New Cthulhu: The Recent Weird (66 page)

“So. What do you think, girl? About what I saw? Look at me. Do you think I’m drunk?”

“No.”

“Well this is exactly how it was last night crossing the Panhandle. So you going to just dismiss what I told you?”

Crossing the Panhandle at about two a.m., Vera had seen a man lying on a bench under one of the pathway lamps. He was passed out, it seemed, as she approached, still a block away, but then the man suddenly appeared to be struck by seizure. His legs started violently kicking out as he lay there

Vera hurried forward, the path curving and some trees blocking her view for several long moments as she limpingly picked up speed, striding as fast as her bad left hip would let her.

When she came back into view just yards from the bench, the man lay quiet again, totally still, his eyelids shut, his face slack, his left arm hanging off the bench—and one of the legs of his trousers flat and empty on the slats of the bench.

“I like to’ve wet myself,” were Vera’s words. She had seen both legs kicking in the dim lamplight and now this empty fabric tube.

And just then, she heard a scraping, as of rough skin wrestling through undergrowth. She caught a blur of movement off in the grass to her right.’

“And it reached some bushes, and right where it left the grass and pushed in between ’em, I saw something big and thick worm itself across, with like pebbly skin!”

Vera pursued, too astonished to do otherwise, and the grass, uncut for some time, snagged her jerky gait. There was a curious tearing sound and then a vigorous, receding slither. She groped into the bushes, and threaded her way into the clear again. Between the trees along the Panhandle’s border she glimpsed, across Fell Street, something big moving low to the ground, reaching the far curb just ahead of an oncoming truck, and diving into the darkness beneath a parked van.

And Vera, in the weeds near where she stood, found a shoe, its laces still tied but the whole shoe ruptured, a bouquet of tatters attached to a sole. Dazed, she unwillingly returned to the bench. There was no sign of the man. In a cluster of bushes not too distant, she heard a muffled thrashing. “I thought it over, but then I headed home. No way was I messin’ around in them bushes.”

Vera glared at Maxie, awaiting her response.

“Well,” said Maxie. “I can only say that’s strange. And I have to add that last night was obviously one of those occasional nights when you get a little drunker than you think you are.”

Vera looked at her gloomily. She didn’t seem to want to challenge this, but didn’t seem able to believe it either.

Maxie cruised down the pleasant asphalted lanes of Golden Gate Park, trending down seawards. The sun, while still an hour high, sank into a rising layer of mist, and dimmed to a Martian wafer, brick-red. A sharp wind came up and started driving the mist inland through the park, draping streamers of fog through the towering cypresses, and tangling it in the eucalypti’s blown cascades of gray-black foliage. Shreds of mist licked her face and she tucked Ramses more warmly in his box. The weather-shift stirred her. In the white-out of driving mist, the great trees rippled like coral reefs in a streaming sea of air.

Wind always excited Maxie, though it bit her harder in her lean old age. Ramses seemed stirred too, looked livelier up at her from his thick swaddling, relishing the silver rush of the air. “Put you to sleep?” she scoffed. “Crazy bitch! Isn’t this an amazing evening?” She crossed the Great Highway, and walked along the seaside promenade, pushing their cart’s rattling prow into the wind. A surprisingly thick foam churned on the surf, the caked yellow froth of hard-lashed seas. Copious fragments of it came tumbling and winging across the broad beach. They climbed the embankment, to fly in chunks and tatters across the promenade, scud out into the Great Highway, and plaster the passing traffic here and there with rags of dirty bubbles.

The cold spray licking Maxie’s cheekbones felt dense and glutinous. And, through all this wind and the sharp sea-smell, there was a haunting swamp scent, a fetor that belonged to dark murk and deep jungle, not at all to windblown coasts. Yet here it was, eddying inside the cowl of Maxie’s parka, probing her nostrils with the smell of putrefaction.

She trudged up past the Cliff House, past the guano-bleached crags just offshore in the surfs crash. Even this high above the sea the dirty blizzard still blew past her, crossing the pavements. Tonight she’d go into those trees again, up beyond the pits of the old Sutro Baths.

Soon it was falling dark, but by that time they were snug in the lee of two close-growing trees, lying back half-propped on a mattress of dry needles and fern fronds, she and Ramses snug in their waterproof fiber-filled mountain bag. Plenty of hot-burning cypress twigs lay broken and stockpiled, while the tiny trail stove housed a hot little blaze at their side, and heated her cocoa in an enameled tin cup. They lay back looking through the gaps in the trees down on the narrowing waters of the Golden Gate, the Bridge ankle deep in the steel-gray sea. The vista grew dimmer, as the headlights rivering atop the Bridge grew brighter. Beyond the Bridge, mist filled the Bay, and muted the glints of the city lights along its eastern shore.

Maxie lit her fourth cigarette of the day—two more still to come!—and congratulated herself, not for the first time, on her long-ago inspiration to take to the streets, to spend two thirds of her days and nights outdoors. How much better the night sky was than any ceiling! And how much better to be moving around! Where in the world was there a more beautiful city than San Francisco? Why lie in any box in the time you’ve got left, eh old girl?

Her shopping cart had been an inspired idea—a declaration of poverty, a protection against thieves. She’d found the perfect way to go abroad in the world. She took a deep drag, and streamed it up towards the first shyly appearing stars. Sipped her cocoa. It would be sweet to have Jack beside her now. They could describe to each other how grand and impossible the Bridge looked, bestriding the sea.

“I miss you, my love,” she said quietly. It always hurt her to say it aloud, and always had a sweetness too, as if Jack just might hear it.

Within the murmur of the wind in the trees, within that restless commotion, she felt wrapped in the conversation, the hum of the forest’s green life was that a trickling sound she heard?

There was a moon well up in the misty night, and when Maxie peered into the trees for the sound’s source, her eye caught a glinting
something
in the ferns a few yards to her left.

A little seepage from the loam? Maybe something a little more profuse than seepage—she saw a silvery little braid of movement there. It was months since any rain.

She finished her cocoa and got out her second-to-last smog. Snapped it alight, and blew the satin smoke from her nostrils. The sound of the night had changed around her. The hillside seemed restive in a new way, not just with the wind’s passage, but stirred by little secretive movements everywhere, a host of small half-hidden lives all working in the earth and in the leaf mold and among the roots of the trees, the roots right under her.

She consumed the cigarette, cupping the coal between drags so the wind wouldn’t accelerate its burn-down. And by the time she’d finished it, had decided that, when she’d gathered ferns and needles for her mattress, there had been no seepage over there, where now she saw it. She weighed her comfort against her curiosity.

In the end, the restlessness in the earth goaded her to action. She extracted herself carefully from the bag, resettling it closely around Ramses. Stepped into her jeans and her Nikes.

Only a glow of embers came from the square mouth of her tin-can stove. She stepped across springy earth into deepening shadow.

Here was a shallow cleft in the sloping soil, and a leakage, not of water, but of a loose viscous fluid, bubbly with strong curdlike bubbles that put her in mind, somehow, of the suds dripping from that open washer door this afternoon.

“You oughta watch out for that stuff.”

The voice was calm but so unexpectedly nearby that Maxie had a neural meltdown.

“You sonofabitch! Don’t you have the manners to greet someone? What’re you doing, sneaking up to me?”

“I been standing here ten minutes. I thought you saw me.” But there was a sour humor in the old man’s eyes that confessed he’d enjoyed making her jump. He was small and lean in dark sweatshirt and jeans, helmeted in a black wool cap with a tiny brim and earflaps, his face all gaunt. But he had a major handlebar mustache that was remarkably thick for a man this old. The mustache made Maxie think of a ragged white alley cat draped over a fence.

“So why are you standing here! There’s plenty of room on this hill. We want our goddamn privacy!”

“You shouldn’t be lyin’ here! That’s what I’m tellin’ ya! You gotta watch out for this stuff, for anything comes from the water table.”

“For anything that comes from the water table?”

“You speak English, doncha?”

“Better than you.”

This made the handlebar man mad. “Maybe so, but you don’t know shit. Just do yourself and everyone else a favor and don’t step in it, if that’s not too complicated for ya.”

And he walked off into the trees—pretty quiet and quick in his movements too, and soon gone from sight and hearing.

Maxie crouched down over the seepage, stirred around in it a little with a twig. It was clotted, with little shadows in the clots. She’d grown up in the Central Valley. “Frogspawn,” she said. Or toadspawn, up on these moist hillsides. That’s all it was. The mustache man was an urban whack, freaked out by unfamiliar Nature. She sighed, and went back to her sleeping bag.

Snuggling down and cradling Ramses, she told him, “That guy seemed almost sane at first, didn’t he?”

But, deeper in the night, Ramses’ movement woke her. He had climbed her shoulder, and stayed there with his muzzle aimed at the seepage. And remained so, after she had fallen back into sleep.

Maureen had fallen asleep in her Barcalounger, snug in quilts with the clicker at hand and Muffin curled on her lap. It was Muffin’s sleeping there that had put Maureen under, and now it was his gentle movements in her lap that awakened her. She had a vague sensation of small, light forms dispersing across her thighs.

Her wakening was hazy and slow, for she’d had one of her nice pills before she and Muffin settled down. She raised her head, so comfy and heavy. Yes, there he was in her lap, his adorable little muzzle thrust up inquiringly towards Maureen’s face, and his little fawn-colored flanks so fluffy. But.

Maureen hoisted herself a little higher. Muffin blinked calmly back at her. But Muffy had no legs. No legs at all. Muffin was only his head, his fat fluffy little torso, and his tail. He looked perfectly sleek, like he’d never had legs!

Maureen was utterly, albeit groggily, astonished.

And just then she felt a delicate movement across the slipper on her right foot.

The shock of it gave her the hydraulic lift to sit all the way up. A slender little jointed shape jackknifed off her slipper, and vanished.

Scooping up Muffin, Maureen surged to her feet in astonished terror. Here was her dog! As smooth as a little guinea pig, but without even a guinea pig’s tiny legs! He was just a plump, furry tube! His tail wagged in response to Maureen’s hands, but lackadaisically. His jaws were slightly parted, and he seemed very lightly to pant.

Maureen set him on the couch, rushed, whimpering softly, to the phone, and punched out her vet’s number from memory. Soon she was in a frantic altercation with the vet’s answering service, Maureen crying banshee-like that an ambulance must come for Muffin and herself and that Dr. Groner had to come in to meet them at the pet hospital at once! Maureen encountered, within a suede glove of courtesy, an iron fist of refusal—and then was galvanized to discover, in her pacings, that Muffin had disappeared from his nest of cushions. But how could the poor dog move?

In a panic she dropped the phone, and searched under the sofa. Down the hall behind her, came the little clap of the backdoor pet-door. It was only Tasha, Maureen’s cranky old portly little Persian, waddling dourly toward her. Still in shock, Maureen responded by rote, went to the kitchen to be sure Tasha’s dish was full. The kitchen was dark but a slant of light from the Barcalounger lamp showed the shadow of food in the dish. Wasting no energy on greeting, Tasha padded a beeline to her supper.

Trembling with determination, Maureen took up the phone again. If it had to be 911, so be it.

A thump and a slithery scrabbling and the rattle of spilt kibble brought her head round. Tasha lay—half in shadow—thrashing mightily, and what looked like long tapery fish with froggy skin, three of them, were eating her legs! Three of her legs as the cat kicked and thrashed them in the air, and clawed at them with her one free paw, but the fish—muscular, powerful—swallowed her legs into their froggy tubes with great gulps, lurching closer to her torso, four of them now! For Tasha’s tail was also taken, by yet another of the little monsters that lurched suddenly from the darkness! Oh dear God in Heaven what was Happening?

A commotion rose from the back of the couch and she whirled. Around from the back and over the top poured another one of these toad-skinned fish, much bigger than the other four. Maureen screamed and leaped backwards, stumbled and fell back into her Barcalounger. And saw that atop this bigger monster’s toadlike skull, there were two little tufted peaks, and instantly recognized those dear little saliences: they were the tips of Muffin’s ears. But already they were no longer like ears. They were melting, sinking to a tarry substance that seemed to weave itself into the toad-skin hemisphere, melting to a dark resin that was already merging with the monster’s amphibious skin. This had been Muffin! This hideous fish! It launched itself, and the creature—big as a cat itself—seemed to have only Tasha in its sights. It launched to the floor and thrashed across it, pushing itself along by—Maureen saw them now—the thrusts of four little legs that looked almost like fins with little clawed feet.

A strange calm fell upon Maureen. All of this was so impossible that it was fascinating. Maureen’s religion had a dimension of true feeling in her heart. The world’s dazzling multiplicity often moved her deeply with reverence and awe. And often she inwardly exclaimed,
Behold the wonders of God’s creation, for how can man conceive any end to their variety?