Cthulhurotica (18 page)

“The sky looks so different from here.” he murmured. “That constellation, the Pleiades, was not always there.” He pointed.

Following his finger, she looked at the Seven Sisters. “I wonder what the sky looked like that long ago.”

Jake swung his arm in a wide arc. “Do you see that?” He pointed at Aries, the ram. “The sun passes across a different constellation each month. Millions of years ago they were different. Some of the stars have become novae. You cannot tell just from looking but you can use the calculated precession of the equinoxes to–”

Kara suddenly turned and kissed him. His arms hung limp at his sides for a moment and then slowly came to rest around her waist. She pulled back from the kiss and grinned breathlessly.

“I have not–” he started to say, and paused. “It’s not a skill I’ve mastered.”

“You’re too busy doing science, right? That’s okay with me. Your mind turns me on.”

In his uncertainty, Jake accepted another kiss. His touch, awkward as it was, thrilled her. She pulled him down with her, flipping over a bowl of strawberries, scattering the little fruits.

“Tell me again about flux" she panted, her hips arching invitingly.

Lips brushing her ear, he whispered metaphors of butterfly nets, invoked Gauss and Riemann, and spoke of differential geometry. He tried to instruct her on curved surfaces, on how a triangle in space wasn’t necessarily flat. He called it "Non-Euclidean" and she rose until the heavens rushed at her.

Back at her apartment he made diagrams, annotating them with symbols she barely understood. She didn’t care as long as he kept feeding her obscure information. He obliged her with talk of quantum gravity devices and high temperature super-conductivity. Hungry for more, all she could think of was devouring his body of knowledge.

“I have to go,” he told her matter-of-factly, one night, five weeks after he had arrived.

“But I thought you didn’t have to go for another month.”

“I have to complete my research.”

Her lush lips curved into a tentative smile and she said, in what she thought was her most seductive voice, “Maybe I can help? I have the time!”

“No.” His reply was curt and she was stung. He spoke again, softly. “You have helped. Very much. But I cannot take you with me.”

Kara was silent for a long time, chewing on her bottom lip and studying her fingers.

“Will you be back?”

“I do not think so.”

“Well… I guess there’s always online. Right?” Her voice became fearful.

“The Internet,” he said, “is an amazing tool. Perhaps the greatest thing humankind has yet achieved. It cannot, however, connect us this time.” He never took his eyes off her.

“I see. Did I do something wrong? If I did I’m sorry and–”

“No, Kara, you did nothing wrong. You have aided me in ways I cannot explain and you have been a good student as well. It is simply time for me to move on.”

“When are you leaving?”

“I am leaving now.”

After she locked the door behind him, she pressed herself against it for support and her tears streaked its unyielding surface all the way to the floor.

Time passed, and no amount of physics could stop it from happening.

It was almost two years later when she got a call from an unfamiliar number.

“Hello? Is this Kara?”

“Yes.” She recognized the voice, but it was different somehow. Stunned, she just listened.

“Uh hi. Listen, I’m not sure where I know you from but umm, well apparently we know each other really well, like, we talked about physics all the time.” There was no trace of his former accent.

“Physics? You want to talk about physics now? Are you fucking kidding me? You up and vanish one day and now…” She was near tears. “I don’t know what your deal is but I’m in school now for physics so I don’t need your lessons anymore.”

He attempted to speak but she cut him off, viciously laying two years of frustration on him in one breath.

“If it wasn’t for you I wouldn’t give a damn about physics. Even though everything you taught me is theoretically impossible and gets me nothing but crazy looks and – and what the fuck happened to your accent anyway? What, did you join witness protection or something?”

“Look, K-Kara. Just hear me out, okay? I don’t know who you are but you say I taught you ’impossible’ physics. I…this sounds crazy but I lost my memory. Or something. Look, can we meet? I’m assuming we’ve met already but I don’t remember it.”

Kara burst into tears and screamed into the phone "Look, we are over, okay? I don’t care about your lost memories. I fucking quit my stupid job to hang out with you and talk about physics.” She spat the words out. “Leave me alone. Go find some other girl to play games with.”

She hung up, threw the phone down, and stormed into the kitchen to pour a drink. On second thought, she took the bottle into her bedroom. Three calls later she turned off the phone.

She awoke groggily to the blare of a horn, stumbled across the room to her desk and plopped down onto the chair, too awake to go back to sleep.

“Eight damn emails?” Aggravated, she was preparing to delete them when she noticed the subject line “I have compromising photos of you.” She paused, then cursed.

Days later she found herself sitting outside of a coffee shop, smoking a cigarette and waiting for Jake. He walked up. His dark hair was wild and overgrown. He was a gaunt, empty-eyed shadow of his former self. He wasn’t the same man at all but she didn’t care. She leapt up.

“You asshole, you better have deleted those pictures!” Her mouth wore a rabid snarl.

“I deleted them alright? I wouldn’t really have sent them to anyone. I just didn’t know how else to get you to listen to me.”

“Bullshit. I don’t believe anything you say.”

“I really did.” For the next several minutes he begged her to believe him.

“Not another word. I trusted you and you screwed me, big time. This time I’ll do the leaving.” She grabbed her purse and rose.

He clasped her wrist and growled at her, “Sit down, damn it. Look at me! I’m a fucking wreck! Just listen!”

Kara sat silently and turned her face away but thought better of it and blew a lungful of smoke right at Jake.

He fidgeted uncomfortably. “Can I have one of those?”

She tossed the box at him. “Sure, just make sure you use them all up before you toss aside that box too, you bastard.”

“That’s not fair. At least hear me out.”

“Fine. Whatever you want. And you look like shit.”

He hacked out a mirthless laugh. “I feel like shit.”

Kara pierced him with a gaze, sighed, and finally gave in. “Let’s go somewhere private.”

They found a motel room nearby.

“So far this is what I’ve pieced together. We met online. You asked me some physics questions and we ended up talking about it all the time. Then we met and hung out for five weeks until I left abruptly. Right?”

“Yes.” She wasn’t angry anymore. Jake was, she now believed, genuinely confused and frightened.

He rubbed the stubble on his cheek. “I keep having these nightmares, like I’ve been somewhere else. I’ve seen crazy, horrible things. I know something now that I can’t reach or comprehend and it’s driving me crazy. I have memories of building some device and I don’t know where it is now. I don’t even know what I was studying–”

“Was it High Temperature Super-conductivity?”

His eyes lit up. “Yes! But I know that’s impossible. The math just doesn’t work.”

Kara smiled ruefully. “Yeah, that’s what I keep hearing.”

“And you got into physics because of me?”

“Well, yes. I got so hooked on the learning – the knowledge itself. Once you were gone, I…” she trailed off.

“You what?” His voice was gentle, like it was before, when they were past making love, past theories, and almost into sleep.

“I had to get it from somewhere. I couldn’t- can’t stop. But nothing is like what I was getting from you. It was so… intoxicating.”

“Yeah well it seems that whatever I knew is no longer with me.” He smiled sadly.

Kara took in the tired look on his face. “Oh Jake, I can’t imagine how horrible this has been for you.”

Jake’s lips began to tremble and Kara wrapped her arms around him. Tears welled in his eyes. She held him for a while and he cried. In a whisper he told her everything he’d lost. His graduate career was over. He’d walked away from his family with no more reason than he had research to do, and they weren’t anxious to have him back. He had no one left, he said as he buried his face against her shoulder. Tenderly, she stroked the back of his neck and kissed the top of his head. She said nothing, chest constricting with restrained tears.

“Please stay with me tonight. I don’t know you but you’re the only person who knows me. I feel like I’m a stranger everywhere I go.” His voice was full of the terror he felt, haunted by nightmares and scraps of memories and desperate for some refuge.

Her heart ached. She’d loved him. Kara bowed her head. “I won’t leave you.” As soon as she spoke her voice gave way and she, too, was crying. In the fading afternoon light they shared their sorrows until, drained of tears and words, they slept.

Kara awoke to the warmth of Jake’s arms around her and his face pressed into her hair. Gently, she attempted to extricate herself without waking him.

“Don’t leave,” he whispered, and held her tightly until he felt her relax against him. There, in the dark, their bodies had found familiar configurations and the entangled strangers lay in silence.

Kara was crying softly.

“Are you alright?” Jake asked.

“We used to sleep together like this.” She turned to face him. “It just reminds me so much of you… before.”

Jake stroked her hair, pulled her close. His lips found her neck and a familiar response shivered its way through her. He withdrew and brought his face close and she did not resist when he touched his mouth to hers. A whimper escaped Kara and then her arms were around him. They sought solace in one another, trying to find the thread that had once bound them.

No shy exploration, no tentative touches – he pressed her back onto the bed, made quick work of her jeans and panties, unhooked her bra. He grasped and caressed, skillfully drawing moans from her mouth and making her body respond to him. A sharp gasp from her and they were joined, his fingers tangled in her curls and his eyes wide, looking directly into hers. Her nails pressed into his back and he arched, giving her the only thing he felt he had left to give. She stole his breath and he bruised her lips with needful kisses. For a little while she felt as if she were with him again, the way he was before, ascending to the starry heights.

He was gone when she awoke the next morning and she cursed him again, even though this time she understood.

She’d tried to help him. She shared her notes, showed him the drawings he’d made for her during their long discussion. His memory of those things had gone. In the one night she had spent with him he had regaled her not with physics and math but with chilling stories of interrogators, clicking away in some bizarre alien language. He spoke of encounters with monstrous, misshapen beings. He recalled studying in the Great Library but could not remember anything he had seen or learned from its manuscripts.

The day she’d spent with him after his change, he’d been so different. In his first incarnation he’d been cold. She now realized he hadn’t shared her ardor, had been only a willing supplier of knowledge and recipient of her fervent embraces. In his second incarnation he had been a lost soul, empty and tortured. She’d not known him anymore and he hadn’t known himself.

In the months that followed, Jake had ended up on the street and was in and out of mental facilities. He didn’t want to see her, refused to live with her or let her help him in any way. Jake’s eventual death didn’t take Kara entirely by surprise. Finally, unable to regain equilibrium in the world and unwilling to contact her again, he’d gotten up from a park bench one day, stood at the edge of the sidewalk, and then walked in front of a freight truck.

Jake was gone, in every incarnation.

Kara, no longer distracted, pursued a Ph.D. in Theoretical Particle Physics. One night at the library, while poring over mathematics tomes and the old Jake’s notes, she was tapped on the shoulder.

“Where did you get that?” A young man she didn’t know picked up the top sheet and studied the curvilinear marks and their notations.

“I – from a friend. It’s his research.”

The interloper nodded. “This is exotic stuff. Looks a lot like some drawings my Great-uncle Wingate has in his office. He’s a professor up at Misk-U.”

“Misk-U?”

“Miskatonic University. Ever heard of it? It’s a big old school in Arkham.”

Kara just stared.

“And Arkham is in Massachusetts. I’ve heard crazy stories about that place. Anyway, I can give you his number, and you should give him a call. He’s pretty eccentric but he’s harmless. Likes to tell horror stories though. When I was a kid I found a whole book scribbled over with this stuff and he told me a story that they were from some brain-stealing aliens. They were called the uh, Great Race or something. I had nightmares for weeks and my mom never let him tell me stories after that. He could probably help you make sense of this stuff. Just tell him you know me.”

He scribbled a telephone number onto a scrap of paper for her.

“I should probably know your name, then,” she said.

“Oh, right!” He thrust his hand out. “Winston Peaslee. Pleased to meet you.”

“Thanks. I’ll hold on to this.” She took the phone number but didn’t take his hand.

Winston smiled reassuringly at her but she’d lost interest and had already turned back to her papers.

After a long, awkward pause, Kara was relieved when he left her to her work, and walked quietly away. Jake was right about one thing, she thought.

No one on this planet was going to understand.

Leon J. West
AMID DISQUIETING DREAMS

 Your Fisheater is coming again tonight, the same as last night and every night since he first whispered to you from the darkness: “follow me, friend.”