New Cthulhu: The Recent Weird (67 page)

For look! The lesser fish had fled to the shadows already, and now Tasha had only one leg, and no tail. Gamely, Tasha hoisted her head to encounter the big toad-fish’s advance, its glossy parabolic jaws gaping wider, wider, as it thrashed its way across the floor, and leapt, and engulfed Tasha right up to her remaining leg. Then it reared up its toadlike gullet, and bolted Tasha’s leg down too.

Maureen watched in awe. And terror too, of course, but encompassing the fear was a bemused sense of privilege for being honored with a revelation. She was being shown a miracle. She was not the futile, undistinguished woman she had, unknown to herself, feared that she was! She was being shown a miracle, and it filled her with gratitude.

Or perhaps this terror simply had made her insane?

But she did not feel insane. She felt tingly. Her thumb itched, and from it a kind of heat seemed to flow out and into all the rest of her body. She lay back watching Tasha’s devourer calmly. The creature seemed slightly to swell, to change—its tail a bit shorter, its legs a bit bigger and more clearly jointed. It waddled its way down the hall, out of her view. There was a clatter of the pet door. And Maureen felt herself alone in the house.

Her body was quite comfortable really. And this was just exactly what she should be doing. After such a revelation, she should be lying here comfortably, meditating upon the wonder of it, and raising hosannas in her heart to a beneficent God capable of such wonders, and loving her enough to share them with her.

At sunrise Maxie rose and broke camp. Went upslope to the cluster of trees where she’d hidden her cart, and then down to the coffee shop just above the Cliff House. Here they accepted her with Ramses in his sling. She had a couple eggs and a cup of coffee. Went to the restroom. One thing about walking around all day was, you were regular as clockwork.

She had a second cup (having laid out her money with a dollar tip—as always) and savored it as she looked from the window. Watched the waves rolling in below the bare foundations of the vanished Sutro Baths. There was still a lot of foam on the waters.

It drew her attention. No gale now to froth it up, but big yellowish mats and ridges of this lather mantled the waves. And still, on this morning’s milder breeze, it blew ashore, even way up here. Little rags of it tufted the dead water of the two square tarns that had been the Baths.

Outside, she got Ramses into his box-bed, and rolled him on down to the paths that networked the site.

When she was closer to the pools, she saw that the froth lay unmelting. Odd. Come to that, it was odd there was so much water in those pits. What was the norm for October, after months without rain?

She pushed to the path beyond the site, and out a ways around the shoulder of the bluffs. The foam lay in a shore-hugging band, not that wide, really, and seeming to narrow as it wrapped around the headland, towards the Golden Gate. Like a great decorative scarf flung round the cliffs’ base.

“It’s me. Over here.”

Again calmly spoken but this time the Handlebar Man stood fifteen feet up slope from her.

“That’s much better,” Maxie said. “I hate being snuck up on. So, you talk about the water table you know about water in general? Like all that foam down there? There’s no wind to whip it up . . . ”

“Ocean’s part of the water table. You don’t think it honeycombs the whole damn peninsula here?”

He let a silence follow.

“Okay,” she said. “So?”

“I’m not good at explaining. I hafta show you. You’ll hafta park the cart and bag the dog.”

“Have you been spying on me? How do you know I carry him in a sling?”

“Hey, I know every walker in this city. I get around. I keep my eyes open. So do you wanna believe, or do you wanna bury your head?”

“In the sand?”

“In the sand.”

“Lead on. I’ve got a knife,” [true] “and I’ve got a gun,” [untrue] “and I know how to use them both.” [untrue—neither one].

He led them back up into the trees. She parked her cart under cover, slung Ramses on her chest. Ramses looked alert and eager, as if today an added amperage coursed through him. The little whippet had always been her warning system, and he was telling her to follow this man.

“I’m Maxie.”

“I’m Leon.” He didn’t look back at her, leading them upslope through the trees, rounding the shoulder of the headland. As they advanced northeasterly, the northern pylon of the Golden Gate just peeked into view, until the woods got thicker and the ground got steeper and she had to give all her attention to the trail.

Leon’s route, scarcely a proper path itself, crossed many a clearer path descending steeply to the beach below. This crooked deer trail moved only gradually down the bluffs as it arced round them.

Now the bluff got quite steep, and the hillside in-folded deeply. And within this seam, a sharper, deeper gully lay. It was bare dirt, running perhaps a hundred yards down the bluff, heavily overgrown along its crests to either side, but in its depth just bare rock and the reddish clay of the cliffside’s flesh.

“Step here,” said Leon quietly, stopping, turning to her. “You up to it? We gotta go down to that outcrop by the lower angle—see it?”

“I’m up to it,” Maxie snapped.

Still, it was steep, and the earth had to be worked with the heel to furnish footholds, and the shrubs used for steadying handholds. Ramses stirred in his pouch, and his muzzle probed the cold blue morning air.

The rim shelved a little. Leon called a halt, and they looked down into the gully. A damp breath welled from it. He pointed towards its apex, upslope of them. “Looka there. You see the stream creeping out of this thing?”

The earth seemed moister round a seam in the clay up there, and yes, she could now see that a thin sheen threaded its way all the way down along the gully’s floor, and into the shrubbery below it.

“I don’t see any flow.”

“Look at that slickness. It’s transparent but it’s like thick, right?”

“Okay, there’s some moisture I guess. So what?”

“This gully right here is where all that foam along the beach is coming from.”

“Hey, Leon. You’ve gotta be kidding.”

“No. But since you don’t know shit, of course you’d say that.”

“Hey, I don’t like your mouth. I don’t like your mustache either. It looks like the whiskers on a walrus’s ass.”

“You’ve seen the whiskers on a walrus’s ass?”

“A white walrus’s ass.”

“Okay. Okay. Why should you trust me? But I’ll tell you what. Come back here just before dark tonight, and get into some cover, and stay hidden, and watch this ravine. You won’t watch long, before you see exactly what I’m talkin’ about.”

The morning sun slanted through the kitchen windows. From her Barcalounger, Maureen gazed dreamily at Tasha’s dish, the scattered kibble on the linoleum, and not even a whisker of Tasha herself. Tasha had been eaten by what Muffin had turned into!

Amazing as this was, it was just a beginning. Maureen had lain for hours perfectly calm, except that her calm wasn’t exactly calm, it was richer than that, more powerful. She felt a golden wholeness, a physical sense of completeness and purpose. Felt utterly relaxed, and utterly vibrant.

And, stranger than this, she felt
multiple
. More than having thoughts now, she seemed to be having a chorus of them. It dawned on Maureen for the first time in her long life that her mind was not really inside her body, not exactly, but that rather it was bombarding her body with constant queries and tests from more or less outside it.

And this dawned on her precisely because, for the first time, she felt that her mind was inside her body, or was multiply inside three separate parts of it. There was first her upper body, and she knew it from within. She was inside her ribcage. She didn’t picture her ribcage—she was in it, enveloped in its blood-slick membranes, in the blood-swollen loaves of her lungs.

And her wonder at this was echoed, for she was also inside her legs, separately inside each one, her knowledge tendriled round their long bones like a ghostly ivy; marveling at the architecture of muscle and tendon and vein.

Never had Maureen felt so complete unto herself—felt herself to be such an exotic construction of bone and meat and soul! A wonderful coolth flushed through her tripart self, as if she had been dipped in a tarn of the blackest, deepest, purest water.

So within herself—within her three selves!—did she feel, that she did not at first realize that her eyes were closed and she lay in a sun-shot darkness. She willed her eyes to open, and it was revealed to her that she had no eyelids, nothing answered the movement of her will. At the same time, this seemed to matter not at all, so gorgeous was the architecture of tissue and vein she lay bathed in, wrapped in.

She tried to touch herself, to learn how she was changing, and it was revealed to her she had no arms while it seemed her feet were bulging, swelling (with a distant noise of ruptured slippers) and her legs’ junctures with her waist were thinning, twisting, and her waist itself was doing likewise. And at the end of this vigorous unbraiding, it seemed three linked tails disengaged.

Maureen’s legs thrust muscularly forth, and they (and her other selves in them) departed, surging reptilically down the hall and bursting—first one, then the other—with a slick whispery sound of passage out through the pet door.

While she who remained in the Barcalounger lay with tail thrashing to a metabolic rhythm, lay enthralled by the great strength blossoming in her newly potent shape.

Transfiguration! Accelerating now. Her flesh became whip-taut and cool. In smooth convulsions, her head and jaws usurped all the mass of her erstwhile body from the ribs up. And her eyes came back! My God, how they came back! Maureen could see all the way around her, her great orbs swiveling like greased ball bearings, eyes big enough to hold the world, catch every least movement in it.

Then, huge-jawed, her skin a glossy armor tough as leather, she wrenched free of her robe. She leapt, in a cavorting dolphins arc, from the Barcalounger, and hit the floor with the four surprises of little legs and clawed feet to break her impact. She scrabbled and slithered toward the front door.

By God in Heaven, Maureen was hungry! It was a raging void in her, a cyclone of need. But her head was too huge for the pet door, and her forefoot too crude for the knob. She rammed the door, cracking it lengthwise, but also hurting her head. She mustn’t use her head as a ram yet. Her instinct told her that food was strength, and she would grow mightier with eating. The kitchen window should be easier than the door. She craved something large to eat, and the thought of the backyard—even as she toiled swiftly back down the hall—brought instantly to mind what she wanted to eat. It was when she was out back gardening, that she was most tormented by King’s barking.

She leapt up onto the kitchen table. Perched on the table, her legs seeming to grow with every passing second, she gathered herself for a mightier leap—straight at the double panes above the kitchen sink.

Erupting into morning sun, in a sparkling spray of glass, Maureen dropped splay-legged—
whumph
—onto her deep, lush lawn.

King lived two yards over. Even now he was barking, with deep, baying deliberation.

She regarded her sturdy plank fence. She sensed that a moment was coming, not too distant, when she would have hind legs that could launch her right over it. But for the present, she began to ram and claw her way into the soft earth at the base of the fence.

She made rapid progress into the soil. As she worked, she heard the strains of Barry Manilow. That was why King was so vocal—his people, Wyatt and Eve—were out in their Jacuzzi on the back deck, enjoying the day with him.

With her cart stashed, knapsack packed, and Ramses in his sling, Maxie headed down one of the steep trails to the beach. Ramses was lively, head up out of the pouch, turning the little wand of his muzzle left and right. And there was a scent of something. A cool October day, a shred or two of cloud across the blue, but it didn’t smell as fresh as it looked. There was a rankness that flirted with her mind.

Ramses got even livelier. Had to be put down. Tottered to a tree and peed on it. He seemed conscious of some adversary here, one he meant to meet. She put him in the sling the rest of the way down, but when they reached the narrow beach, he insisted on getting down again and tottered, zig and zag, ahead of her.

Maxie climbed the rocks a little way, and saw the yellow curdled foam mantling the sea for a hundred yards offshore, an unbroken collar arcing eastwards, curving round back towards the Golden Gate. In that direction the creamy expanse narrowed. Would it taper finally to a point of origin?

Ramses was already well ahead of her. She hurried after. Look at the life and purpose in him today! Put him to sleep? The idiocy of that woman.

They picked their way across rock shelf and gravel bar. Maxie found Ramses’ unflagging energy as astonishing as she did the foam, which was indeed tapering, narrowing, till they came to a sharp invagination of the bluffs’ wall.

Rounding this, they confronted a vertical cleft that vanished into the vegetation overhead. It was reminiscent of the much higher one Leon had taken her to, but its cleft was moister, and faintly foamy, and from its juncture with the barnacled rocks, a thin, milky threadwork branched out into the sea. The whole great stream of foam rose here!

Her clawed feet seemed to grow in strength with use—they gave Maureen a surprising amount of leverage in the earth. But it was her massive muscled head, and sinewy fish-like thrust, that enabled her momentum through the loam.

Surfacing in a spray of marigolds (Miss Saunders’ largest bed of them) she charged to the next fence, and dove again against the earth, the dense soil a medium almost as yielding as water to her miraculous new shape.

She erupted in front of King’s sizeable little house, which was in the corner of the yard the dog most loved—for from here he could bark at houses on every side of him. Maxie rose like a geyser of hunger, a craving void that must obliterate this beast. King had spirit. He yelped, he snarled, he lunged—into Maureen’s widening, up-rushing jaws, which possessed his forelegs, head and chest, and lifted his struggling hindquarters skywards.