New Cthulhu: The Recent Weird (68 page)

The game brute was chewing ferociously on Maureen’s tongue, a massy organ which felt not pain, but tingling imminence, and then that tongue swelled and thrust more deeply into King’s throat, a thick, expanding root that exploded King’s skull within her mouth. She heaved him back, and yet again back, bagging the dog—near inert now, just tremoring—all the way down her gullet.

For an indeterminate time she crouched there, hidden by King’s house from Wyatt and Eve in their Jacuzzi. Crouched there while Barry Manilow swelled suavely overhead. Crouched there discovering that King within her, though the architecture of him was dissolving in her corrosive stomach acids, though the brain and the bone shell that had held his heartbeats, his thoughts, were dissolving in her hunger, King himself was not dissolving, the animal’s spirit emerged intact within her as his fleshly structure crumbled away. She felt, in the darkness of her digestion, the barking brute’s horror and dismay, to find himself existing within the black sphere of her belly.

And as if this doleful incarcerated life in her were some kind of dynamo, an imperative deep in her new body, Maureen’s bones branched creaking to life, and the muscles of her legs bulged along these bones. Almighty God in Heaven! I behold your wonders and I cry hallelujah unto you! Behold I open like a blossom under your radiance!

Swelled—in moments!—to half again her size, Maureen could just overlook the roof of the doghouse. In her almost spherical gaze, how shapely did Wyatt and Eve look, waist-deep in their Jacuzzi, drinks at their elbows! And how she hungered for them! Their fleshiness. In them lay her own more lordly stature! Behold the greatness the Lord declared that she had earned! To snatch them into her need’s whirlwind would be to tower like a colossus when the meal was done. Still her hind legs grew, her steel-spring knees jutting higher to her sides, the muscles swelling like melons. And now, low though she squatted, Wyatt saw her.

She met his gaze. Such a square, fleshy young man, very intimidating whenever she’d gone to him with her faint, courteous complaints about King’s barking. At present he didn’t look threatening, looked astonished and suddenly Maureen absolutely knew that she could splash down into that hot tub with a single leap—

And as she thought it, launched it, thrust old bony mother earth so powerfully beneath her that she hung on air, a weightless bubble sailing the blue sky, and hit the water swallowing, Wyatt already socketed in her vast mouth, so that she reared his legs high in a crown of spray, and got him all down with a gulp.

She sat in the water with Eve, pinning her against the tub’s rim. Maureen and Eve both sat astonished—Eve at Wyatt’s vanishing, and Maureen at Wyatt’s arrival within her, for as her cauldron belly’s acids licked him swiftly to bone, his mind, his memories coalesced within her own. She knew him inhabiting her, and he, thus pent, knew her.

Loving Lord! You show me, unworthy, your wonders! Your glory is as a feast you set before me!

She was saddened to find that she could not communicate this gratitude to Eve, and tell Eve how she was not going to be annihilated, but was to live again within Maureen. Her attempt at explanation produced only a long sticky amphibious hiss, at which poor frightened Eve cried out, and peed in the tub water. Maureen gripped Eve with her forefeet, and thrust the young woman headfirst into her jaws. Soon, once she was dissolved, Eve would understand, would know it was all right.

For almost an hour longer, her globed eyes dreaming, her body sunk in metabolic meditation, she squatted in the foaming water. It seemed her mind half dozed, while her body grew so vast that stars were coming out inside her, winking on here and there, a visceral swarm of tiny suns.

Then Maureen came more awake. These stars she felt inside her. These myriad points of light. they were her eggs. She had to find her way to water—big water, in the dark earth. She had to meet someone.

Ramses squirmed to be put in his bed-box in the cart’s prow. Not to curl up, but to sit propped on his rickety forelegs, sniffing the air, his attention drawn everywhere. Her little protector was back, but what kind of danger could waken him so? She walked along California, up Arguello to its end, crossed the park, thence along Waller (Haight itself, though she liked to scope all the people and what they were wearing, took too much steering of her cart), and then down along Divisadero to the Castro. Went into the Gin and Beer It, which had a back alley where Yves let her park her cart between his dumpsters.

“How’s our little man?” Yves leaned his beaky nose down to Ramses, who dabbed his answering muzzle from the sling. To Maxie, setting up her gimlet, he said, “Why didn’t you tell me you had a new friend?”

“I don’t have a new friend.”

“Well, Leon said to tell you, if you showed up, to stick around a little and he’d be back.”

“A scrawny whacko with a white mustache?”

“So you do know him. I’ve known him for years. He’s a walker, like you. And here he is! Well howdy, Miss Dee.” This to Leon’s companion. A gray-haired woman with a handsome face-gray eyes and gaunt cheeks. She carried an old fashioned walking stick with a brass head.

Leon said, “Maxie, this is Dee. Let’s take a table—you gotta talk to Dee, Maxie.”

“Don’t be so abrupt.” Dee poked his shoulder. “I’m very pleased to meet you, Maxie. I’ve seen you around. The thing is, I do have to talk to you. Would you please? Can I buy you another gimlet?”

“Well, sure. Yes you can, dear.” It was fun using the old-ladyism “dear.” She had the right, had maybe fifteen years on Dee, and liked her too, liked her eyes, both kind and tough. It occurred to her Jack had been just around this woman’s age when he died.

At the table Leon sat opposite Maxie, and while Dee got some books from her little backpack, Maxie asked him, “What are you staring at?”

“I’m just keepin’ my mouth shut till you’ve heard her and gone through all the usual changes.”

A comeback died in Maxie’s throat. For some reason, his sarcastic conviction called sharply back to her Vera’s two a.m. vision in the Panhandle. Vera was not the hallucinating type. A cold, cottony sensation moved delicately down Maxie’s spine, recalling white rags of sourceless sea foam, tumbling before the wind.

“There’s no way to ease into this,” Dee told her. “Please. Just listen. And after a while, I’ll tell you what I’ve seen with my own eyes.” And she began to read from a battered gray book.

“Our little Earth is beset by Titans. In the infinitude of space and time, the Great Old Ones swim like krakens through the deep. Time and again they find us, in worlds that have been, and worlds that have yet to be anywhere and anywhen they find, have found, will find us, time without end, but in this present time, in the cosmic deep they navigate, there hangs one particular window of light and color that draws them. Like a stained-glass pane high above, it tempts the titans’ appetites with a flash of rainbow radiance. And that is the window on our twenty-first century.

“For now, in our age, it is this Queen of Cities, skirted by her seas, it is this jewel among metropoloi, crowned with towers, limbed with mighty bridges, robed in lushly architected stone—it is San Francisco that beguiles the Titans’ mossy megalithic eyes, as they drift through the cosmic benthos.

“In our present time, it is towards San Francisco they converge, hither they swim! Hither they glide, drawn to this radiant window on the rest of our world.

“Of the Great Old Ones, the mightiest, dread Chthulu, is among us already. He appropriates our souls, possesses our wills. Legions of his minions, his devout Ganymedes, already infest our corporate boardrooms, our governments, our churches.

“Dagon too is among us already. He feeds more frankly on our flesh. His benthic zombies come dripping ashore to harvest our bodies in the night, while offshore his vast hands can seize the greatest vessel and crack it for the nutmeats of its crews.

“Tsathoggua too is among us already.”

Here Leon laid an interrupting hand on Dee’s arm. He leaned toward Maxie and told her, “Tsathoggua. That’s the one you can meet for yourself, right where I showed you. You can meet him tonight. Then you’ll know some shit!”

Maureen moved through the foliage of Golden Gate Park in the dusk. She went by leaps and lurks, vaulting through the dense cover, and crouching with rubbery resilience through more open ground—and freezing, seizing, and feeding wherever sudden occasion presented itself. She consumed a jogger, a small, quick woman in black spandex. She launched the elastic shroud of her tongue and snatched a wildly kicking cop off his motorbike and down her throat.

And went on, seeking water. Her body knew the touch of water all around her. Each wart on her great surface (she was big as a Volkswagen bug now) sensed every molecule of water in a radius of miles. Just west, of course, the mighty Pacific foamed on the beach, but no, this water was too turbulent to receive her tender spawn.

She sensed already the smaller, stiller pool she sought. Sensed too that she would soon meet her mate-to-be. He drew even now towards the selfsame spot. The eggs within her seethed to be born, and thus it was, just as the first few stars were coming out, that she muscled through the foliage around the rim of Stow Lake.

The paths, the little plaza, the parking lot were deserted, but out on the oil-black lens of the lake there was movement, and a muted, hilarious commotion. A couple kids had broken the lock on a paddleboat and ridden it from its corral out to the open water. Bottles glinted, and hoarse guffaws broke out, imperfectly muffled. The little scamps! Maureen hungered fiercely for them!

But even as she advanced, a glittery black hugeness erupted near the boat, and overturned it. Two human shapes thrashed spray and foam and were engulfed as one by wide, inhuman jaws.

It was He, and his feeding was her own—she felt it in her own bowels, and her unborn young rejoiced in the feast. Maureen and He were already one, were two halves of a host on the very threshold of being born. Maureen slid down into the lake.

In the silken dark, buoyant as bubbles, they met. They clasped fore claws and spun and tumbled and spiraled in the satiny deep. For the first time in her life, Maureen knew Love, and knew its consummation was at hand. She broke their grip and swam towards the lake rim. A muddy cove she found, curtained by leafy vines, and into this she climbed, leaving only her hindquarters in the water, and waited His advent.

His great smooth underbelly surged onto her back. He locked his forelegs round her throat, his hindlegs round her mighty thighs. His cloacum hung just atop her own, still shallowly submerged.

In a delirium of fulfillment, Maureen unpent her eggs, and felt them bubble unendingly from her cloacum.

Each bubble was an atom of her own raging hunger, and that hunger in herself was not diminished by its ejection, its diffusion over the black lake. With this birthing her own hunger was vastly magnified, enlarged into this spreading fan of spawn.

For as she spawned, her mate’s sperm joined its stream to hers, the sperm like a gelatinous explosive, a viscous dynamite that individually detonated each little globe of her greed, and woke it to life.

Long was their transport! Long their embrace! Long and long the sweet effusion of their kindled brood upon the waters!

Until, at length, they lay spent, lay piggybacked as one in a curious, tingly hiatus that became a growing expectancy of something else, something more awaiting them, something vastly larger than the miracle they had just performed.

Maureen knew they had just begun, not ended, something grand and glorious. Of course her tadpoles even now a-forming, would within this very night sprout limbs and disperse into the surrounding greenery, would radiate from the park in all directions and find their way into storm drains and sewers and backyards and gardens all over San Francisco. But none of this now seemed half as important as what lay before her.

She and her mate crouched, cold to the wonder they’d worked. A greater marvel beckoned them now, a radiant immensity drew them to itself, commanded their nearness as a shining planet commands its moons.

Her mate unclenched her, and slid crunching away through the foliage. Maureen followed him.

Leon led them along the path he had shown Maxie this morning. They talked low, and interruptedly, for by moonlight the path was even trickier. ”The thing to hold onto,” Dee said, “is to know they can be hurt. Can be fought.”

“I have to be honest,” said Maxie. “I don’t think I quite believe what you’ve told me.” Back in the Gin and Beer It, Dee had told her a very great deal indeed, as night fell outside, and the time drew on to come here.

Ahead, Leon growled, “No problem. You will.”

They smelled it just before they reached the gully’s edge: a coldly yeasty breath of swamp. He brought them to a place where the rim of the gully shelved slightly. There was crouching room here where the scrub grew more sparsely. The seam was a darkness below them, save at its upper end where the moon angled in and glinted on the seepage from the cleft clay there.

Too old to crouch, Maxie sat on the coarse grass, and set Ramses down between her legs on a pad made from his folded pouch, for he whined to be set free. He sat there alertly, still galvanized by that vitality he’d shown all day.

“Just remember,” Leon growled. “Don’t do anything. We’re just here to see. So you’ll know.”

Maureen had seen a print of a wonderful religious painting somewhere, where all these souls were rising up a shadowy shaft, rising into a circle of glorious radiance above, their faces and arms lifted in love and acclaim towards the eternal light that drew them up to Itself.

That image had stayed with her for years, sometimes made her eyes misty; just thinking of that moment when God lifted his chosen ones straight up to His everlasting bosom.

And this was happening to her. The shadowy shaft was a dense night-black undergrowth she climbed through, and her mate, some ways upslope, climbed before her. She toiled her bulk up through the lightless tangle of this World Below, and there was a great light, a sun above her that she climbed to. Its radiance had not yet burst forth, but it was near, so near! Just ahead up this steep bluff at whose foot they had emerged from the sea.