New Cthulhu: The Recent Weird (64 page)

At last, in a tiny voice, Charlie said, “Take me home.”

Leech was magnanimous. “But of course, Charles. Trust me, this way will suit you better. Pursue your interests, wage your war against the dream factory, and you will be remembered. Everyone will know your name.”

“Yeah, man, whatever. Let’s get going.”

“Creighton,” said Leech. “It’s night up top. The moon is full. Do you think you can lead us to the moonlight?”

“Sure thing, George. I’m the Wolf Man, ahhh-woooooo!”

Janice Marsh had died while they were under the mountain. Her room stank and bad water sloshed on the carpets. The tarpaulin served as her shroud.

Leech hated to let her down, but she’d had too little to bring to the table. She had been a coelacanth, a living fossil.

Charlie announced that he was abandoning the search for the Subterranean Sea of California, that there were other paths to Helter Skelter. After all, was it not written that when you get to the bottom you start again at the top. He told his Family that his album would change the world when he got it together with Dennis, and he sang them a song about how the pigs would suffer.

Inside, Charlie was terrified. That would make him more dangerous.

But not as dangerous as Derek Leech.

Before he left the Ranch, in a requisitioned buggy with Constant at the wheel, Leech sat a while with Junior.

“You’ve contributed more than you know,” he told Junior. “I don’t often do this, but I feel you’re owed. So, no deals, no contracts, just an offer. A no-strings offer. It will set things square between us. What do you want? What can I do for you?”

Leech had noticed how hoarse Junior’s speech was, gruffer even than you’d expect after years of chili and booze. His father had died of throat cancer, a silent movie star bereft of his voice. The same poison was just touching the son, extending tiny filaments of death around his larynx. If asked, Leech could call them off, take away the disease.

Or he could fix up a big budget star vehicle at Metro, a Lifetime Achievement Academy Award, a final marriage to Ava Gardner, a top-ten record with the Monkees, a hit TV series . . .

Junior thought a while, then hugged Leech.

“You’ve already done it, George. You’ve already granted my wish. You call me by my name. By my mom’s name. Not by his, not by ‘Junior.’ They had to starve me into taking it. That’s all I ever wanted. My own name.”

It was so simple. Leech respected that; those who asked only for a little respect, a little place of their own—they should get what they deserve, as much as those who came greedily to the feast, hoping for all you can eat.

“Goodbye, Creighton,” he said.

Leech walked away from a happy man.

I cannot think of the deep sea without shuddering at the nameless things that may at this very moment be crawling and floundering on its slimy bed, worshipping their ancient stone idols and carving their own detestable likenesses on submarine obelisks of water-soaked granite.

“Dagon” · H.P. Lovecraft (1917)

• HEAD MUSIC •

Lon Prater

At 1:02 a.m., Diego’s eyes snapped open. The haunting, tuneless music was in his head again, louder than ever. Mournful tones rose and fell, reverberating between his temples. Throughout his eighteen years he had heard them: occasional, faint and inviting whispers tugging at his innards. Now the deep, echoing hornsong was louder, more insistent; it had control of his body.

Bare-chested and shoeless, he burst through the painted screen door. The cool autumn night welcomed him with a clammy marsh-salt embrace.

The flimsy wood frame squealed and slammed shut behind him. The keys to his father’s work truck jangled in one hand.

On the horizon, a prowler moon crouched fat and yellow behind a low fence of backlit clouds. His naked back pressed against the chilled vinyl seat. Diego would have shivered, but the music moving his body prevented it. He was glad that he had worn sweatpants to bed.

Bare feet, wet with dew and grass clippings, pumped the gas pedal and pressed in the clutch. He watched—calmly, serenely—as his right hand twisted the key. The stubborn engine roared indignantly to life.

The truck lurched onto the empty road, headlights darkened. Diego was completely out of control: a passenger within the truck as well as within his own body.

The rusty old heap hurtled down the empty blacktop, landscaping tools clattering madly in the bed. Diego felt content. He rode the swell and crash of a forlorn internal symphony; he was not afraid.

The beach was part of a state park and nature preserve. Red and white signs threatened after-hours trespassers with fines and jail time. The penalties were even steeper for those foolish enough to take animals, glass, or vehicles onto the sand.

The renegade truck bounced over the benighted dunes. At the same time, the plaintive wailing began to recede; a cacophony of lesser tones gained in strength. He realized with a start that his body was his own again.

Diego squinted through the dirty windshield. A curtain of dense gray clouds blocked most of the moon’s reflected light. This far from town the stars shone with a rare luminosity. Their light was mirrored in the phosphorescent foam and sparkle of the cresting waves. Wet sand glimmered at the water’s edge.

A shadowed hump lay in the blackness just yards from the lapping waves. Leaning forward, Diego flipped on the headlights.

The head music erupted into skull-splitting shrieks. His hand shot out automatically, killing the lights. The return of darkness stifled the blood curdling screeches as well—but he had already caught a glimpse of the thing on the beach.

He wiped the sudden cold sweat from his face and took several calming breaths. Steeling himself, Diego opened the door and stepped trembling onto the sand.

He shivered. The night had grown mute and windless. Even the tuneless music had faded to a soft mewling; his brain was full of newborn kittens.

Sand and bits of dune grass scrunched beneath him as he approached the creature. It had the length and girth of a small killer whale, but that was where the resemblance ended.

Diego walked around it, unable to fathom what he was seeing. It had slick, warty gray-green skin flecked all over with lambent orange jewel-like scales. There were no eyes to speak of. Either end of its tube-like body presented a fleshy pucker of skin surrounded by a forest of supple whips and barbed tendrils. Near the center of its girth there were three great vein-lined fans pressed close against its body.

The creature stank of window cleaner.

Whatever it was, it had called him here to this beach with its hornsong. The same sounds he had heard over the years, only stronger now, more desperate.

A lonely dirge-like cry sang inside him. It engulfed him in waterlogged sadness, drowning out the soft whining chorus. He felt a strange kinship with this thing, one that he could not explain.

Ancient intuition clawed its way into his awareness. The creature—no, she—was stranded, beached here in the alien air. Unable to return to the sea, she knew she was dying.

Tears scorched his eyes. He rushed at her, vainly throwing his weight into an attempt to roll the immense cylinder of her body back into the sea.

As reward, Diego’s bare chest, arms, and back were scored with tiny nicks from the scattered orange scales. His torso was smeared with a gritty, viscous film that made the open cuts swell and burn like bee stings. He cried out in frustration, looking around for a way to save this bizarre and wondrous creature.

His eyes came to rest on the abandoned truck. He strode toward it, for the moment ignoring the piteous lament in his head. A search of the truck revealed a lawnmower and gas can, hand tools and pruning shears, shovels and rakes, a wheelbarrow and some clear bags—but nothing that would help him return this behemoth safely to the sea.

Despair filled him like freshly poured concrete. He returned to her side. The inky waves were almost washing up against one puckered end.

The kitten-like mewling started up again in earnest. He put a hand on her, careful not to let the sharp orange speckles cut him. On some primitive level he felt the squirming fluted mass of life within her.

They could have been her brains as easily as they were her young. It didn’t matter to Diego; he knew that they needed to come out of her.

He gulped, approaching her ocean-side sphincter again. The dank smell of salt and rotting seaweed mixed with her ammonia odor, an unsettling combination. He carefully pushed the waving tendrils away from the opening. This would not be easy.

Diego plunged his arm into the unearthly creature, straining to keep down his gorge. His heart beat fast and loud in his ears. Something skittered across his foot and he jumped—a ghost crab.

His arm was buried to the shoulder. The keening in his head was louder, more frantic. He grasped the end of a slippery fat hose and pulled. It came out with a slurping noise and a geyser of foul liquid.

Diego dropped the greasy pus-thing and vomited all over it. It writhed there, celebrating the glorious emptying of Diego’s guts. Then, like a slow but enormous blond worm, it inched its way into the waves.

The mother’s song was faint now; the chaotic internal cries of her young continued to gnaw desperately at him.

He jabbed an arm into her again, feeling nothing but the pain of his burning cuts and the squish of her organs. He removed his arm and went to the opposite end. This time it was easier. Diego eased two of the worm-things from the orifice, each over six-feet long. He deposited them gingerly into the lapping water.

They lay there motionless. Diego could suddenly smell their corruption, even over the ammonia and beach scents.
Stillborn. As were the others still rotting within the dune-side womb
.

He had saved one of the disgusting things. Wasn’t that enough? The wailing chorus of those still in the sea-side womb disagreed, begging for release. One day they would grow into creatures as beautiful and alien as the one dying here before him. But not if he left them inside her to die.

He went to the back of the truck and returned with the pruning shears. Sticking the bottom blade into the sphincter at the water’s edge, he crossed himself, preparing for what he had to do.

Diego squeezed the rubber coated handles together with all his might. The blades weren’t as sharp as he had hoped. They did not cut so much as chew slits into her, widening the puckered hole. She did not bleed, at least not so he could tell it, but the ammonia smell nearly made him pass out. What kept him conscious was the soft saxophone moan of her pain—her fear—echoing through his head.

He finished carving a second slit out of the rubbery flesh. He knew he had the will to do what was required. Nevertheless, he was thankful that his stomach was already empty. Diego took one last look around.

The moon had escaped from the clouds, leaning closer now to cast a pallid eye on the boy and the primeval sea thing on the beach. His father’s truck stood lonely watch from atop the dunes.

Diego pulled off his sweatpants and boxer shorts, leaving them in a heap on the sand. He grunted, drawing in one last breath before he burrowed naked and unflinching into the womb of the beast.

Rough slimy tissue like pus-soaked leprous scabs pressed all around him. He was waist deep inside her, and clawing his way closer to the maggoty nest of her tender young. The vapors were rank, infectious. Every one of the cuts on his body screamed as they were filled with her vile inner fluids. Worming himself farther into her, Diego gagged on bile.

He could feel the wind kick up, tickling his feet and ankles. Every other part of him was embalmed in the gelatinous tract to her inner organs.

Diego heard her wordless voice again, clearer and richer, a quiet ululation. From within her the music embraced him, every note entwining his soul and hers. She sang to him of the deep black ocean floor, of submarine cities chiseled from stone and shell that had never been touched by the sun. He shot harpoon-fast through majestic salt-water caverns populated by unimagined species both great and terrible. An age long past—and yet to come—dazzled his mind; those who once reigned would awaken. They would sweep the planet clean of humanity, sloughing man’s frail advances from its face like dead skin.

His reaching hands dug into a torn membrane, ripping it farther. Diego scooped up the howling coils of her knotted young, dragging them back with him through her awful stickiness in one armful. He collapsed to the sand, the writhing blond creatures squirming free of each other and all over and around him, then crawling blindly into the waves.

Finally, the last one slipped beneath the surface, leaving Diego with only the moon and the gorgeous stinking carcass for company. He felt grief wash over him even as he saw the tide drawing his pants and vomit out to sea.

Scientists would come in the morning, and reporters. They’d take their pictures and measurements. Scratching their chins in wonder, they’d speak earnestly of evolution and the coelacanth. They would cut her up in their laboratories, puzzling over the secret of her genes. In time, someone would realize the horrible truth; the world would be warned of mankind’s short leash.

Diego rose, his nude body sticky with foul juices and pockmarked by the swollen cuts. He dug in his toes, kicking wet sand across the beach.

He made one last trip to his father’s truck, rummaging in the glove box first before grabbing the metal can from the bed.

With remorse like he had never felt before, Diego splattered gasoline all over the she-carcass and her stillborn young. He stood there feeling the loss of the music for a long time before he set fire to a wad of napkins and papers. Mouthing a silent and unintelligible prayer, he threw the flaming papers upon her.

She went up in a quick blue whoosh that in other cases might have made Diego jump. He danced an unfamiliar dance around her instead, growing dizzy from the fumes. Naked to the moon and sand and wind, he made dirge noises never before sounded upon the earth by man.

The pyre burned itself out about an hour before dawn. Diego hunched on the sand, watching the last smoking embers. She had no bones; the flame left nothing behind but a sprinkling of orange scales. He poked the blackened sand with the shovel before turning it over and over upon itself, hiding even this evidence from the failing stars above.

He was sweating, coated with sand and sticky filth. No one would know what had transpired on this beach; Diego was certain of that. The secret of her kind would remain hidden for another age or more, until they chose to reveal themselves.

Diego walked, then ran, then swam as far and as deep into the frigid black waves as he could. The last thing he heard was the music of underwater horns, calling him home.