Neil Gaiman & Caitlin R. Kiernan & Laird Barron (54 page)

He had found the rocks I had been saving, which he hurled on the floor. He thrust his hand into my other pocket and extracted Ondine’s panties. After a moment of baffled silence, he made a gagging noise of utter loathing.

“You goddamn pervert!” he screamed.

The wall hit me in the face, cracking teeth. I only then became aware of a worse pain where he had hit the back of my head with his gun. I wondered how I had wound up on my knees. They hurt, too.

“Bastard bastard bastard!” he screamed, kicking me in the back as if trying to squash a bug to paste. “You got me to touch your goddamn frogspawn jackoff rag—”

He stopped kicking me. I tried to stop my sobbing and groaning so I could hear what he was saying, though his words were strangely muffled. It sounded as if he were choking. Was it too much to hope that he was dying of apoplexy?

I managed to twist my head around. I couldn’t imagine what was happening to him. Most of his face was covered by a wet, black cloth, and he was apparently standing a foot off the floor, his heavy-duty oxfords and white tube-socks jerking spasmodically.

But it was no cloth that covered his face. It was the huge, webbed hand of the dark figure that loomed behind him, the Deep One I had revived.

“Praise Mother Hydra!” I sobbed.

“Praise her name!” a rich, deep, croaking voice responded.

“Sokay, sweetie,” I slurred, dumping Ondine Gilman into a lobby chair of the hotel that, most inaccurately, bore her name. “Jus’ get us a room, okay?”

“Wha… ?Where?”

I leaned forward and, under the pretext of giving her a kiss, pressed her carotid arteries until she lost consciousness again. After changing my
modus operandii
in the Northwest, I had learned that this was every bit as effective as an ice-cream locker for draining the will of baptismal candidates.

“Excuse me, Sir! Just what—oh. It’s Mr. Smith, isn’t it?”

“Bob. It’s good ol’ Bob,” I said, steering a wayward course for the desk and the clerk I had seen before, the one who had used a bandanna to pick up my bag. He was still wearing his Munch necktie. The image was a deliberate slur against my people.

“What’s going on?”

“Celebrash. Celebration. We’re outta that damn crazy-house.”

“I can see that. What’s going on outside, I meant.”

I pretended to hear the sirens for the first time. And there were indeed screams, too.

“They’re celebratin’, I guess.” I heard a burst of automatic gunfire.

“God!”he cried, starting from behind the desk.

“Hey, wait. Need a room for me and my sweetie.”

“I can’t rent you a room, you’re drunk. And I’m closing.”

“Then gimme my bag,” I said. “Left my bag, remember?”

“Oh. Sure. Then will you go?”

“Drunk, huh?”

“Where am I?” Ondine cried.

“’Sokay, honey.”

He dumped my bag on the counter, forgetting to protect his precious hand from my contagion in his confused haste. He fretted and fussed as I opened it, and he grew even more flustered at another burst of automatic fire in the distance.

“I’m not really drunk,” I said clearly as I pulled the nine-millimeter Browning out of the bag and jacked a Black Talon round into the chamber.

“What?”

“I’m just very different from you, that’s all.”

I put the bullet right through the Screamer’s bald, distorted head and through the clerk’s breastbone.

“I’m coming, dear,” I told Ondine, and hurried over to deprive her simian brain of yet more oxygen.

I was afraid she might not be able to understand what I was doing after I had stripped her and tied her to the bed in the room I had assigned us, but she came around as good as new. Nobody would have paid attention to her screams and curses over the similar noises in Town Square.

I took all the time I wanted to amuse myself, but it surprised me when dawn broke while I was still thrusting into her. I turned and saw that it was a dawn of floodlights, powerful floodlights from the section of town sealed off by razor-wire. The gunfire had become constant, but it seemed as if fewer guns were in use.

“You fucking bastard!” Ondine sobbed.

“You got part of that right,” I grunted, “but I’m the one who’s legitimate, remember!”

“Freak!”

I’d had enough of her and her filthy mouth. I pulled out and rummaged among my clothing for the stones. Her screams found surprising new energy as I inserted them in the secret places, but I managed to ignore her as I recited the words. I’m not sure if the words and the procedure are exactly right, since Grandma explained them fully only at the very last, when she had passed over and was in a fearful hurry to rejoin her people, but I have always used them.

I suspect that any human being who reads this account may think that my baptism of forty-eight women between 1982, the year Grandma passed over, and 1984 was somehow excessive. On the contrary, it was based on an exact calculation of the yearly baptisms Grandma was prevented from performing while she was interned in Oklahoma (four), and while she was confined in the nursing-home (forty-four). Despite all the hard work and laborious planning involved, to say nothing of the danger, I wanted to complete Grandma’s hecatomb and ensure that she was granted full honor among the Deep Ones as quickly as possible. Don’t you think she had suffered long enough and waited long enough already? If you still believe someone should be censured for upsetting the public with such a concentrated flurry of “criminal” activity, you might look to President Herbert Hoover, whose agents disrupted her life and prevented the free exercise of her religion, or to Sidney Newman, my grandfather, who did the same.

It was my turn to scream as the door opened. I recoiled from the figure in black that stood there, but then I saw that it was Old Lady Waite.

“I don’t know what you did, Bob,” she said admiringly, “but you sure stirred up the Host of the Sea. However,” she added as she set a crocheted bag on the bedside table and withdrew a large black book and a butcher-knife, “that’s not really the way to go about this business.” To Ondine she said, “Hush, now, child, this won’t take much longer at all. To baptize your soul we have to separate it from your body. Take heart from the fact that your suffering won’t be wasted. Even now your pain and shame are floating out like incense to feed those whose glory you can’t even begin to comprehend.”

While I watched and listened, she showed me exactly how it should be done.

The flapping roar of helicopters deafened us as we ran through the marsh. They raced toward us, flying barely higher than the reeds. I thought this was the end, but they passed right over us to the town, where they blasted the beach with rockets and cannon-fire.

“They’re killing them!” I cried.

“I doubt it,” Old Lady Waite said. “The Deep Ones are not stupid, you know. They wanted to destroy the Facility and give the boys in the back room something to chew on, and they’ve done it. They’re long gone by now, taking their dead with them. You’ll read in the papers tomorrow how some foreign fishermen got out of line when they thought they saw a sea monster, or maybe a mermaid, and how the dumb state troopers called in an air strike. There’s no fun on earth like reading the papers, if you know what to look for.”

Whatever the papers might say, our position was untenable. Dr. Saltonstall knew what I’d done in the Northwest, he hadn’t just been on a fishing expedition, and he couldn’t be the only one who knew. I had made no attempt to hide the remains of Ondine and the hotel clerk. As for Old Lady Waite, she was sure that they would come hunting for any lingering Dagonites in Innsmouth, whatever the papers might say, with her at the head of their list.

She had kept a small sloop ready for just such an emergency, and now it ghosted through the black creek under a small jib while she steered it expertly.

“Where are we going?”

“You mentioned Fiji. It’s nice there. There’s an island where the Deep Ones mix freely with the people, just like they used to do in Innsmouth. Just like they’ll do again here when this blows over and Ramon does what I told him.”

“We’re going to… to the South Pacific in this?”

“Not we, I’ll be passing over before very long at all.” She laughed at the horror on my face. “What’s the matter, can’t you swim?”

“Yes, of course, but—”

“Don’t worry. I’ll make sure you know how to sail it before I pass over. Then I’ll stick by you, or maybe our friends will.”

Old Lady Waite—but that was merely the name of her larval shell, soon to be discarded as she assumed the glorious form that I came to know and love, in every sense of those words, as Pth’th-l’yl-l’yth.

It was the magnificent soul of that companion and lover-to-be who had guided me, and who now gestured at the black water. I saw nothing at first, then aglow in the depths, a trail of phosphorescence to one side of the boat. A second followed on the other side. Large, submarine creatures escorted us.

∇

Lost Stars

Ann K. Schwader

W
ind driven sleet spattered Obscura Gallery’s windows, turning a late November afternoon even gloomier. Sara sighed. Just what she needed, after a long day hanging large-format photographs for tomorrow’s meet-the-artist reception.

Shards of Rameses II strewn across Lower Nubia mocked her in black and white. Lost Aegypt was their most important show this year—as her boss kept reminding her. Never mind that she’d already taken off, or that Sara herself should have been home half an hour ago.

So much for attending that women’s spirituality meeting tonight. Not that she’d been looking forward to it, but Diane was counting on her… opinion? Support? Reassurance? Her friend hadn’t been clear, only anxiously enthusiastic.

Enthusiasm was a big part of Diane’s personality, but anxiety wasn’t—at least, it hadn’t been. They’d fallen out of touch these past few months. Sara had been working a lot of overtime, while Diane whirled through diets, feminist causes, and dead-end relationships at her usual breakneck pace.

In all three departments, she’d been certain each latest discovery was the Real One. Her voice on the phone last night hadn’t sounded so unshakable. She’d just insisted that this new group was unlike anything she’d ever been involved in. More authentic. More
empowering
.

The gallery door’s tinkling bell interrupted.

“Oh wow,” came a female voice moments later. “Can I borrow your employee discount?”

Sara snorted. “My what?”

Halfway down the tippy ladder, she got her first good look at Diane. Her friend had been struggling with her weight for years without much success. Now the wrists protruding from the sleeves of her loose black sweater were positively bony. Her jeans sagged in the rear, and even her features looked pared down.

“Good God, girl. What diet drugs are you on?”

Diane laughed, but her laugh was thin too.

“Just plain old womanpower—
really
old womanpower.” Her eyes lit with secret humor. “It’s like we’re all tapped into this ancient matriarchal energy source. There’s nothing it can’t help you do: lose weight, find a job that doesn’t suck, get clear of the idiot men in your life.”

“Not a problem.” The idiot man in Sara’s life had left on his own. And not recently, either.

“Sorry.” Her friend’s smile faded. “I guess what I’m saying is, you’ve got to try it yourself. Come meet our circle tonight. Meet Sesh’tet …”

“Who?”

“Our High Priestess, except this isn’t Wicca. It’s way older, out of Egypt. Like Sesh’tet.”

Sara stifled an inward groan. She’d tried women’s spirituality groups before, and remained unimpressed. Too much New Age crap. Too much lip service to Sisterhood, with the same bitchy backstabbing afterwards.

But Egypt?

“Come on.” Diane grinned. “You know you want to.”

The hell of it was, she did. Egyptology was a recent but major hobby. She’d even taken a class last summer, accumulating embarrassing quantities of books and Egyptian jewelry since.

Fingering the ornate silver
ankh
under her collar, she sighed.

“Just let me get these last few straight.” Heading for the front door, she locked it and flipped the CLOSED sign around. “You can tell me all about Sesh’tet. What’s she working from, anyhow—Isian mysteries?”

“Older.”

Something in Diane’s tone made Sara frown. “I can’t imagine what might be older and still documented, not in that part of the world.”

The secret look flashed in her friend’s eyes again. “I can.”

Sara took a deep breath to quiet her own frustration. Whatever cult Sesh’tet was selling, it obviously resonated at some deep emotional level. Maybe tonight’s meeting would show her how to unsnarl Diane from this latest spiritual tangle.

Of course, it might be legit. She’d read about some pretty strange religious survivals, animism and shamans and such. And this was Boulder: People’s Republic of Alternative Reality.

“So who made this Sesh’tet a High Priestess? Was it part of an initiation, or what?”

“An initiation in the Valley of the Kings.” That proud-confused tone was back in Diane’s voice. “She hasn’t told us much about it, though. I think she’s afraid of the Egyptian government—they’re not exactly big on religious freedom.”

“Makes sense.” A nastier thought occurred to Sara. “Have
you
been initiated yet?”

Diane’s chin bobbed down before she could catch herself.

“Don’t worry—I won’t ask for details.”

The secrecy didn’t bother her. Mystery cults worked like that. What she deeply didn’t like was the idea of initiation after maybe three months. Didn’t Wicca require a year and a day?

Of course, this wasn’t Wicca. It was far older—or so this Sesh’tet person claimed. Which meant she wouldn’t learn a damn thing without meeting Sesh’tet.

Straightening one last photograph, Sara climbed off the ladder and dusted her hands on her chinos. “Ready to go?”

Diane blinked at her. “I thought you weren’t… ” The corners of her thin mouth twisted. “Egypt snagged you, didn’t it?”

It’s snagged one of us, anyhow. And I want to understand why
.