Neil Gaiman & Caitlin R. Kiernan & Laird Barron (25 page)

When she laid the book down in the small hours, she sat amid a near-total desertion that she scarcely noticed. Something tugged powerfully at memory, something that memory dreaded to admit. She realized that in reading the tale, she had taken on an obscure, terrible weight. She felt as if impregnated by an injection of tainted knowledge whose grim fruit, an almost physical mass of cryptic threat, lay a-ripening in her now.

She took a third-floor room in the Parnassus for the night, for the simplest effort, like calling a cab, lay under a pall of futility and sourceless menace. She lay back, and her exhausted mind plunged instantly through the rotten flooring of consciousness, straight down into the abyss of dreams.

She dreamed of a city like Hollywood, but the city’s walls and pavements were half alive, and they could feel premonitions of something that was drawing near them. All the walls and streets of the city waited in a cold-sweat fear under a blackly overcast sky. She herself, Patti grasped, was the heart and mind of the city. She lay in its midst, and its vast, cold fear was hers. She lay, and somehow she knew the things that were drawing near her giant body. She knew their provenance in huge, blind voids where stood walls older than the present face of Earth; she knew their long cunning toil to reach her own cringing frontiers. Giant worms they were, or jellyfish, or merely huge clots of boiling substance. They entered her deserted streets, gliding convergingly. She lay like carrion that lives and knows the maggots’ assault on it. She lay in her central citadel, herself the morsel they sped toward, piping their lust from foul, corrosive jaws.

She woke late Sunday afternoon, drained and dead of heart. She sat in bed watching a big green fly patiently hammer itself against the windowpane where the gold light flooded in. Endlessly it fought the impossible, battering with its frail bejeweled head. With swift fury and pain, Patti jumped out of bed and snatched up her blouse. She ran to the window and, with her linen bludgeon, killed the fly.

Across the street, in a window just one story higher than her own, sat Fat Face. She stood looking back for a moment, embarrassed by her little savagery, but warmed by the way the doctor’s smile was filled with gentle understanding, as if he read the anguish the act was born of. She suddenly realized she was wearing only her bra.

His smile grew a shade merrier at her little jolt of awareness, and she knew he understood this too, that this was inadvertence, and not a hooker’s come-on.

And so, with a swift excitement, she turned it into coquetry and applied her blouse daintily to her breasts. This was the natural moment—she had been right to wait because now her tender fantasy would bloom with perfect spontaneity. She pointed to herself with a smile, and then to Fat Face with inquiry. How he beamed then! Did she even see his eyes and lips water? He nodded energetically. With thumb and forefinger she signaled a short interval. As she left the window she noted the arrival, down the sidewalk, of a gaggle of hydrotherapy patients, several with leashed strays in tow.

It chilled her somewhat. And would the patients’ arrival interfere with the intimate interview she imagined? Her preparations slowed. She stepped down to the lobby some ten minutes later and walked slowly to stand by the front doors. The lobby was empty and so were the sidewalks. All lay in a sunny Sunday desolation. It was dreamlike, beautiful in a way, but it caused her a delicate shudder, too. She stepped outside and looked around her—and felt suddenly the craziness of kinky sexual charities such as she intended. Maybe she should forget it, just go party somewhere. And right then, as she stood there, a car full of her friends pulled up to the curb in front of her. In a chorus they invited her to join them. They were off to cruise, maybe crash out of town, had some parties they knew about.

Almost, Patti went. But then she noted that Sheri’s kid sister Penny was in the car. She shuddered at so near a reminder and waved them off with a laugh. She began to move down the sidewalk, weighing how strong her urge to visit Fat Face still was, not looking up toward him because maybe she would just walk on down to the bar…And then Arnold lurched from his booth and made a grab for her arm.

She was edgy and quick, and jumped away. He seemed to fear leaving the booth’s proximity and came no nearer, but pleaded with her from where he stood:

“Please, Patti! Come here and listen.”

Like a thunderbolt, the elusive memory of last night now struck Patti. “Shoggoth” was eerie, and that whole story familiar, because they were precisely what that letter had been all about! She was stunned that she could so utterly banish from her mind that lurid document. It had spooked Patti badly the night before her friend died. It had come from Arnold—and so had that book! That was the meaning of his look. The red moronic face glared at her urgently.

“Please, Patti. I’ve had knowledge. Come here—” He darted forward to catch her arm and she sprang back, again the quicker, with a yelp. Arnold, thus drawn from the screening of his booth, froze fearfully. Patti looked up, and thrilled to find Fat Face looking down—not in amity, but in wrath upon Arnold. The newsman gaped and mumbled apologetically, as if to the sidewalk: “No. I said nothing. I only
hinted…”
Joyfully, Patti sprang across the street and in moments was flying up those green-carpeted stairs she had climbed once before with such reluctance.

The oppression she had first found in these muted corridors was not gone from them—the quality of dread in some manner belonged there—but she outran it. She moved too quickly in her sunny fantasy to be overtaken by that heaviness. She ran down the fourth-floor hall and, at the door where Sheri had knelt giggling and she had balked, seized the knob and knocked simultaneously while pushing her way in, so impetuous was her rush toward benign sanity. There Fat Face sat at a big desk by the window she’d always known him through. He was even grosser-legged and more bloat-bellied than his patients. It gave her a funny shock that did not change her amorous designs.

He wore a commodious doctor’s smock and slacks. His shoes were bulky, black, and orthopedically braced. Such a body less enkindled by spirit might have repelled. His, surmounted by the kindly beacon of his smile, seemed only grandfatherly, afflicted—dear. From somewhere there came, echoing as in a large enclosed space, a noise of agitated water and of animals—strangely conjoined. But Fat Face was speaking:

“My dear,” he said, not yet rising, “you make an old, old fellow very, very happy!” His voice was a marvel that sent half-lustful gooseflesh down her spine. It was an uncanny voice, reedy and wavering and shot with flutelike notes of silver purity, sinfully melodious. That voice knew seductions, quite possibly, that Patti had never dreamed of. She was speechless, and spread her arms in tender self-preservation.

He sprang to his feet, and the surging pep with which his great bulk moved sent a new thrill down the lightning rod of her nerves. On pachydermous legs he leapt spry as a cat to a door behind his desk, and bowed her through. The noise of animals and churning water gusted fresher from the doorway. Perplexed, she entered.

The room contained only a huge bowl-shaped hydrotherapy tub. Its walls were blank cement, save one, which was a bank of shuttered windows through which the drenched clamor was pouring. She finally conquered disbelief and realized a fact she had been struggling with all along: those dozens of canine garglings and cat shrieks were sounds of agony and distress. Not hospital sounds. Torture chamber sounds. The door boomed shut with a strikingly ponderous rumble, followed by a sharp click. Fat Face, energetically unbuttoning his smock, said, “Go ahead and peek out, sweet heedless trollop! Oh yes, oh yes, oh yes—soon we’ll
all
dine on lovely flesh—men and women, not paltry vermin!”

Patti gaped at the lurid musicality of his speech, struggling to receive its meaning. The doctor was shucking his trousers. It appeared that he wore a complex rubber suit, heavily strapped and buckled, under his clothes. Dazed, Patti opened a shutter and looked out. She saw a huge indoor pool, as the sounds had suggested, but not of the same shape and brightly chlorinated blue she expected. It was an awesome slime-black grotto that opened below her, bordered by rude sea-bearded rocks of cyclopean size. The sooty, viscous broth of its waters boiled with bulging elephantine shapes…

From those shapes, when she had grasped them, she tore her eyes with desperate speed; long instants too late for her sanity. Nightmare ought not to be so simply
there
before her, so dizzyingly adjacent to Reality. That the shapes should be such seething plasms, such cunning titan maggots as she had dreamed of, this was just half the horror. The other half was the human head that decorated each of those boiling multimorphs, a comic excrescence from the nightmare mass—this and the rain of panicked beasts that fell from cagework above the pool and became in their frenzies both the toys and the food of the pulpy abominations.

She turned slack-mouthed to Fat Face. He stood by the great empty tub working at the system of buckles on his chest. “Do you understand, my dear? Please try! Your horror will improve your tang.
Your veil shall be the wash of blood that dims and drowns your dying eyes…
You see, we find it easier to hold most of the shape with suits like these. We could mimic the entire body, but far more effort and concentration would be required.”

He gave a last pull, and the row of buckles split crisply open. Ropy purple gelatin gushed from his suit front into the tub. Patti ran to the door, which had no knob. As she tore her nails against it and screamed, she remembered the fly at the window, and heard Fat Face continue behind her:

“So, we just imitate the head, and we never dissolve it, not to risk resuming it faultily and waking suspicions. Please struggle!”

She looked back and saw huge palps, like dreadful comic phalluses, spring from the tub of slime that now boiled with movement. She screamed.

“Oh yes!” fluted the Fat Face that now bobbed on the purple simmer. Patti’s arms smoked where the palps took them. She was plucked from the floor as lightly as a struggling roach might be. “Oh yes, dear girl—
you’ll have for bridesmaids Pain and Dread, for vows you’ll jabber blasphemies…”
As he brought her to hang above the cauldron of his acid body, she saw his eyes roll jet-black. He lowered her feet into himself. A last time before shock took her, Patti threw the feeble tool of her voice against the massive walls. She kicked as her feet sank into the scorching gelatin, kicked till her shoes dissolved, till her feet and ankles spread nebulae of liquefying flesh within the Shoggoth Lord’s greedy substance. Then her kicking slowed, and she sank more deeply in….

∇

Shoggoths in Bloom

Elizabeth Bear

“W
ell, now, Professor Harding,” the fisherman says, as his
Bluebird
skips across Penobscot Bay, “I don’t know about that. The jellies don’t trouble with us, and we don’t trouble with them.”

He’s not much older than forty, but wizened, his hands work-roughened and his face reminiscent of saddle leather, in texture and in hue. Professor Harding’s age, and Harding watches him with concealed interest as he works the
Bluebird
’s engine. He might be a veteran of the Great War, as Harding is.

He doesn’t mention it. It wouldn’t establish camaraderie: they wouldn’t have fought in the same units or watched their buddies die in the same trenches.

That’s not the way it works, not with a Maine fisherman who would shake his head and not extend his hand to shake, and say, between pensive chaws on his tobacco, “
Doctor
Harding? Well, huh. I never met a colored professor before,” and then shoot down all of Harding’s attempts to open conversation about the near-riots provoked by a fantastical radio drama about an alien invasion of New York City less than a fortnight before.

Harding’s own hands are folded tight under his armpits so the fisherman won’t see them shaking. He’s lucky to be here. Lucky anyone would take him out. Lucky to have his tenure-track position at Wilberforce, which he is risking right now.

The bay is as smooth as a mirror, the
Bluebird
’s wake cutting it like a stroke of chalk across slate. In the peach-sorbet light of sunrise, a cluster of rocks glistens. The boulders themselves are black, bleak, sea-worn and ragged. But over them, the light refracts through a translucent layer of jelly, mounded six feet deep in places, glowing softly in the dawn. Rising above it, the stalks are evident as opaque silhouettes, each nodding under the weight of a fruiting body.

Harding catches his breath. It’s beautiful. And deceptively still, for whatever the weather may be, beyond the calm of the bay, across the splintered gray Atlantic, farther than Harding—or anyone—can see, a storm is rising in Europe.

Harding’s an educated man, well-read, and he’s the grandson of Nathan Harding, the buffalo soldier. An African-born ex-slave who fought on both sides of the Civil War, when Grampa Harding was sent to serve in his master’s place, he deserted, and lied, and stayed on with the Union Army after.

Like his grandfather, Harding was a soldier. He’s not a historian, but you don’t have to be to see the signs of war.

“No contact at all?” he asks, readying his borrowed Leica camera.

“They clear out a few pots,” the fisherman says, meaning lobster pots. “But they don’t damage the pot. Just flow around it and digest the lobster inside. It’s not convenient.” He shrugs. It’s not convenient, but it’s not a threat either. These Yankees never say anything outright if they think you can puzzle it out from context.

“But you don’t try to do something about the shoggoths?”

While adjusting the richness of the fuel mixture, the fisherman speaks without looking up. “What could we do to them? We can’t hurt them. And lord knows, I wouldn’t want to get one’s ire up.”

“Sounds like my department head,” Harding says, leaning back against the gunwale, feeling like he’s taking an enormous risk. But the fisherman just looks at him curiously, as if surprised the talking monkey has the ambition or the audacity to
joke
.