New Cthulhu: The Recent Weird (23 page)

Cavanaugh,

Greetings, O Left Hand of young Belknap. I was quite pleased to shew you about Providence this past fortnight, being none the less pleased to have finally returned to the seat of my ancestors, and hope that one day you’ll return for another visit when you’re not feeling quite so poorly.

One for the commonplace book strikes me just now. Penfriend spends a warm summer day meeting in the flesh with penfriend, and returns home via locomotive only to be greeted by a letter from the old boy’s spinster aunt sending regrets and condolences. ‘Apologies for opening and reading your correspondence with my Samuel, but you must know that he passed of tuberculosis a month gone by . . . ’ I’ll likely not do anything with it. Now that it is down on paper the idea rather smacks of Victoriana—no possibility of tightening coils of horror, reaching out & gradually dragging the reader in. I want tremendously to pen another tale, but even this letter is being written piecemeal between snatches of revisory work and long nights of astronomical observation. An aurora has visited Providence, as it does at the rarest of intervals, and I have taken to camping out under blankets in subarctic weather to observe this most cryptical of sky effects. A very few degrees of latitude makes all the difference when it comes to auroral perception, so I am sure you have in your new Green Mountain home auroras with a frequency beyond all Rhode Island standards.

Wandrei speaks of a recent trip home. You would do well to shew him some of your weird fiction, for he is among the most discerning and erudite of our band of enthusiasts, and has frequently hinted that he may dare to launch a magazine of weird fiction of his own.

Yr obt Grandsire—Nekropolis.

I woke up tied to a chair, and the first thing I noticed was a saline lock, for putting in an IV, or drawing blood. Fremgen loomed into my sight a moment later, peering at me. “Awake already. You are a strong one.”

“What—what—” My mouth was dry, and I couldn’t manage much more than that.

“I just took a little blood,” he said. “Barely a pint. There’s juice downstairs, cookies too. Help yourself when I’m gone.”

“Motherfucker,” I said, articulating as clearly as I could. “Let me go. I’ll fucking kill you.”

“I’m afraid I can’t, young man. I might need more of your blood.” He turned to a table and began measuring out powders from a row of colored glass jars, pouring them into a stainless steel pot heating over a camping stove. “The recipe isn’t exact, and it says the blood of direct descendants will work, but may require ‘greater quantities.’ Best to keep you here and fresh.” He referred to a big old book bound in pitted black leather, running his finger along the page. He made a few more adjustments to the contents of the pot before putting a lid on it.

I rocked a little in the chair, but the motion made my head spin—whatever local herbs he’d drugged me with, they—combined with the blood loss—worked too well.

“You don’t know how long I’ve been working on this, and to have you fall into my hands. To come to my door! It’s perfect.” He picked up a sheaf of papers and shook them at me. “These are your great-grandfather’s letters to Lovecraft, you know. I bought them ages ago. I had the man’s letters, the ink, the words from that time, and all I needed was a sample of the blood.” He put down the letters and began lighting candles, though his hands were shaking so badly I was afraid he’d drop the match and set the ramparts of newspapers flaming.

I concentrated on breathing deeply and trying to get my equilibrium back while he set candles around the room. He moved a wooden chair to a clear spot on the floor, and poured something white—salt, maybe?—on the floorboards, making a big circle. He poured a smaller circle of salt inside the first one, so the chair was at the center of a Bull’s eye. “Almost there,” he said. He took the lid off the pot, and the smell of burning blood and weird spices made me want to retch.

“What are you doing?” My voice was a lot more steady this time.

“Traveling in time, boy. Lovecraft wrote about it—of minds traveling in time, at least. Even alien minds, transposed into human bodies, and vice versa. ‘The Shadow Out of Time’—you know it? No. Well. That’s the idea. With the blood of Cavanaugh Payne’s great-grandson to connect me to his body, and a letter written in Cavanaugh’s own hand to connect me to a particular time, and through certain ancient rituals from priesthoods devoted to forgotten gods, I can project my mind back into Cavanaugh Payne’s body, take control, and then . . . oh, and then . . . ”

I suspected that arguing with the basics of his plan was fruitless, since crazy people tend to cling to their central craziness. But I couldn’t help but find the whole idea stupid, even accepting the premise. “Then what? Great-grandpa was a miserable bastard. He sold some shitty stories, knocked up great-grandma, and disappeared before the child was even born. He left all his things behind, so he probably just got murdered and dumped in a river or something. You want that life? Why?”

“It’s a stepping-stone,” he said, and moved the camping stove and the pot closer to the chair, placing them carefully inside the outer salt circle. He returned to the table and picked up a yellowing letter. “This is from Cavanaugh, in his last letter, from 1928. Listen: ‘Your offer is too kind, Grandpa. I would be delighted to visit and I insist you let me stand you lunch. Perhaps we could spend the afternoon poking around in those bookstores you’ve told me so much about.’ You see? He didn’t just write to Lovecraft—he arranged a meeting with him! And if I’m the one controlling his body when he meets Lovecraft, it should be trivial for me to get a little of the great man’s blood. I won’t need nearly as much as I took from you, not when drawn from the source itself. Then I can simply recreate this ritual, and take over Lovecraft’s body. You’ve read ‘The Thing on the Doorstep’? No? Still, like that. As for your great-grandfather’s disappearance, it only proves my venture will be successful. After I take over Lovecraft’s body, Cavanaugh’s corpus will be left an empty idiot husk, mindless and drooling. I’ll need to get rid of it—hence the ‘disappearance.’ I’ll dispose of his remains with due respect, fear not.”

“Why the hell would you want Lovecraft’s life? Didn’t he have a fucked-up marriage and die young? Wasn’t he afraid of everything? Black people, brown people, the ocean, shellfish, the sky, the dark, women, everything?” I wiggled in the ropes. The knots weren’t all that good. I figured I’d be able to work them loose soon, so if he wanted to keep babbling like a James Bond villain, that was fine with me. He was about a thousand years old, so I was pretty sure I could take him, even half-drugged and down a pint of blood. “Wasn’t he . . . gay!” I needed this old man angry, off-balance . . .

“But the stories,” Fremgen said dreamily. “If I go back to 1928 and take over Lovecraft’s life, so many of the great stories will remain to be written. And I’ve committed them all to memory, their publication histories, everything. His life was so well-documented, you know, with his letters, all those letters, it will be easy to be him, and it will be my hand that writes ‘The Shadow Out of Time’ and ‘At the Mountains of Madness’ and—but you’d never understand.” He tore the letter in his hands into little pieces and dropped them fluttering into the stinking pot, then sat down in the wooden chair in the circle of salt. “The money for the letters is in the writing desk downstairs, Payne. I don’t need the letters, but take the money.”

Thick smoke rose from the pot, and through some weird quirk of the room’s ventilation swirled around Fremgen and the chair without crossing the outer line of salt. Fremgen took deep breaths, and I hoped he wouldn’t die of smoke inhalation before I could kick his crazy ass. I wiggled harder at the ropes and slipped my left wrist loose, then untied the other knots, though leaning down to untie my ankles made my head pound alarmingly. I stood up, waited for the swaying to settle, then headed straight for Fremgen, who was staring blank-faced and zoned-out from his chair. I stepped across the first line of salt, scuffing it with my shoe, and then a wave of horrible dizziness swept over me. Was it the smoke, more of Fremgen’s homegrown knockout herbs? I stumbled and fell, sprawling across the inner salt circle.

And then, I guess the only way to say it is, I traveled in time.

No!

The voice was clearly Fremgen’s, though I didn’t hear it with my ears, but ringing in my head, a syllable of pure fury. I was on a street, beside a brick building, the air cool. I leaned against a wall and groaned. It felt like somebody was banging their fists against the inside of my skull.

Mine! Mine! Mine!
Fremgen shouted.

I turned my head—my neck felt funny, stiff, weird—and looked at my hands. My white hands. My white, hairy-knuckled, totally unfamiliar hands.

“Oh, hell,” I said. “I don’t believe this.” My voice was not my voice.

You’re ruining everything!
Fremgen wailed in the back of my head.
I’m on my way to see Lovecraft right now!

“Nope,” I said, and pushed away from the wall. I tried to take a step and nearly fell on my face, because my feet were shaped wrong, and my legs were the wrong length, and all together I felt like I was wearing a suit that was too big in some places and too tight in others. “Not going to happen.” I laughed out loud. Great-grandpa had a pretty good laugh. “You know, you should’ve read those letters I brought. The last one from Lovecraft especially. He and Cavanaugh had a pleasant lunch, if a little awkward.” I took a tentative step forward, and thought I was getting the hang of operating the body now. “But I’m not letting you anywhere near that guy. Not that I actually care if you take over Lovecraft’s body, one old dead white dude is as good as another I guess, but you just shouldn’t have fucked with me.”

I felt more pounding and poking in my head, but it wasn’t too bad, like the memory of a headache. Fremgen was in me, wrenching and heavy at once, like one too many pancakes, but he couldn’t pull himself up my spine, into my—into Cavanaugh’s—brain. He’d stolen a pint of my blood to make this spell, but when I stepped into the circle, I was full of my own blood, so I must have made a better connection. I turned down an alleyway, just the kind of narrow passage crowded by crumbling red brick buildings doubtless inhabited by swarthy immigrants that scared the shit out of Lovecraft. “So how do we get back?” I said.

I will never go back. You have to sleep sometime, and when you do, I will seize this body, I will find a spell to oust you, I will succeed. I’ve wanted this too long.

“We’ll see,” I said, and went through a doorway into what seemed to be an abandoned building, big holes bashed through the walls inside, heaps of plaster and brick and trash in the corners. I just wanted a place to hunker down and think for a little while. I wasn’t eager to take over Cavanaugh’s life, though he disappeared in 1928, so maybe that’s what happened—what would happen—whatever. Maybe I would just take off and make my own way, change my name, have a new life. Cavanaugh wasn’t that much older than I was, though life expectancies in the ’20s weren’t so great, probably. But back here I didn’t have the debts and narrowing of options I faced back home, so maybe—

Something unfolded out of a dark corner, and now that I looked, that corner hurt my eyes—the angles were all wrong somehow. And the thing that stepped toward me was too big for the space in this room, it should have been all hunched over and squeezed, but it was tall, it just kept getting taller, wider, unfolding into dimensions I couldn’t even comprehend, it was—

It was squamous. Rugose. Noisome. Eldritch. Cyclopean. Those aren’t the right words. There are no right words. But those are the best I can come up with.

You broke the circle!
Fremgen screamed in my mind.
You broke the seal of salt, you fool, you’ve loosed it, the opener of the way, the dweller from the inbetween, the guardian of the black and red path, it’s coming for us—

Fremgen was still desperately trying to wrest control of the body away from me. So I let him, and he grabbed on, and he shoved me, and I went hurtling away from there, out of the body, just in time to see the great thing’s face—which wasn’t a face, but there’s no word for what it was, and it did at least have a mouth—swing down and dilate and open and blossom and grasp.

I woke in Fremgen’s upstairs room, my head thudding. I sat up, woozy, trying to get the hang of my own body again, and scooted back out of the circle of salt. Fremgen was still in the chair, drooling, body an empty vessel. His mind was back there, still. In Cavanaugh. In the belly of some unspeakable beast.

I stood up, and then Fremgen lifted his face to me. His mouth opened but what came out weren’t words. Imagine shortwave radio static, loud and echoing across a depthless canyon. His eyes were wild and blank at once, crackling like an aurora. Whatever ate Fremgen had come back through the path he’d made in time.

I figured I was pretty well fucked. Then the thing in Fremgen’s body tried to stand up and fell sideways and knocked over a table and half a dozen burning candles, then kicked over the camping stove, which was still lit. There was a horrible snapping pop, and I’m pretty sure it was Fremgen’s hip breaking. The thing bellowed and mewled. I remembered how hard it had been for me to walk around in Cavanaugh’s body, because it was so different from my own, but at least he’d been human, he’d had arms and legs and bilateral symmetry. The thing in Fremgen had come from a totally different kind of body, a thousand limbs reaching into the sixth dimension, so it could only twitch and flail as it tried to fold the curve of the world around itself, just to reach me.

Either the rolling camp stove or the candles caught a pile of papers on fire, and pretty soon the whole terraced array of old newspapers was burning. The thing in Fremgen’s body tried to drag itself toward me, right over the flames, and it screamed, too ignorant of human limits to even know it should avoid fire. I half-ran, half-fell down the narrow stairs.

I stopped by the writing desk, trying not to listen to the screaming from above, the torrent of weird syllables that didn’t sound like any language I’d ever heard. I opened the drawer and there was an envelope with my name scrawled on the front. There was money in it, and though I didn’t stop to count it then, I later found out it was $200 short of the price we’d agreed upon for the letters. That cheap bastard. I left the briefcase with the letters in the living room. Fremgen had paid for them, after all, and I didn’t want them anymore. I didn’t want to see if that last letter had . . . changed.