New Cthulhu: The Recent Weird (57 page)

Vowles laughed at that, but then they showed more footage of the ridge, the fire and flashing lights the only features on a blackness that might’ve been the ocean, and the wink of unburned green brush with the white granite stone were laid bare under the searchlights. He cringed as he watched, for fear that the camera saw—

Saw what? What really happened? He told nobody what he saw. Nobody ever believed that kind of shit from somebody under anesthetic. He was still asking himself what he saw as he nodded off halfway through the lowlights of the Padres game, and each repetition took him further away from an answer.

The earthquake woke him up in the middle of the night. Before he could wake Dana or even look at the clock, he was falling through the floor and the foundation split open in a jagged black mouth that swallowed the Vowles household.

He found himself jammed more or less upright between the hot, wounded rock walls of a new fault line. His wife and daughters screamed for him in the dark, and he screamed back for them to be calm. The earth shifted, flexing like the muscles of a jaw. Cyclopean molars gritted and ground his family’s screams into inert slurping sounds, and now he only screamed to drown it out.

He heard and felt something above his head—purposeful, furious digging. He was going to be saved. He tried to shake free of the rock, but dirt tumbled into his face, choking him. He wriggled and got an arm free, and the debris dislodged by his arm showered his face, and he really did not want to be rescued, now—

For he was buried alive upside down, and the rescuer burrowing towards him like a bulldozer was coming for him
from underneath—

He woke up in the hospital. “It can’t happen,” he screamed at the nurse trying to strap him down. “It can’t happen! We stopped it—”

Dana jolted out of a chair beside the bed to take hold of his mummified arm. The nurse tried to give him something to calm him down, but Dana drove her away.

The news played on the TV bolted to the far wall.

Firefighters had discovered a body in the area cleared by the fire, and identified him as 69-year old Calvin Loomis, a retired US Geological Survey engineer afflicted with Alzheimer’s, missing from his home since he wandered away, two days ago. An old snapshot appeared on-screen: soft, sunny, Elmer Fudd features, white, crewcut hair, and freckled, ruddy skin. Vowles recognized the face; he’d seen it in the crowd in the opposing team’s bleachers at one of his daughters’ softball games.

The Caltech Seismological Laboratory reported a 2.4-magnitude seismic hiccup at eight-thirty tonight, directly underneath central San Diego. The short violence of the spike, which the geologists explained as vertical realignment from very deep in the crust, had gone mostly unnoticed throughout the state. This kind of settling was actually beneficial, said the newscaster, beaming reassurance, and disproved outmoded doomsday scenarios about the Big One. The East Pacific Plate still pushed coastal California northward at a stately two inches per annum, but no ugly seismic surprises lay in store for the foreseeable future.

Not so lucky was some city in central Mexico, flattened and devoured by a 6.4 quake. He didn’t catch the name of the vanished place—they might not even have said it—but three hundred were dead, thousands wounded and another several hundred missing.

The volcano on the big island of Hawaii was acting up again, with lava flows causing the evacuation of guests at two imperiled hotels. China denied that an earthquake had killed hundreds at a labor camp in Mongolia.

There was something about a missing local newlywed couple, but already, when he recalled the image of those naked, slumbering bodies swallowed up by the living bowels of the earth, he saw it through a pixilated filter, with a news logo slapped on it, two more strangers dying. Strangers died every day—

It happened
, he told himself.
You know it did
. The land took them.
It had to happen—what has to be done—

He loved this city, this land, as much as anyone who lived there ever did. In twenty years, he would still live here, and his children would live here, and, God willing, they would raise children here, too.

And somebody would have to do something . . .

. . . the snatches of sight I experienced had a profound and terrible meaning, and a frightful connexion with myself, but that some purposeful influence held me from grasping that meaning and that connexion. Then came that queerness about the element of time, and with it desperate efforts to place the fragmentary dream-glimpses in the chronological and spatial pattern.

“The Shadow Out of Time” · H.P. Lovecraft (1936)

• DETAILS •

China Miéville

When the boy upstairs got hold of a pellet gun and fired snips of potato at passing cars, I took a turn. I was part of everything. I wasn’t an outsider. But I wouldn’t join in when my friends went to the yellow house to scribble on the bricks and listen at the windows.

One girl teased me about it, but everyone else told her to shut up. They defended me, even though they didn’t understand why I wouldn’t come.

I don’t remember a time before I visited the yellow house for my mother.

On Wednesday mornings at about nine o’clock I would open the front door of the decrepit building with a key from the bunch my mother had given me. Inside was a hall and two doors, one broken and leading to the splintering stairs. I would unlock the other and enter the dark flat. The corridor was unlit and smelt of old wet air. I never walked even two steps down that hallway. Rot and shadows merged, and it looked as if the passage disappeared a few yards from me. The door to Mrs. Miller’s room was right in front of me. I would lean forward and knock.

Quite often there were signs that someone else had been there recently. Scuffed dust and bits of litter. Sometimes I was not alone. There were two other children I sometimes saw slipping in or out of the house. There were a handful of adults who visited Mrs. Miller.

I might find one or another of them in the hallway outside the door to her flat, or even in the flat itself, slouching in the crumbling dark hallway. They would be slumped over or reading some cheap-looking book or swearing loudly as they waited.

There was a young Asian woman who wore a lot of makeup and smoked obsessively. She ignored me totally. There were two drunks who came sometimes. One would greet me boisterously and incomprehensibly, raising his arms as if he wanted to hug me into his stinking, stinking jumper. I would grin and wave nervously, walk past him. The other seemed alternately melancholic and angry. Occasionally I’d meet him by the door to Mrs. Miller’s room, swearing in a strong cockney accent. I remember the first time I saw him, he was standing there, his red face contorted, slurring and moaning loudly.

“Come on, you old slag,” he wailed, “you sodding old
slag
. Come on, please, you cow.”

His words scared me but his tone was wheedling, and I realized I could hear her voice. Mrs. Miller’s voice, from inside the room, answering him back. She did not sound frightened or angry.

I hung back, not sure what to do, and she kept speaking, and eventually the drunken man shambled miserably away. And then I could continue as usual.

I asked my mother once if I could have some of Mrs. Miller’s food. She laughed very hard and shook her head. In all the Wednesdays of bringing the food over, I never even dipped my finger in to suck it.

My mum spent an hour every Tuesday night making the stuff up. She dissolved a bit of gelatin or cornflower with some milk, threw in a load of sugar or flavorings, and crushed a clutch of vitamin pills into the mess. She stirred it until it thickened and let it set in a plain white plastic bowl. In the morning it would be a kind of strong-smelling custard that my mother put a dishcloth over and gave me, along with a list of any questions or requests for Mrs. Miller and sometimes a plas0tic bucket full of white paint.

So I would stand in front of Mrs. Miller’s door, knocking, with a bowl at my feet. I’d hear a shifting and then her voice from close by the door.

“Hello,” she would call, and then say my name a couple of times. “Have you my breakfast? Are you ready?”

I would creep up close to the door and hold the food ready. I would tell her I was.

Mrs. Miller would slowly count to three. On three, the door suddenly swung open a snatch, just a foot or two, and I thrust the bowl into the gap. She grabbed it and slammed the door quickly in my face.

I couldn’t see very much inside the room. The door was open for less than a second. My strongest impression was of the whiteness of the walls. Mrs. Miller’s sleeves were white, too, and made of plastic. I never got much of a glimpse at her face, but what I saw was unmemorable. A middle-aged woman’s eager face.

If I had a bucket full of paint, we would run through the routine again. Then I would sit cross-legged in front of her door and listen to her eat.

“How’s your mother?” she would shout. At that I’d unfold my mother’s careful queries. She’s okay, I’d say, she’s fine. She says she has some questions for you.

I’d read my mother’s strange questions in my careful childish monotone, and Mrs. Miller would pause and make interested sounds, and clear her throat and think out loud. Sometimes she took ages to come to an answer, and sometimes it would be almost immediate.

“Tell your mother she can’t tell if a man’s good or bad from that,” she’d say. “Tell her to remember the problems she had with your father.” Or: “Yes, she can take the heart of it out. Only she has to paint it with the special oil I told her about.” ”Tell your mother seven. But only four of them concern her and three of them used to be dead.

“I can’t help her with that,” she told me once, quietly. “Tell her to go to a doctor, quickly.” And my mother did, and she got well again.

“What do you not want to do when you grow up?” Mrs. Miller asked me one day.

That morning when I had come to the house the sad cockney vagrant had been banging on the door of her room again, the keys to the flat flailing in his hand.

“He’s begging you, you old tart, please, you owe him, he’s so bloody angry,” he was shouting, “only it ain’t you gets the sharp end, is it?
Please
, you cow, you sodding cow, I’m on me knees. . . . ”

“My door knows you, man,” Mrs. Miller declared from within. “It knows you and so do I, you know it won’t open to you. I didn’t take out my eyes and I’m not giving in now. Go home.”

I waited nervously as the man gathered himself and staggered away, and then, looking behind me, I knocked on her door and announced myself. It was after I’d given her the food that she asked her question.

“What do you not want to do when you grow up?”

If I had been a few years older her inversion of the cliché would have annoyed me: It would have seemed mannered and contrived. But I was only a young child, and I was quite delighted.

I don’t want to be a lawyer, I told her carefully. I spoke out of loyalty to my mother, who periodically received crisp letters that made her cry or smoke fiercely, and swear at lawyers, bloody smartarse lawyers.

Mrs. Miller was delighted.

“Good boy!” she snorted. “We know all about lawyers. Bastards, right? With the small print! Never be tricked by the small print! It’s right there in front of you, right there in front of you, and you can’t even see it and then suddenly it makes you notice it! And I tell you, once you seen it it’s got you!” She laughed excitedly. “Don’t let the small print get you. I’ll tell you a secret.” I waited quietly, and my head slipped nearer the door.

“The devil’s in the details!” She laughed again. “You ask your mother if that’s not true. The devil is in the details!”

I’d wait the twenty minutes or so until Mrs. Miller had finished eating, and then we’d reverse our previous procedure and she’d quickly hand me out an empty bowl. I would return home with the empty container and tell my mother the various answers to her various questions. Usually she would nod and make notes. Occasionally she would cry.

After I told Mrs. Miller that I did not want to be a lawyer she started asking me to read to her. She made me tell my mother, and told me to bring a newspaper or one of a number of books. My mother nodded at the message and packed me a sandwich the next Wednesday, along with the Mirror. She told me to be polite and do what Mrs. Miller asked, and that she’d see me in the afternoon.

I wasn’t afraid. Mrs. Miller had never treated me badly from behind her door. I was resigned and only a little bit nervous.

Mrs. Miller made me read stories to her from specific pages that she shouted out. She made me recite them again and again, very carefully. Afterward she would talk to me. Usually she started with a joke about lawyers, and about small print.

“There’s three ways not to see what you don’t want to,” she told me. “One is the coward’s way and too damned painful. The other is to close your eyes forever, which is the same as the first, when it comes to it. The third is the hardest and the best: You have to make sure
only the things you can afford to see come before you
.”

One morning when I arrived the stylish Asian woman was whispering fiercely through the wood of the door, and I could hear Mrs. Miller responding with shouts of amused disapproval. Eventually the young woman swept past me, leaving me cowed by her perfume.

Mrs. Miller was laughing, and she was talkative when she had eaten.

“She’s heading for trouble, messing with the wrong family! You have to be careful with all of them,” she told me. “Every single one of them on that other side of things is a tricksy bastard who’ll kill you soon as
look
at you, given half a chance.

“There’s the gnarly throat-tipped one . . . and there’s old hasty, who I think had best remain nameless,” she said wryly.

“All old bastards, all of them.
You can’t trust them
at all, that’s what I say. I should know, eh? Shouldn’t I?” She laughed. ”Trust me, trust me on this: It’s too easy to get on the wrong side of them.

“What’s it like out today?” she asked me. I told her that it was cloudy.

“You want to be careful with that,” she said. “All sorts of faces in the clouds, aren’t there? Can’t help noticing, can you?” She was whispering now. “Do me a favor when you go home to your mum: Don’t look up, there’s a boy. Don’t look up at all.”

When I left her, however, the day had changed. The sky was hot, and quite blue.

The two drunk men were squabbling in the front hall and I edged past them to her door. They continued bickering in a depressing, garbled murmur throughout my visit.

“D’you know, I can’t even really remember what it was all about, now! Mrs. Miller said when I had finished reading to her. “I can’t remember! That’s a terrible thing. But you don’t forget the basics. The exact question escapes me, and to be honest I think maybe I was just being
nosy
or
showing off
. . . . I can’t say I’m proud of it but it could have been that. It could. But whatever the question, it was all about a way of seeing an answer.

“There’s a way of looking that lets you read things. If you look at a pattern of tar on a wall, or a crumbling mound of brick or somesuch . . . there’s a way of unpicking it. And if you know how, you can trace it and read it out and see the things hidden
right there in front of you
, the things you’ve been seeing but not noticing, all along. But you have to learn how.” She laughed. It was a high-pitched, unpleasant sound. “Someone has to teach you. So you have to make certain friends.

“But you can’t make friends without making enemies.

“You have to open it all up for you to see inside. You make what you see into a window, and you see what you want through it. You make what you see a sort of
door
.”

She was silent for a long time. Then: “Is it cloudy again?” she asked suddenly. She went on before I answered.

“If you look up, you look into the clouds for long enough and you’ll see a face. Or in a tree. Look in a tree, look in the branches and soon you’ll see them lust so, and there’s a face or a running man, or a bat or whatever. You’ll see it all suddenly, a picture in the pattern of the branches, and you won’t have chosen to see it. And you can’t
unsee
it.

“That’s what you have to learn to do, to read the details like that and see what’s what and learn things. But you’ve to be damn careful. You’ve to be careful not to disturb anything.” Her voice was absolutely cold, and I was suddenly very frightened.

“Open up that window, you’d better be damn careful that what’s in the details doesn’t look back and see you.”

The next time I went, the maudlin drunk was there again wailing obscenities at her through her door. She shouted at me to come back later, that she didn’t need her food right now. She sounded resigned and irritated, and she went back to scolding her visitor before I had backed out of earshot.

He was screaming at her that she’d gone too far, that she’d pissed about too long, that things were coming to a head, that there was going to be hell to pay, that she couldn’t avoid it forever, that it was her own fault.

When I came back he was asleep, snoring loudly, curled up a few feet into the mildewing passage. Mrs. Miller took her food and ate it quickly, returned it without speaking.

When I returned the following week, she began to whisper to me as soon as I knocked on the door, hissing urgently as she opened it briefly and grabbed the bowl.

“It was an accident, you know,” she said, as if responding to something I’d said. “I mean of
course
you know in theory that anything might happen, you get
warned
, don’t you? But oh my . . . oh my
God
it took the breath out of me and made me cold to realize what had happened.”

I waited. I could not leave, because she had not returned the bowl. She had not said I could go. She spoke again, very slowly.

“It was a new day.” Her voice was distant and breathy. “Can you even imagine? Can you see what I was ready to do? I was poised . . . to change . . . to see everything that’s hidden. The best place to hide a book is in a library. The best place to hide secret things is there, in the visible angles, in our view, in plain sight.