New Cthulhu: The Recent Weird (38 page)

Here is where my guilt begins: not in humoring Blaine, but in opening that damnable book. There was nothing to prevent me from keeping the book for a week without so much as touching it, then bringing it back with an admission of defeat. I had seen Blaine’s desperation; he had come to me only because he could not think of anything rational to do. He would be disappointed, but neither surprised nor suspicious. But if I did that, he would leave again. And I wanted to surprise him, to show him that I could help him. Perhaps that was the root of my folly: I wanted Blaine finally to take me seriously.

I opened the book. It was, as Blaine had said, in cipher, but it was not a terribly difficult cipher. I thought I recognized it after looking at a few lines, and my estimation of the unknown forger went up several notches. It might not have been difficult, but it was quite obscure, a cipher invented and used almost exclusively by a circle of Flemish occultists who had flourished in the late sixteenth century. Even then, it did not occur to me that the book might be genuine, only that the forger had done his homework. I refreshed my memory of the cipher and got to work.

Within a page, I knew that the book was no fake, but by then it had trapped me.

I dare not describe it too closely, for fear that there may be another copy somewhere in existence, and that I may excite curiosity about it. If there is another copy, let it molder to dust wherever it lies.

I have dreams sometimes, in which I throw the book again on the fire, but this time it does not burn. It simply rests on top of the flames, its pages flipping randomly back and forth. I can feel my hands twitching and trembling with the need to reach into the fire and rescue it. Inevitably, I do reach. I plunge my hands into the fire, and I wake up. Although my hands are marred by neither blisters nor burns, they throb and sear for hours afterwards as if the fire in my dreams were real.

I will not give the book’s true title. I have since found a few veiled references to it in the writings of those Flemish occultists, and they refer to it always as the
Mortui Liber Magistri
—
The Book of the Master of the Dead
or, perhaps,
The Book of the Dead Master
. I will do the same. Freed of the cipher, the
Mortui Liber Magistri
was written in perfectly straightforward Latin, with all the mesmerizing power of a cobra’s inhuman gaze. Once I had read the first two sentences, I was lost. I could neither look away nor put it aside, and I finished my translation just as the sun was rising.

Then I telephoned Blaine. When Blaine answered, I wanted to say,
Blaine, this book is an abomination. I think you should burn it.
But the words that came out of my mouth, calmly and rationally, were nothing like that at all. The words I spoke were the words the
Mortui Liber Magistri
wanted spoken: “I know how to do it.”

Blaine was amazed, delighted. We made our plans. We would meet that night at his house, and I would show him how to bring Helena back. Then we would perform the ritual. “Very good,” I said to Blaine, replaced the telephone receiver, and staggered to bed.

I slept until sunset, when I woke up screaming.

I will not—
cannot
—describe the ritual. If I could excise it from my brain, believe that I would. I cannot, and the ineradicability of the memory is no more than I deserve. The ritual was an evil, perverted thing, and I neither know, nor want to know, where Blaine found the materials he used—except for the human blood. That was mine.

Blaine had always been able to persuade me to do what he wanted, and he was full of good, rational reasons why it had to be my blood instead of his. Sometimes, when my insomnia is particularly sere—a vast, arid, cracking wasteland in which the dead trees do not give shelter—I wonder if perhaps that was the crux at which things began to go wrong. Blaine loved his wife enough to spend thousands of dollars and to perform this obscene ritual, but not quite enough to open a vein in his own arm and let his own blood pool on the obsidian slab in his cellar.

There is a hard, angry little voice in my head, a voice like hers, that says,
Blaine deserved his death.
That is not true, and I know it. What Blaine
deserved
was a friend good enough and strong enough to stop him, but I was not that friend.

The book had released me as soon as I had explained everything to Blaine, so I have no excuse. Where a stronger, better man would have said,
Blaine, this is madness
, I looked into his burning, haunted, driven eyes, and I rolled back the cuff of my shirt.

The ritual worked. That is the most ghastly thing. I hold no particular brief for the rationality of the world, but that this vile obscenity should actually have the power to bring back the dead seems to me a sign not merely that the world is not rational, but that it is in fact entirely insane, a murderous lunatic gibbering in the corner of a padded cell.

The ritual worked. The patterns of blood and graveyard earth, the stench of burning entrails, the repulsive Latin phrases that Blaine chanted, they combined exactly as the book said they would. A presence coalesced in the middle of Blaine’s obsidian slab. It was shapeless and colorless at first, but as Blaine’s incantations mounted in fervor and monstrosity, it drew itself together, taking on Helena’s shape and garbing itself in her chic, severely tailored clothes. The colors were slower to come, but I remember the way her hair washed in, a torrent of blood and gold down her back. She was facing away from us.

“Helena,” Blaine said, breathless with wonder and desire. “Helena, darling, it’s me.”

The shape did not turn.

“Helena, it’s me, it’s Augustus. Darling, can you hear me?”

Still she did not turn, but a voice, undeniably hers, said, “Where’s Ruthie? I want Ruthie.”

“Helena!”

She moved a little, restlessly, in the circle, but still she would not turn. “Ruthie loves me,” she said. “He says so.”

“Helena, it’s Augustus!” I had an unwelcome flash of insight: that I was watching the distillation of the nine years of their marriage, Helena never looking at Blaine, always looking for something else, Blaine pleading and coaxing, talking always to her back, to the amazing sunset river of her hair.

“Why isn’t Ruthie here?” Helena said petulantly, as if she had not heard Blaine at all.

Blaine stepped into the circle. I do not think he realized at that point what he was doing, for the warnings in the
Mortui Liber Magistri
against the caster crossing the circle were dire and uncompromising, and I know that he heard me when I explained them.

“Blaine!” I lunged forward, but I could not catch him in time; I had drawn too far away from the circle when Helena began to manifest. My fingers brushed the back of his shirt with no more force than a butterfly’s wing, and he was beyond help. The instant Blaine was within the circle, Helena turned. She had heard him all along, had known to a nicety—as she ever had—how to get him to do what she wanted.

Her face was ghastly. It was not simply that she was, all too clearly, still dead. It was that she was dead and yet animate. Her face was gray and stiff and bloodless, but it was filled with a monstrous vitality. Blaine had not brought Helena back to life; he had done something far, far worse.

I suppose it is possible that the thing in the circle was not Helena Pryde Blaine at all, that it was a demon or some other sort of inhuman spirit. My own belief, however, is that it was the quintessence of Helena, the thing in her that Blaine had never been able to see, and that I had been powerless to show him: the greedy selfishness of a child who can never be satisfied with her own toys if another child has a toy, no matter how shabby, that she does not. Blaine was just another toy to her, and one that bored her.

He saw the truth of her then, the insatiable, heartless greed, although he had never seen it before. He recoiled from her and tried, far too late, to back out of the circle.

“Kiss me, darling Auggie,” said Helena, in her breathless, mocking way. She caught his arms and drew him toward her. Blaine stiffened and made a noise that would probably have been a scream if he could have gotten enough air into his lungs before her lips closed on his. When she let him go—five loathsome, endless seconds later—he fell down dead.

I was pressed into the corner, the cold damp bricks prodding at my back like angry fingers. My whole desire at that moment was that Helena should ignore me as she always had.

She looked at me. The face was livid and hard, but the eyes were still hers. “Boothie,” she said.

I moaned, somewhere in the back of my throat. It was all the noise I could make.

She cocked her head to one side, a hideous parody of the way she had been accustomed to flirt. “I don’t suppose I can talk
you
into the circle, Boothie, can I?”

My head was shaking “no,” wobbling back and forth on my neck as if it belonged to someone else.

“No,” she said, with a little moue of disappointment. “Auggie could have, I’ll bet. But you never liked me, did you?”

“I hated you, Helena,” I said, the truth croaking out of me unwilled.

She actually smiled then, and I would give anything I possess if I could stop seeing her smile in my dreams. The smile was hers, the little, gloating smirk that I had always loathed, but the dead stiffness of her face made it a rictus. “I don’t hold that against you, Boothie. I always knew you were jealous.” She tittered. “Boothie and Ruthie—Auggie and I both had our little lapdogs, didn’t we?”

I should have held my tongue, but my hatred of her, my crawling revulsion, was greater than my fear. “Yours killed you,” I said.

“And now Auggie’s has killed him. So I guess we’re even.”

She was starting to fade; with the death of its caster, the ritual was losing potency. She noticed it herself. “Phooey,” she said. She looked at me, her eyes bright with all the malice of the living Helena Pryde Blaine. “Are you going to have a go at calling Auggie back, Boothie? I’m sure you could do it. He always said you were the smartest man he knew.” With that, she was gone, dissolved into the stinking smoke, leaving nothing behind her but her husband’s corpse.

It took me until dawn to clean the cellar, washing away the blood and dirt and other materials. I had to lift Blaine to clean under him, but after that I left him where he was. His body looked sixty-two now instead of thirty-two, and there was not a mark on him: nothing to show that he had not fallen down dead of a heart attack. He was cold and stiff, and obviously had been dead much longer than five hours, although he had died only seven minutes before two o’clock.

He had been living entirely alone, without even servants—he had dismissed them all when his interest in necromancy began to devolve into obsession—and that was my good fortune. I took away the paraphernalia of the ritual and threw all its repellant ingredients into the river on my way home.

Then I waited.

Blaine was found four days later. One of his sisters finally became worried enough about him to use her key to his house. No one, except apparently for me, had heard from him in over a week. His family had known nothing of his dabblings in necromancy. He had told no one of his latest purchase—save of course the book dealer—and no one at all of his decision to consult me. There were, as I myself had seen, no signs of violence on his body, and the coroner’s judgment was that his heart had simply given out: he was awfully young for such a death, but he had been under a severe strain for a very long time, and these things did happen . . . If someone had gone exploring through Blaine’s effects, they might have found evidence to suggest another possibility, but his family did not wish any further inquiry, and the Blaines are powerful. No one else asked questions, and I heard later that the book dealer who had supplied Blaine’s mania had left the city unexpectedly and precipitously.

My culpability was not discovered, nor even suspected. Only I knew, and the things that came to find me in my dreams. They knew and I knew that Helena was right. I had killed Blaine, just as surely as Rutherford Chapin had killed her. The guilt and the loneliness were all but unbearable; I was as comfortless as Cain.

And all the while Helena’s last question—
Are you going to have a go at calling Auggie back, Boothie?
—echoed meanly through my head. I could repeat the ritual. I had kept the book, and my notes, and I had watched Blaine. I could bring Blaine back.

I wanted to. I wanted to bring Blaine back, just as Blaine had wanted to bring Helena back. I wanted to see him again, to hear his voice. More importantly, I wanted to talk to him and to know that he was finally and forever hearing
me
, not the version of me that lived in his head. I wanted Blaine to love me as I had always loved him.

I sat by the fireplace in my living room, the book and my sheaf of notes in my lap.
It will be different,
said a voice in my head—the voice, I suppose, of Blaine’s “Boothie.”
Helena was greedy and loveless. Blaine is my friend. Blaine would never want to hurt me. And I won’t make the mistakes that Blaine did.

It said such wonderful, plausible things, that voice, and I wanted to believe it very badly. It was my hatred of Helena that saved me, my absolute, unassailable conviction that she would never have put any idea in my head that might have made me happy. I remembered her eyes, remembered her smirk, and with a sudden convulsive motion, flung the
Mortui Liber Magistri
and all my notes onto the fire.

The notes went up at once. For a terrible moment I thought the book was not going to burn at all, and I grabbed the poker and shoved it deeper into the fire. It was an old book, its pages dry and brittle. Once they caught, they were quickly consumed, my last link with Blaine destroyed, transformed in seconds into a pile of ashes and a bitter, noxious reek.

The sound of them burning was like the sound of Helena laughing.

I dream of a day when they may rise above the billows to drag down in their reeking talons the remnants of puny, war-exhausted mankind—of a day when the land shall sink, and the dark ocean floor shall ascend amidst universal pandemonium.

“Dagon” · H.P. Lovecraft (1917)

• TAKE ME TO THE RIVER •

Paul McAuley

The first and probably last Bristol Free Festival hadn’t drawn anything like the numbers its blithely optimistic organizers had predicted, but even so, the crowd was four or five times as big as any Martin Feather had ever faced. Martin had been brought in as a last-minute replacement after the regular keyboard player in Sea Change, the semi-professional group headlining the bill, had broken his arm in a five-a-side football match. Last night’s run-through had gone okay, but now, in the mouth of the beast, Martin was beginning to get the jitters. The rest of the band were happy to hang out backstage, passing around a fat spliff, drinking free beer, and bullshitting with a mini-skirted reporter from the Bristol Evening Post, but Martin was too wound up to stay still, and after his third visit to the smelly Port-A-Loo he wandered around to the front of the stage to check out the action.

It was the hottest day yet in the hottest summer in living memory. More than three hundred people sprawled on drought-browned grass in front of the stage, and a couple of hundred more queued at ice-cream vans and deathburger carts or poked around stalls that sold vegetarian food, incense sticks and lumpy bits of hand-thrown pottery, hand-printed silk scarves and antique shawls and dresses. A fire-eater and a juggler entertained the festival-goers; a mime did his level best to piss them off. There was a fortune teller in a candy-striped tent. There were hippies and bikers, straight families and sullen groups of teenagers, small kids running around in face paint and dressing-up-box cowboy outfits and fairy princess dresses, naked toddlers, and a barechested sunburnt guy with long blond hair and white jeans who stood front and centre of the stage, arms held out crucifixion-style and face turned up to the blank blue sky as he grokked the music. He’d been there all afternoon, assuming the same pose for the Trad Jazz group, the pair of lank-haired unisex folk singers, the steel band, a group of teenagers who’d come all the way from Yeovil to play Gene Vincent’s greatest hits, and the reggae that the DJ played between sets. And now for Clouds of Memory, second-from-top on the bill, and currently bludgeoning their way through “Paint It Black.”

Martin had joined Clouds of Memory a few months ago, but he’d quickly fallen out with the singer and lead guitarist, Simon Cowley, an untalented egomaniac who couldn’t stay in key if his life depended on it. Martin still rankled over the way he’d been peremptorily fired after a gig in Yate and left to find his own way home (it hadn’t helped that his girlfriend had dumped him in the same week), but watching his nemesis make a buffoon of himself didn’t seem like a bad way to keep his mind off his stomach’s flip-flops.

Simon Cowley ended “Paint It Black” by wrenching an unsteady F chord from his guitar a whole beat behind the rest of the band, and stood centre-stage with one arm raised in triumph, as if the scattering of polite applause was a standing ovation. His shoulder-length blond hair was tangled across his face. He was wearing a red jumpsuit and white cowboy boots. He turned to the drummer and brought down his arm, kicking off the doomy opening chords of his self-penned set-closing epic, “My Baby’s Gone to UFO Heaven,” and Martin saw Dr. John stepping through the people scattered at the fringe of the audience, heading straight towards him.

He should have known at once that it meant trouble. Dr. John was a small-time hustler who, after dropping out of Bristol University’s Medical School, supplemented his dole by buying grass and hash at street-price in St. Paul’s, Bristol’s pocket ghetto, and selling it for a premium to students. They’d first met because Dr. John rented a rotten little flat above the club where Martin had been working. Dr. John had introduced Martin to the dubious delights of the Coronation Tap, and after Martin had set up his hole-in-the-wall secondhand record shop, Dr. John would stop by once or twice a week to sell LPs he’d found in junkshops or jumble sales, or had taken from students in exchange for twists of seeds and stems. He’d tell Martin to put on some reggae and turn it up, and do what he called the monkey dance. He’d flip through the stock boxes, pulling out albums and saying with mock-amazement, “Can you believe this shit? Can you believe anyone would actually pay money for it?” He’d look over the shoulders of browsing customers and tell them, “I wouldn’t buy that, man. It’ll make your ears bleed. It’ll lower your IQ.” or he’d read out the lyrics of prog rock songs in a plummy voice borrowed from Peter Sellers until Martin lost patience and told him to piss off. Then he’d shuffle towards the door, apologizing loudly for upsetting the nice middle-class students, pausing before he stepped out, asking Martin if he’d see him at the Coronation Tap later on.

When he wasn’t hustling dope or secondhand records, Dr. John spent most of his time in the Tap, sinking liver-crippling amounts of psychedelically strong scrumpy cider, bullshitting, and generally taking the piss. Like many people who aren’t comfortable in their own skins, he was restless, took great delight in being obnoxious, and preferred other people’s voices to his own. He would recite entire Monty Python sketches at the drop of a hat, or try to hold conversations in Captain Beefheart lyrics (“The past sure is tense, Martin! A big-eyed bean from Venus told me that. Know what I mean?”). His favorite film was Get Carter, and he could play Jack Carter for a whole evening. “A pint of scrumpy,” he’d say to the landlord, “in a thin glass.” Or he’d walk up to the biggest biker in the pub and tell him, “You’re a big man, but you’re in bad shape. With me, it’s a full time job. So behave yourself.” Amazingly, he was never beaten up, although a burly student in a rugby shirt once threw a full pint of beer in his face after being told that his eyes were like piss-holes in snow.

Dr. John’s scrumpy-fuelled exploits were legendary. The time he’d been arrested for walking down the middle of Whiteladies Road with a traffic cone on his head. The time he’d tried to demonstrate how stuntmen could fall flat on their faces, and had broken one of his front teeth on the pavement. The time he’d climbed into a tree and gone to sleep, waking up a couple of hours later and falling ten feet onto the roof of a car, leaving a dent the exact shape of his body and walking away without a bruise. The time he’d slipped on ice, fallen over, and smashed the bottle of whiskey in his pocket: a shard of glass had penetrated his thigh and damaged a nerve, leaving him with a slight but permanent limp. His life was like a cartoon. He was Tom in Tom and Jerry, Wile E. Coyote in Roadrunner. He was one of those people who bang their way from one pratfall to the next in the kind of downhill spiral that seems funny as long as you don’t get too close.

Now he gimped up to Martin, a short, squat guy with a cloud of curly black hair and a wispy beard, wearing a filthy denim jacket, a Black Sabbath T-shirt, and patchwork flares, saying loudly, “Didn’t you used to be in this band?”

“For about five minutes in April.”

Dr. John sneered at the stage. “You’re well out of it, man. Is that a gong I see, right there behind the drummer? It is, isn’t it? Fucking poseurs.”

“If they dumped Simon and found someone who could actually sing and play lead guitar, they might have the kernel of a good sound. Put the bass and drums front and centre, like a reggae set-up.”

“Not that you’re bitter or anything,” Dr. John said. He pulled a clear glass bottle half-filled with a cloudy brown liquid from one pocket of his denim jacket, unscrewed the cap and took a long swallow of brackish liquid, belched, and offered it to Martin.

Martin took a cautious sip and immediately spat it out. “Jesus. What is it?”

“Woke up on the floor of this strange flat this morning, man. I must have been invited to a party. I mixed myself a cocktail with what was left.” Dr. John snatched back the bottle, took another pull, and smacked his lips. “You have to admit it has a certain vigor.”

“It tastes like cough medicine. There’s beer backstage, if you want some.”

“Backstage? Were you playing, man? I’m sorry to have missed it.”

“I’m on next. Playing with the headliners.”

“Free beer, man, now I know you’re a star.”

“I’m only a stand-in, but I get all the perks.”

On stage, Simon Cowley, his face screwed up inside a fall of blond hair, was hunched over his guitar and picking his way through an extended solo. When Martin had joined Clouds of Memory, he’d tried to get them interested in the raw new stuff coming out of New York and London—Television and the Ramones, Dr. Feelgood and the 101ers—but Simon had sneered and said it was nothing but three-chord pub rock with no trace of musical artistry whatsoever. “Artistry” was one of Simon’s favorite words. He was the kind of guy who spent Saturday afternoons in guitar shops, pissing off the assistants by playing note-by-note copies of Jimmy Page and Eric Clapton solos. He liked to drop quotes from Nietzsche and Hesse into casual conversation. He was a big fan of Eric Von Daniken. He subscribed to the muso’s music paper, Melody Maker, and despised the achingly hip streetwise attitudes of the New Musical Express, which Martin read from cover to cover every week. The tension between them had simmered for a couple of weeks, until, while they were packing up after that gig in Yate, Simon had picked an argument with Martin and sacked him on the spot.

Dr. John took another swig of his cocktail and said, “Sabbath, man, they’re the only ones who can do this kind of thing properly. Did I tell you about the gig at Colston Hall this spring?”

“Only about a hundred times.”

“It wasn’t loud enough, but that was the only thing wrong with it. A thousand kids belting out ‘Paranoid’ at the top of their lungs, it was a religious experience. But this, this is like . . . ” He looked up at the sky for inspiration, failed to find it, and took another drink.

“It’s prog rock crap,” Martin said, “but Dancing Jesus likes it.”

The barechested guy stood in the middle of the thin crowd, arms flung wide, face tilted to the blue sky, quivering all over.

Dr. John’s lifted his upper lip in a sneering smile that showed off his broken tooth. “Where his head’s at, man, he’d groove on anything. I sold him my last three tabs of acid and he dropped them all. Anyone’s in UFO heaven, it’s him.”

“Made much money here?”

“I’m here for the vibe, man.”

“Right.”

“Truly. I’m down to seeds and stems until Tuesday or Wednesday, when this a guy I know is going to deliver some primo hash. Moroccan gold, man, the real no-camel-shit-whatsoever deal. This guy, his brother’s a sailor, gets the stuff straight from the souk. I’ll put you down for an eighth, seeing as you’re a good pal and a professional musician and everything.” Dr. John looked around and sidled closer and said, “Plus, you can help me out a little right now.”

Martin was instantly wary. He said, “I’m on after this lot finishes.”

“I’ve seen these fuckers play before, man. They’re getting into the drum solo, and then there’s the bass solo, that plonker’s endless guitar wankery . . . You’ve got plenty of time. And it’s a really simple favor.”

“I bet.”

“A lot easier than saving someone from a beating.”

A few weeks ago, at a dub concert in a community hall in St. Paul’s, a gang of Jamaican youths had decided to get territorial on Martin’s bloodclat white ass. Dr. John and his dealer had chased them off, an heroic deed Dr. John had mentioned no more than fifty or sixty times since. Martin said, “I believe it was your friend Hector who actually saved me.”

“But I alerted him to the situation, I asked him to help you out because you’re a good friend of mine. And friends have to look after each other, right?”

Martin sighed. “If I do this thing for you, will you promise to never mention St. Paul’s again?”

“Cross my heart and hope to die, man. See that girl?” Dr. John put his arm around Martin, enveloping him in a powerful odor compounded of stale booze, sweat, and pot smoke, and turned him around.

“What am I looking at?”

“The girl, man. Black hair, white dress.”

She stood beside the St. John’s ambulance, in the narrow wedge of shadow it cast. Tall and willowy in a long white dress that clung to her curves, her arms bare and pale, her elfin face framed by a Louise Brooks bob of midnight-black hair.

“I’ve been watching her,” Dr. John said.

“I don’t think she’s your type.”

Regulars at the Tap sometimes speculated about Dr. John’s sex life. Everyone agreed that he must have one, but no one could imagine what it could be like.

“She’s dealing, man. Actually, she’s not really dealing because there’s no money changing hands, she’s been handing out freebies all afternoon. What you can do for me is sashay over there and cop a sample of whatever it is she’s holding. See, it really is an easy-peasey little favor.”

“If it’s so easy, why don’t you do it?”

“Man, that would hardly be cool. I’d blow my reputation if I was seen taking a hand-out from some hippy chick.”

“But I wouldn’t.”

“That’s different, man. You’re not in the business. You’re a civilian. Go get a sample, okay? And talk to her, try to find out where she’s getting her stuff from. A chick like that, she has to be fronting for someone. Maybe those guys who muscled into my business at the Student Union.”

“The ones who put the Fear in you,” Martin said.

One day at the beginning of the long, hot summer, Dr. John had walked into the Tap with two black eyes and a split lip, and insisted on showing everyone the stitches in his scalp whether they wanted to look or not. “Four fuckers beat me up round the back of the Student Union. Told me that it was their territory from now on. Some pockmarked guy with a goatee is working my spot now, turning the kids on to brown heroin by telling them that he’s out of grass, but if they’d like to try a sample of this nice powder. . . ” Dr. John had looked solemn for a moment, then had put on his Get Carter voice. “Still, look on the bright side. They’re only fucking students. Maybe a little bit of heroin will light up their immensely dull lives.”