New Cthulhu: The Recent Weird (13 page)

The phone rang, and he jumped, fumbling the tape onto the floor. Hadn’t he switched that off? Leaving the cassette where it lay, he ran into the kitchen, catching the phone on the third ring and calling, “Hello.”

His Uncle George said, “Hello, Henry.”

“Uncle George!” he answered, a smile breaking over his face.

“How is everything?” his uncle asked.

“Fine, fine,” he said. “I was just getting ready to call you.”

“Uh oh.”

“Yeah, it looks like I’m going to be a few minutes late to dinner.”

“Can you still make it? Should we wait for another night?”

“No, no,” Henry said, “there’s no need to reschedule. I was just listening to something, a tape; I got kind of caught up in it, lost track of time.”

“Music?”

“No, something my father left me. Actually, I was kind of hoping we could talk about it.”

“Of course. What is it?”

“I’d rather wait until we see each other, if that’s all right with you. Listen: can you call the restaurant, tell them we’re running about fifteen minutes late?”

“Certainly. Will that be enough time for you?”

“I can be very fast when I need to be; you’d be amazed. Do you have their number?”

“I believe so. If not, I can look it up.”

“Great, great. Okay. Let me run and get ready, and I’ll see you shortly.”

“Excellent. I’m looking forward to this, Henry. I haven’t seen you in—well, to tell you the truth, I can’t remember how long, which means it’s been too long.”

“Hear hear,” he said. “I’m looking forward to it too. There’s a lot I want to ask you.”

“I’m glad to hear it, son: there’s much I have to tell you.”

“I’m sure you do. I can’t wait to hear it.”

“Well, this should be a fine, if melancholic, occasion. A Farange family reunion: there haven’t been too many of those, I can assure you. What a pity your poor father can’t join us. Oh, and Henry? one more thing?”

“What is it?”

“Would it be too much trouble if my butler joined us for dinner?” As Henry’s stomach squeezed his uncle went on, “I’m embarrassed to ask, but I’m afraid I am getting on in years a bit, and I find I can’t do much without his help these days. The joys of aging! He’s a very quiet chap, though: won’t say two words all evening. I hate to impose when we haven’t seen each other . . . ”

His mouth dry, Henry stuttered, “Your butler?”

“Yes,” his uncle said. “Butler, manservant: ‘personal assistant,’ I suppose you would call him. If it’s going to be an intrusion—”

Recovering himself, Henry swallowed and said, “Nonsense, it’s no trouble at all. I’ll be happy to have him there.”

“Splendid. To tell the truth, he doesn’t get out much any more: he’ll be most pleased.”

“I’ll see you there.”

Henry replaced the phone in its cradle, and hurried to the shower. As he stood with the hot water streaming down on him, his uncle’s voice in one ear, his father’s voice in the other, he had a vision, both sudden and intense. He saw a boy, dressed in brown slacks and a brown sweater a half-size too big for him, standing at a landing at the top of a flight of stairs. In front of him was a great oaken door, open the slightest hairsbreath. The boy stood looking at the door, at the wedge of yellow light spilling out from whatever lay on the other side of it. The light was the color of old bones, and it seemed to form an arrow, pointing the boy forward.

. . . a coast-line of mingled mud, ooze, and weedy Cyclopean masonry which can be nothing less than the tangible substance of earth’s supreme terror—the nightmare corpse-city of R’lyeh, that was built in measureless aeons behind history by the vast, loathsome shapes that seeped down from the dark stars. There lay great Cthulhu and his hordes, hidden in green slimy vaults and sending out at last, after cycles incalculable, the thoughts that spread fear to the dreams of the sensitive and called imperiously to the faithful to come on a pilgrimage of liberation and restoration.

“The Call of Cthulhu” · H.P. Lovecraft (1928)

• THE VICAR OF R’LYEH •

Marc Laidlaw

“Let anything be held as blessed, so that that be well cursed.”

—Anthony Trollope,
Barchester Towers

Glorious afternoon, warm and breezy among green hills dotted with sheep. Looking down from his sylvan lounging spot upon the village with its twin spires, Geoffrey heard a mournful bell coming from the towers of Barchester Cathedral, and almost immediately thereafter noted a small dark shape making its way across the dewy grass from the open doors of the church. A faint distortion followed the pedestrian, as if air and earth were curdling in its wake. He blinked away the illusion, but the feeling of oppression grew until he clearly saw that yes, ’twas the vicar coming toward him with some message he suddenly felt he did not wish to hear. Meanwhile, the tolling of the bell had grown appalling. As the little man struggled up the hillside, he seemed to expand until his shadow encompassed the town itself. Abruptly the vicar stood before him, the pale features of the meek country parson tearing into soft and writhing strands like the points of a wormy beard. The vicar scowled, revealing five segmented ridges of bone, teeth akin to the beak of a sea urchin. Geoffrey did not wish to hear the vicar speak, but there was no stopping his ears.

“You up, Geoff?” The voice, its accent inappropriate, was first wheedling, then insistent. “R’lyeh’s rising!”

He forced his eyes open. Somehow the phone had lodged itself between his cheek and pillow. The voice of his boss went on.

“Geoff, are you there? Did I wake you? I know you were here late, but we’ve got an emergency.”

“Mm. Hi, Warren. No. I was . . . I was getting up.”

(7:43 by the clock.)

“Calculations were off. Fucking astrologers, right? Anyway, we’ve got to throw ourselves into it. Marketing’s in a tizzy, but let them be the bottleneck. I think if we dig in—”

“Give me . . . ” Shower, skip breakfast, grab coffee at a drive-through, traffic. This was bad. “ . . . forty-five minutes?” Very bad.

“You’re a pro, Geoff.”

Very bad. Cancel all plans. Forget about rest until this thing was done. Already resigning himself to it. Exactly how off were the calculations? He’d soon find out.

Forty-eight minutes later, panicking over his growing lateness, Geoff spiraled down through increasingly lower levels of the parking lot. He was late, but he was worrying more about the dream. What did it mean? That he was becoming polluted? That his pure visions had become contaminated by the foul effluents in which he labored daily? It seemed more urgent that he get away. Finish this job and get back to what he loved. Put all this crap behind him. If he could just get through it.

As he descended, the fluorescent lights grew dingier and more infrequent; fresh white paint gave way to bare, sooty concrete; the level markers were eroded runes. Even at this hour, he found not a single free parking space until he reached the lowest level. At the end of the farthest row, he found a retractable metal gate raised just over halfway. Beyond it, a promising emptiness, dark.

His car scraped under the gate with half an inch of clearance. He found himself in a cavernous lot he had never seen before, darkness stretching beyond the reach of his headlights. This lot was anything but crowded. A mere dozen or so cars parked companionably in the nearest row of spaces. He pulled in beside them and shut off his engine though not yet his lights. Stairs? Elevators? He saw no sign of either. The safest course would be to walk back under the gate to the main level.

Slamming the door killed the light from his car, but enough flowed from the gateway to show a layer of dust on the adjacent Volkswagen. Geoff peered through the passenger window, shuddering when he saw a row of tiny plastic figures perched on the dashboard, winged and faceless except for tentacles and the keyhole eyes of superintelligent cuttlefish. The toys were self-illuminated, in the manner of their kind, and pulsed with faint colors that signaled their intentions to those who could read them. Scattered over the seats were piles of sticks and matted weeds. Also a fallen stack of books, and a spiral notebook open to a page covered with scribbles he took for treasure maps. What kind of treasure seeker plundered the recesses of a not very ancient parking garage?

Fearing he might be mistaken for a prowler, he straightened up, tugging his backpack over his shoulders. On his way toward the gate, he glanced back and saw that the car bore an all too popular bumper sticker: HE IS RISEN.

The sudden grinding of the metal gate called up terrors of confinement, though in fact the gate was opening the rest of the way. Blue-tinged headlights came down the ramp, blinding him. He threw up a hand to shade his eyes, and saw a long black limo cruising through the entryway. It came to a stop, fixing him in its headlights, the engine thrumming so deeply that he felt the throbbing through his shoes.

“Come forward!” piped a voice, thin and irresistible.

Geoff walked around the side of the limo. One of the doors was open. Inside, a luxurious compartment of oxblood leather and recessed lights comfortably contained Warren and another man unknown to him.

“Geoff? What are you doing down here?”

“Who is this?” came the reedy voice that had bid him approach.

“Uh . . . this is Geoffrey Abbott, our lead designer.”

“Really? Come in, young man.”

Warren gave an uncomfortable smile, then waved him in. Geoff sat, balancing his backpack on his knees. As the car purred forward, Warren nodded toward the other man, a small fine-boned figure in a gray suit, dark of complexion, with curly black hair cropped close.

“Geoff, I’d like you to meet Emil Calamaro.”

Geoff held back his hand a moment. He had never heard Warren say the name in anything but scorn; yet he was obviously awed by the actual presence of the owner of Aeon Entertainment.

“So,” piped the small man, “you are tasked with R’lyeh’s rising, is that not so?”

“Only in the Commemorative Simulator,” Warren said.

There was a chitter of laughter. “As if it could be otherwise!” said Calamaro.

It was several seconds before Geoff realized what Calamaro was talking about. Everyone on the team had a slightly different pronunciation of “R’lyeh”—from Warren’s “It’s really, really,
Real-yeah
,” to the broad “
Ruh-lay
” to the completely lazy and obnoxious “
Riley
.” But Calamaro’s take on the name was especially odd: It seemed to come bubbling up from his gullet through a column of thick liquid, less a word than a digestive sound.

“Geoff’s got the job for now,” Warren said quickly, covering Geoff’s confusion.

“And you think him more suitable than the previous designer?”

“We’ve got a lot of faith in Geoff,” Warren said. “He created the
Jane Austen Mysteries
.”

Calamaro sank back in his seat, making a faint hissing sound and baring his teeth at Austen’s name. Out of Egypt, Geoff thought, and now owner of an extensive media empire. Not always a hands-on sort of owner, Calamaro took an active role in producing only a select few of the titles in the endless run of Cthulhuvian flicks and tie-in games that Aeon cranked out on a seasonal basis. Calamaro’s dark, slender fingers clenched the head of a walking stick that was somehow both leopard and crocodile. On the seat beside him sat a cylindrical box, tall and golden, fastened with a clasp.

“I know it’s a bit of a stretch, but the authenticity of those levels, and Geoff’s ability to make them lively and action-packed without sacrificing the integrity of the source material . . . well, we think it’s a great fit. No one originally thought you could set Jane Austen to work solving crimes in the world of her own books, but Geoff’s team did a fantastic job.”

“I designed the
Bloody Trail of Lord Darcy
,” Geoff said, compelled to rise to his own defense, knowing that Warren had not actually played any of the Austen thrillers. “I was looking forward to starting in on
Pride and Extreme Prejudice
when this came along. Eventually I think Thomas Hardy will be a fertile source of—”

“I would like to see the work so far.”

“Absolutely!” Warren said.

“Sure.” Geoff hoped none of his terror showed in his face.

The limo stopped. The driver opened the passenger door. Calamaro indicated that Geoff should go first.

He could no longer see the gated entrance. Ahead of the car, held in its headlights, was a doorway. Calamaro stepped into the beams, his shadow staggering out across the hard-packed floor and then the wall. He supported himself on his walking stick, hugging the golden cylinder close to his chest with the other arm. Warren hurried to open the door. Beyond was an elevator and a flight of stairs. The elevator waited, but when Geoff tried to enter, Warren held him back. “Why don’t you take the stairs, Geoff? We’ve got some business to discuss. We’ll catch up with you upstairs. Give you time to get the demo ready.”

“Uh . . . sure.” Geoff held back and watched the doors shut. Calamaro’s eyes glittered like obsidian lenses in the mask of a sarcophagus, refracting the overhead lights into a vision of endless night full of fractured stars.

He wasn’t sure how long he’d stood there before he remembered to look for stairs.

By the time Geoff reached the office, everyone was buzzing determinedly through the halls as if they had some other purpose than to catch a glimpse of the man who had set them all in motion. Lars Magnusson, one of the programmers, intercepted Geoff en route to his cubby: “Guess who’s making the rounds this morning?”

“I know,” Geoff said. “Calamaro. I rode in his limo with Warren.”

“Calamaro?” said Lars. “Really? No, I’m talking about Petey Sandersen!”

If this news was meant to lift his spirits, it barely raised an eyebrow. More evidence (as if any were needed) that he did not fit in on the Simulator project; that in fact his loyalty to the whole Aeon Entertainment enterprise was suspect.

Petey Sandersen was a legendary figure—an idol to those who had grown up suckling on the thousand media paps of the Black Goat of the Woods. He had formulated (or packaged) the original rules and invocations, the diagrams and tokens that everyone had once taken for the arcane paraphernalia of an elaborate role-playing game. But while Petey had become revered as the Opener of the Way, the Wedge by Which They Widened the Weft, Geoff had spent his adolescence trying to put as much distance as he possibly could between himself and the massively overhyped eldritch invaders.

With Sandersen and Calamaro on the premises, this was shaping up to be a day for high-powered executive reviews. Careers were made or casually ended on days like this. Nice of them to warn the peons in advance.

Geoff slung his backpack under his desk and fired up ABDUL, their proprietary level editor. It was hard not to panic, considering that Warren had volunteered him to show off work that was by no means ready for a demo. About all he had time to do now was check for obvious errors and send the map for a full compile. That, and pray that during the night no one had checked in changes that would break the work he’d done the previous day. Reviewing the morning’s round of check-in notices, he didn’t spot any midnight code changes that would affect his map, but that didn’t mean he was in the clear. Artists were notorious for quietly making an ill-advised change to one inconspicuous model, thereby wreaking havoc on the entire world. Most of them were contractors, prone to exceedingly short lifespans at Aeon, rarely in place long enough to be trained in the brutal realities of their resource management software, dubbed ALHAZMAT. Anyway, there was no way around it. He started his compile and prayed for deliverance.

There was certainly no shortage of divinities in attendance on his prayers. His cubicle was lined with figurines: a mottled green plastic Cthulhu hunched upon a pedestal with leathery wings peaked above its tentacled face; a translucent vinyl Faceless Idiot God containing a congeries of odd shapes that sparked and swarmed like luminous sea life when you squeezed it; a pewter Shub-Niggurath, a goodly number of whose thousand young had fallen behind the desk to be sucked up by the night janitor’s vacuum. The eldritch figures seemed to leap, leer and caper at the corner of his eyes while Geoff bent close to the monitor. On the long late nights when his tired eyes were burning, he thought they did worse things than that. These were not
his
Cthulhu-Kaiju figures, not
his
maddeningly cute Li’l Old Ones. They were a constant reminder of the indignity of his situation. They belonged to the previous occupant of the cubicle—a designer who could return at any moment, depending on the whims of upper management. Aeon shuffled and recombined its design teams as if they were packs of Pokemon cards—and not particularly rare ones at that.

Geoff bore no love of Elder Gods, but as much as he would have liked to, he couldn’t get rid of the vinyl monstrosities. He didn’t dare dump them in a drawer and set out his own beloved, hand-painted, resin-cast garage-kit models of Mansfield Park and Northanger Abbey. As long as he sat here and accepted the paycheck that came with the keyboard, he must pretend a devotion to the Cthulhuvian pantheon in all its manifestations. Including Warren, who sprang up on the far side of his partition, waggling fingers for him to follow.

Entering the conference room on Warren’s heels, Geoff found the other managers enthralled by the spectacle of a portly cherubic man holding forth at the end of the monolithic onyx slab that was their conference table. He was in the midst of an anecdote that ended, “—so I said, I don’t think of Petey as a Ted Klein reference. I think of Ted Klein as a
Petey
reference!”