his beating, Icke put a trash bag on his bed and then put the ice bag on top of it, tucking the black plastic around it. He knew cold water would form on it, and he didn’t want his sheets to be wet at bedtime. He lowered the bump on the back of his head onto the ice, and tried to relax. It hurt a lot.

He’d been unconscious for a while. He didn’t know how long. When he woke up and looked up the steps, he saw Woody Manderveigh at the top, staring down at him, motionless. When Icke glanced down, there was blood on his jacket and shirt, but not too much. He stumbled to his feet, and Woody didn’t help. By the time Icke was standing, the other boy had gone.

Icke had walked home and showered, glumly grateful that it was his mom’s night for bar drinking, and put himself to bed without comment. It was hard to get sleep, though. He kept thinking about what he’d seen while he’d been knocked out.

He’d gone out into the ocean again, sending his mind farther and deeper than ever before. He hadn’t been able to hold any clear thoughts or grasp a string of words, but at some level he’d been hoping that if he went far enough, he might not have to come back. Eventually he did return, but between waking and black-out he’d found something.

Miles out and fathoms deep, he’d occupied a creature unlike any other. He could tell it was primitive, simple in thought and act, even compared to a swordfish or a salmon. It wasn’t exactly a fish either, though he felt fins and gills. Icke’s wandering talent had touched squids and octopi, and this had something in common with those as well.

He felt tentacles, but more than eight. There was something of the polyp to it, something crustacean in the way it was joined together, but it had no shell, and it was immense. Of that he was certain. Icke had felt around whales, on one rare day when no other human knew they were passing, and this was bigger. It was bigger than the whole pod.

He couldn’t say how he knew it was old, older than men, any more than he could explain knowing its size and its slumber and the hunger that slept with it. But he knew that it was vast, and easily roused to frenzy. He knew it was too primitive to die.

♦

As Icke’s Friday catch filled his wet prison, he reached out farther, deeper, searching for that vast mind of stupid and alien dreams. It was still there. He had some vague sensation that the lump on his head was acting like an antenna.

He put himself through it and knew that it could come ashore. Its mere rising bulk would be enough to flood the cheap houses, like his, that were close to the beach where the fish got gutted.

He knew that whatever its limbs were – not tentacles or pseudopods or hands or claws exactly, but something long and numerous and powerful – they could reach the top of the hill, as far as Wellesport Central High School. Certainly they could reach Wendy and Wesley’s home, halfway up. It could rise and reach and crush and consume. It could.

Icke thought about whether Wendy would be grateful if he saved her from it, or if that would only raise more questions. He wondered if he could escape its hunger, if he called it. He wondered if that mattered to him.

He couldn’t control these things, exactly. It was more like he knew what they’d do before they acted, and they always acted according to the knowledge he possessed.

He stared out at the sea, and wondered what he should decide to know.

The cage was full. Francis Icke reached down into the water. Even though the water was icy, he paused, his hand halfway between the carrying handle and the latch that would set his captives free.

CODING TIME
by Marc Reichardt

I heard someone approach. “You’re gonna go blind, hunched over the screen like that.” I looked up, my focus shifting from the Dylath program to the sallow white of Jean’s angular face. Everyone looked like that eventually in the perpetual darkness of Onyx division. I couldn’t tell whether her bright red hair made it better or worse.

I sighed. “Did your mom tell you that? You don’t look old enough to have been watching CRTs.” Maybe she had parents that cared.

She smiled and brushed a stray lock of hair back from her face. “Eyestrain. You should be fourteen inches from the screen.”

“Actually, that’s why we maintain the lighting at this level.” I jumped. Roger’s silky voice made it sound like he was right by my ear, but the clicking of his hard-soled shoes indicated that he was still down the hall.

I glanced back. His dark suit kept him part of the shadows. I still couldn’t tell what his true complexion was. Was he Arabic? Otherwise Asian? He didn’t sound black, as much as people can ‘sound’ anything. He rested his arms on the cubicle wall, blocking out the dim hallway behind him. The glare of my screen revealed none of his secrets.

“Eyestrain is mostly caused by the presence of bright peripheral objects. Focusing on one light source in front of you isn’t supposed to be a problem.” He smirked – not that any amusement touched his almond-shaped eyes. “That’s what the government says.”

Jean forced an obvious giggle, then nodded and slipped past him, purse over her shoulder. She’d told me once,
during lunch, about how uncomfortable he made her. At a diner, maybe? I blinked hard, trying to remember. I’d been working way too long on this project.

Roger turned to me. My monitor brought a bit of clarity to half of his face. One eyebrow arched, his eye pinning me to my chair. “Heading home, too?”

I squinted back at my screen. I was suddenly tired, but I shook my head anyway. “No. I still have some work to do on Dylath. Kleiner said he wanted to start the compiler tomorrow, if he could.”

His face fell to shadow again, but I could still see his smile. It seemed to be almost glowing in the darkness. “All right, then. You know we appreciate everything you do here, Stephen.”

I half-smiled and nodded, caught in that awkward space where you feel compelled to thank someone for thanking you, setting up the infinite recursion loop. Roger was always so damn courteous, even if he did expect us to work like dogs. You couldn’t hate the guy. The best you could do was follow Jean’s lead, and try to avoid him.

He headed for the hallway, gliding more than walking. It wasn’t until he was some distance past our area that the clicking started up again. As I stared at my screen, gazing into the depths of Dylath, it occurred to me that the whole place was tiled. His steps should have been clicking the whole time...

8:47

... but the noise was actually the check wheel, hanging in the diner’s call window. The waitress had put another order in it, and the surly-looking cook had spun it around for a look. He hovered above the grill in stained whites, caught amid the hiss of grease and steam. I looked back to the oversized digital clock above the window. Still 8:47. I’d been watching it for a while. I couldn’t remember seeing a digital clock that big
before, or one with numbers that faint bluish-green tone.

I had coffee in front of me, black, half-full. The waitress swept into my vision, a mess of limp brown hair, her wide eyes staring disappointment and boredom at me. Her nametag said ‘Chelsea.’ She wore a dark button under it, with what looked like three cat’s pupils in a triangle pattern, but fat slits of orange rather than the normal black.

“Still OK with just the coffee?”

I nodded to the button, certain I’d seen it somewhere before. “Yes. Thank you.”

Her sigh was very audible as she moved down the counter. She probably thought I was some kind of shut-in. In a way, I was. My world had pretty much become work and sleep and more work. I rarely left the base to do anything, so I was kind of surprised to find myself here. The life of a US Cyber Command programmer. I twisted around in my seat. Was this where Jean and I had come for lunch?

The walls were tiled in stark white, punctuated by the occasional black square. Apparently, they ran a no-frills operation, as there were no placemats or condiments at the tables. There was no one else in the place, except for a very large, black-haired woman in one of the green booths. She stopped playing on her phone, and looked up at me with baleful eyes that had seen too many phishing texts or Angry Birds or whatever.
Hey, lady, I’m one of the people that keeps Iranian serpents from lunging through your screen and ripping your face off. Or something.
She continued to stare until I looked away. There was something wrong with her eyes, like they were missing definition somehow. I couldn’t make it out, and didn’t want to keep looking – not because I was concerned about being rude, but because she was kind of creepy.

The windows that made up most of the outer wall of the place were fogged by the steam and the rain. There were people moving outside, but they were smudges more than shadows. When I turned to look for the waitress, thinking I might actually eat something, she was nowhere to be found. I tried to catch the cook’s eye, but he was entranced by his grill. I turned around again.

The woman was still staring. I could just make out the reflection of the clock in her eyes.

12:21

I was looking into the depths of Dylath, lines of code showing me the strange path to the land beyond the servers. I rubbed my eyes. The time was there, in the corner of my screen. I was pretty sure it meant p.m., as in ‘afternoon’, but the operating system we used didn’t bother with such niceties and, despite this being a military base, it wasn’t using military time either. I was tired, but not as much as if I’d come back here straight from the diner. I’d gone home to sleep, like a normal drone. Must have. I dimly recalled the large, staring woman, a distant memory that I grasped for. Had I dreamed her?

I looked up. Hunched shoulders and indeterminate brows made up the rest of Onyx division. Their faces were hidden behind screens, faded smears of light in the shadow. I didn’t see Jean anywhere. I’d kind of been hoping to spot her red hair as a confirmation that it wasn’t all light and shadow and invisible faces.

I stopped for a moment as it hit me that I didn’t really know my co-workers that well. There was Jean, of course, and Kleiner. His first name was some traditional German contraption (Reinhard?) but everyone just called him ‘Kleiner’, or ‘the compiler guy’, since that’s what he was responsible for. He wasn’t the only one – I had access to it as well – but he just happened to live and breathe putting everyone’s parts together. I was more about finding new parts to make the system work. Exploring, if you wanted to be romantic about it, even though there’s very little romantic about security programming.

I looked down the hallway. The operating lights set in the ceiling and floor almost seemed friendlier where I was, as if I could escape something here. But there was nothing to threaten me. Just my veteran chair, my fellow (faceless?) programmers, and the susurrus of keyboards, building Dylath in the interest of all Americans and even humanity itself.

That was what I remembered Roger saying, anyway. I wasn’t sure if I believed it. We were trying to protect the people in Onyx, but there were other programs in Cyber Command that were more aggressive. I wondered if anyone else on the team puzzled over our orders, and whether they just came from Roger. How did we define ‘security,’ anyway? Was it beating the enemy to the punch because we knew what was coming, or building protection from the unknown? Both?

I had multiple windows open to various segments of the program as they were being written. Somehow, they had arranged themselves in a pattern like bricks in a wall – or in a pyramid. The imaginary picture came through so starkly that I knew I’d seen it somewhere before, like the cat’s eye button. A magenta sky, behind stepped pyramids with gargoyles mounted on their levels. The pyramids seemed Aztec or something else Mesoamerican, but the gargoyles screamed Western Europe. Or they would have, if they could have screamed. They were faceless, however, lacking features entirely. They were black and bat-winged, and they were moving. The sky pulsed with a presence that hung just beyond it.

I closed my eyes tightly, getting after-images of white code against the ebony screen, and willed away the dream image of... wherever that was. I was
definitely
working too much. I turned to look down the hallway again, and Roger was standing there, watching me and smiling. His grin stretched wider as he saw me notice him. I nodded to him and turned back to my monitor, not wanting to think about how long he might have been there, or why. The huge stone blocks were still on the screen, suffused with the crawling script of technology.

7:56

“Uhhhhh! Oh, Godddd!”

Jean moaned in my ear as I gripped her hair and thrust into her. I’d invited her back to my Spartan little domicile, where we’d made the best human connection that either of us had experienced in quite some time. I was pretty sure that’s how it had gone, anyway. I felt her writhing beneath me as we received the input/output that all programmers want and sometimes even experience – slimy and hot and wet and desperate. The alarm clock flashed its stoic, blue-green numbers, unimpressed by our activity.

I saw a flicker of movement past the window, and imagined someone watching us. My mind really should have been focused on other things, but the hair on my neck was standing up at the thought that someone might have been observing our little tryst. It was both unnerving and mildly exciting.

“Uh! Uh! Stephen!”

I closed my eyes, and saw the face of the large woman in the diner, her expression accusing and questioning at the same time. Her eyes were tinged with yellow, the pupils and irises just solid black spots. An image formed in them of the pyramids and towers of Dylath – blocks of immaculate granite, covered in the code that was the true language of the world. We were building it for him, and his father. I felt utterly removed. I had no idea who he or his father really were, or why it should matter.

I opened my eyes as Jean howled and clung to me. It sounded like she was speaking in tongues, but the words seemed to have meaning, rather than being gibberish. She was telling me something – or at least it felt that way. My body shuddered. Excitement, fear, or simply finishing? It was hard to tell, but I was spent, regardless. I rolled off of her, both of us heaving in release.

She sighed. “Mmmm. Been waiting for that.”

“Have you?”

“I don’t get out much more than you do, and let’s just say that there aren’t that many guys on base that I’d like to show my code to.” She was a programmer, taking my concepts and implementing them as Onyx demanded. “Besides, you always send me the interesting stuff.”

I got up on one elbow and looked down at her. She was flushed, but somehow still pale, her hair arrayed in a frenzy of still motion. “How do you figure that one? I didn’t think I was actually being that original with my designs.”

Her eyes narrowed a little, and the corners of her mouth turned up. “Really? I thought they were transformative. Real ‘reaching into other dimensions’ kinda stuff. Which is the point, right?”

I frowned, remembering the vision of the pyramids. I was about to ask if she’d ever seen anything like that when something else occurred to me. “Do you know any other languages?”

She raised her eyebrows. “You mean, like other than Haskell and the Cs...?”

“No. Real human languages.” I half-grinned. “When you were going off there, you were talking in a language that I didn’t recognize. Hebrew, maybe?” Stereotypes were sometimes instinctive, and not always wrong. I already knew that she was a natural redhead.

Her eyes narrowed again, and she cocked her head forward a little to look at me intently. “No. I don’t speak Hebrew. Just English. I’m not sure what I might have been saying. I, uh, lose my head a little sometimes, when things are really good.” She returned my grin. Then something clearly dawned on her. “Although... since I’ve been thinking about it so much lately, it might have been
your
language. Your code.”

7:57

I sat at the counter with my coffee. The diner had become my retreat, in a way. It was the one place where I felt that that no one could bother me. Why that didn’t include my own apartment was hard to fathom. Ever since the moment when I’d felt that Jean and I were being watched, the sense of vulnerability had persisted. It just no longer felt safe. ‘They’ could find me there, whoever ‘they’ happened to be.

Of course, I’d also spent a fair amount of time trying to process Jean’s odd comment about ‘my language.’ She seemed to think it was obvious, and said that it probably wasn’t safe to discuss outside of the base. Since then, she’d apparently been avoiding me at work, in meetings or what-have-you.

I swirled the black sludge in my cup, hoping that my reflection might give me some answers. What language had I invented to convey my programming visions to the rest of Onyx, precisely? I couldn’t remember taking any great leap forward. There were certainly moments where it seemed like the frameworks were basically writing themselves, but that hadn’t required any great flashes of insight. I could have been channeling someone else, for all I knew.

I swallowed. The thought stuck with me. A pair of very dark eyes stared back at me from the cup. A glimpse of motion pulled my attention to the windows, where a small crowd shifted in the darkness. I didn’t remember there being a bus station near this place... and then I saw her.

The large, dark-haired woman was in her booth again. She was staring intently at her phone, stubby fingers fluttering over it. I could see her murmuring occasionally, although her face gave no sign as to whether she was reacting to something on the phone – no one seemed to use them to actually talk to other people any more – or simply commentating to herself. In this place, the chances were even.

She looked up at me, and held my gaze again. There was a familiarity in her expression, and it wasn’t just that we’d had this test of wills before. She continued to murmur, even as we stared at each other. It was almost like a chant, and I could nearly make out the words...