The Dark Rites of Cthulhu Page 12

  That night I dreamed a vast city, whose architecture was some fantastic blend of Angkor Wat and Giger prints – with a little Escher thrown in. The city was filled with strange looking men and women that wore glittering metal masks. At dusk, beneath two huge moons, we gathered at a great pit outside the city. A bright crimson ray came from the depths, and the people moaned in ecstasy. Then two green arms – hundreds of meters long – shot out of the pit. They fastened on an older man who carried a staff. They seized him, lifted him high in the air, and then pulled him down into the pit. His mask fell off as he descended. He looked like Thomas Martinez. Then people began dancing and embracing. It turned into an orgy. I rutted with a half woman, half goat and I saw Suzi nearby being taken by two hairy, apelike men at the same time. The air smelled of blood and cinnamon. Music – the music from the video – played.

  I awoke aroused and tried to get my wife into it, but it was nearly time for the alarm to go off and she said, “Honey it’s a workday. We’ll do this on the weekend, when we can get into it.” I let her go back to sleep and took care of myself. At the moment of orgasm, I almost always make a little noise. This time I said a word, “Sehresh!” I don’t know why, and it scared me enough to keep me from drifting back to sleep.

  That morning when I logged in at work, there was e-mail from Nadis inviting all of us to lunch at the Star of India across the street.

  We all showed up (except for Martinez). Nadis had won $1000 on a scratch-off game.

  “It’s all true!” he said.

  We made a date to go buy tickets en masse that night.

  Suzi was texted from #xulthanisrisen.

  The time of Exchange is over. Priest Jough El Ayin has transitioned to your space and time. The Green God Game starts on the day of Hermes-Yog at the hour of the Cerise Ray. Odo kikale Nafatagn!

  “That’s helpful. Where’s Martinez?” asked Calvin.

  “What did you have for dinner last night, Calvin?” I asked.

  “Big Mac and fries. Why?”

  “No dreams?” I asked.

  “Why? You mean that bullshit about don’t eat meat? Why, did you have a dream?”

  We looked at each other, our nan and curries getting cold.

  “What’s this got to do with Martinez?” asked Calvin. “You guys are serious bullshitters.”

  Calvin grabbed his cream colored I-phone and called Martinez. No results. Then he dialed Martinez’s supervisor.

  “He didn’t come into work today. What do you bullshitters know?”

  We stared at our food. Suzi and Nadis blushed.

  “You guys are seriously fucked up. I ain’t playin’.”

  Calvin got up to leave. Mrs. Wong said, “Sit down, Calvin. You are playing because it’s how we will get rich. Sit down. Martinez was taken because he stood too close to something dangerous. That won’t be our fate.”

  “What do you mean, ‘taken’? Taken where? By who?”

  Nadis said, “The God of the Pit, the motherfather of the Green God.”

  Pete Nunio asked, “What?”

  Nadis said, “Look there’s a text on Scribd. Google The Seven Rays of Ool Othag. Suzi and I found it this morning.”

  “Over breakfast?” I asked.

  “Over none of your damn business. If you want to play a game, you better know the rules.”

  Lunch proceeded fairly quietly. We trotted back to our cubicles. I downloaded The Seven Rays but I didn’t have time to read it. My boss piled it on that afternoon. None of us knew Martinez outside of the game. Well we were all Facebook friends, which meant we occasionally told each other when we made a road trip, saw a cute cat video, or passed on vaguely liberal political memes. Everyone but Calvin showed up after work and we walked to the Sac-n-Pac and bought tickets, and more tickets, and won nothing.

  “The Time of Exchange is over.” Suzi said.

  “So when’s the Hour of the Cerise Ray? That’s like orange, right?”

  Suzi said, “At sunset comes the Cerise Ray down from the ruined planet searching for its opposite among the Hornless Ones. The unity being made in the Red Ceremony magic, all is balanced. Life for death, death for life, and the Daemons sleep in the Sixth Angle until the forces need be equalized again.”

  “What the fuck does that mean?” I asked.

  “We need to get together at sunset on Wednesday. Day after tomorrow. We’ll play a game.”

  “So is this an ARG? Is Martinez spoofing us? Or is this about life and death?” asked Pete.

  Mrs. Wong answered. “It’s a game. It’s Facebook. And it maybe life and death. My aunt choked to death on a Mah-jongg tile. Death is never far away. Thousands die each hour, each minute.”

  “You guys are so much fun to hang out with,” I said, “as a game, I’m not very amused.”

  I went home, said nothing to my wife, and when I saw the Xulthan had posted twice, I did not read them.

  The next morning, I did not read them.

  That night I clicked on the two links. Clicking wasn’t playing.

  The first was a very amateur shot of a boy being born. Parents looked normal. No occult significance. I always think the miracle of life looks a little gross on video. The second video looked very professional. A camera snakes through what appears to be a Stonehenge style ruin at night. Desert all around, three circles of stone. Great and spooky flute music playing in the background. The camera rests on the center stone the right size for a living room couch. I guess it might be an altar stone. The camera zooms in and we see a glyph carved in the gray-green stone. Simple, geometrical. Yet somehow it makes me fearful. I watch the video seven times in a row until my wife calls me to bed, calling herself a “Facebook widow.” Nice one, Mary, real supportive. I start to tell her about the Green God Game, but realize how stupid and paranoid it sounds.

  I spend thirty minutes getting dressed the next day. I am up and out before my wife. It usually takes fifteen minutes to dress, shave and grab a packet of Pop-Tarts. Should I wear a green shirt? Should I send a fuck-off? Is this a game that will end in a filmed scene, fifteen minutes of YouTube fame and prizes? Is this an eldritch horror breaking into our world through a soft spot? What happens after a hundred years of monster movies, plush Cthulhu dolls, and prank spooky e-mails? When does the barrier that our ancestors’ ancestors had so carefully set-up finally wear away? How many people had been like my great-grandmother who really said, “Speak not of the devil, lest he appear?”

  Fuck it. It was the day of Hermes Yog, so I wore a “Kiss Me I’m Irish” t-shirt. Let the Green God deal with that.

  We gathered at lunch. Even Calvin. We all wore green, although in Calvin’s case, he had chosen a clip-on bow tie. Nadis and Suzi looked high on love, Mrs. Wong was prim and serious in a green dress that was the height of fashion twenty years ago. Pete Nunio looked younger than his 28 years. In his green and white dress shirt. I would’ve thought he was an intern reporting on his first day. We ate at Ruby’s barbecue, because we needed to get away from work, and it was an eight minute drive.

  “So?” I asked, “Are we going through with it?”

  “With what?” asked Pete. “All we heard was that the game took place at the time of the tangerine or something. They didn’t tell us to gather anywhere.”

  “The hour of the Cerise Ray.” Said Suzi.

  Nadis said, “All of you guys aren’t thinking this through. There isn’t a ‘them’ or a ‘he’ or an ‘it’ – somebody here is running a little game.”

  “I thought of that,” I said, “could one of us rig the lottery?”

  “Maybe that was chance.” Said Pete.

  “No. I think we were Chosen.” Said Mrs. Wong. “It is like that Shirley Jackson story we all read in High School. ‘The Lottery.’”

  I asked, “What about Martinez?”

  Clarence said, “I went by his house. He lives on the east side in a little house that used to belong to his parents. The lights were off. I knocked and rang the bell and shouted till the neighbors came out.
”

  Suzi said, “Fred and I will be in the big truck bay by the north building at 6:35. That’s sunset. Come if you want or not. It will be empty, it’s Wednesday night, and all of those trucks are making deliveries until about midnight, right Calvin?”

  Calvin said, “Yeah, that’s right. It’s unlocked because folks need to park their vans and trucks. It’s got a break room.”

  “Great,” I said, “we can meet the dread Green God with a Coke.”

  Calvin followed me back to my cubicle after lunch. He was scared – possibly more scared because he had not dreamt of Martinez. He wanted to know that I really had. He wanted to know if he was being fooled.

  “Look, I don’t know what to tell you. I feel we’re all taking part in a ritual. Not as the players, not as the priest on stage, but just the folks in the audience. The people that stand up, sit down, and kneel.”

  “But those people feel good when it’s over.” Said Calvin.

  “We might also.”

  He hung around for an hour. Twice my boss had walked by. I finally told him to beat it. His last words to me were that he was not going to be at the truck dock. I told him that I would probably bow out as well.

  So he waved pretty sheepishly when I met him at the door of the dock at 6:20. Suzi and Nadis were there, and Mrs. Wong. Pete held out until 6:33.

  Suzi and Fred had chalked a diagram on the floor – looking a little like a hopscotch board in seven colors. At one end it was broad and orange colored. Cerise. Whatever. At the other end it was narrow and green. At the narrow end stood a rack with chains, winches, and hooks for lifting engines out of vans. It was terribly suggestive. Suzi had printed out The Seven Rays of Ool Othag and bound them into a green cardboard notebook. She read her lines.

  “Welcome worthy players. As before, so now. The gods molt and break free of their larval shells. They teach us how to run and dance and scream. The real world breaks into the world of mirrors. Hear the mirrors breaking! Hear the drums of Ia Nath Thool!”

  At that moment all of our phones buzzed, rang, or played music. We opened or activated them, fussed for a moment to remember how to work the loud speaker setting. Drumming filled the air, an odd time signature. Dave Brubeck would have been pleased. Clarence hopped up the diagram as though it were hopscotch.

  “Not like that,” said Mrs. Wong, “remember the video.”

  And that was when I realized that we hadn’t all seen the same clips. We had been subtlety prepared for different roles. Clarence looked ashamed and said, “Show me, Simlisell.”

  Mrs. Wong bowed, and suddenly did not seem like a frail old woman that worked in Marketing. Suddenly she seemed wise and menacing. She stepped through the seven tiers striking a pose at each. Her poses were like Egyptian hieroglyphs. She was living letters – or rather words! At the last tier, with its deep hunter’s green, she struck a pose that reminded me of the glyph on the altar stone. The air in the large dock suddenly seemed charged as though we had been running an ionizer or a Van de Graff generator for hours. Mrs. Wong bowed to us, and despite my burning desire to opt out of the game, I bowed back with the rest of them.

  Then the air/space/our brains cracked. I could see a crack in the air, somehow floating in space over the suspension device. A long green crack. Pete Nunio danced the seven stations. A bigger crack started. Then Suzi. Then Fred. With Fred, fragments of the world passed away. I was looking on an alien world with a ruined planet in the sky and two small moons. The music now came through the cracks, not our phones. The tempo changed. Everyone but me had danced. I could see the Pit and what was left of Martinez was crawling out of it.

  Fred Nadis said, “Shersess, it is your time.”

  I knew that word. I saw it flash into my mind from that first YouTube link. I could read the strange letters. It meant sacrifice. I started to run to the door, but Suzi and Calvin had anticipated my move. So I ran to the little room that held the snack bar. I wedged a rusty folding chair under the grimy doorknob. They began to chant, “Sheress, Sheress, zodicare entoia!” That meant Sacrifice, Sacrifice, don’t stay in your cave! My being in this crummy little room was part of the ritual as well. They kept chanting.

  I heard the outside door open. I screamed for help. Someone could help me. But their chant changed. “Xulthan! Xulthan! Qaa nadezzer, qaa Sheress!” Xulthan! Xulthan, call the little one out, call for the Sacrifice!

  I wanted to look. I wanted to see Xulthan. He/She/It began singing. It wasn’t a human voice. As the song grew unguided by the scales and chords and rhythms of Earth, I saw several of the images from Facebook. Not just things that I identified with the Green God Game. Posters of girls in futuristic green vinyl dresses. Volcanoes erupting. News items about asteroids hitting the Earth in record numbers. Biographies of weirdo painters and writers. Dirty jokes that I couldn’t quite understand. Train wrecks. Burning school buses. Everything. Everything I had viewed on my quest from 0 to 332 friends. It was all part of a ritual. A ritual began long ago and farther away than I could imagine. It had been soaking into me, little by little. I felt it echo around my bones. It couldn’t be written in a book, or maybe even in a thousand books.

  I knew when Xulthan finished Its song, I would move the chair. I would leave my little cave as I had always done for centuries without end. I would walk into the crack between the worlds. I would bring balance. It would hurt. It would be squishy.

  It would be Blissful.

  (For the memory of Joel Lane)

  With Death Comes Life

  By Scott T. Goudsward

  It is said the world would end in fire. That was wrong.

  I’d like to say that it was fast and painless. It wasn’t.

  The morning started like every other. I rolled out of bed, turned off the alarm and padded to the bathroom for a shower and shave. Downstairs, I knew there would be breakfast waiting and a note from Jessica, my live in girlfriend. Later in the week, we’d be celebrating our sixth year together, little dancing, good meal, and dessert would be an engagement ring and a tearful “YES!” Or that’s how I played it out in my mind.

  Except when I walked into the kitchen, tightening my tie, she was slumped over the table, face down in the omelet she made me. A puddle of blood was spreading on the table, covering and soaking everything, dripping over the edge, saturating and staining the tablecloth. I ran over, slipping on Jessie’s blood on the floor around the chair.

  At one point I remember screaming her name, and then just screaming. I tried lifting her head, but there was so much blood. I moved her, just a hair and the scalpel that was still wedged between her limp fingers tumbled to the floor.

  I saw the edges of the wound on her neck and pictured her all too clearly jamming the scalpel into her neck and slicing, pulling the perfectly sharp blade from one ear to the other, chewing her lips bloody to not scream out while tears rolled down her face. I reached for the phone on the counter, trying my hardest not to pass out before I dialed 911.

  I woke up on the couch, though I don’t remember walking to it. There was a damp towel on my forehead. I slipped it off and sat up. The apartment was crowded with cops, medics and photographers. A young man wearing a jacket with the EMT service logo on it, pointed a rubber gloved finger at me, then to a cop. In my pocket I felt the weight of the ring box; I’d been taking it back and forth from work so Jessie wouldn’t find it.

  “How are you feeling?”

  “How do you think?” The medic grimaced, from my answer or his stupid question, I don’t know. A cop came over and sat across from me on the ottoman. He looked at me like I was guilty, that I pressed the blade into her throat and killed her, watching as she cried, bleeding out and drowning in the blood filling her lungs.

  “I need to ask you some questions.” He said. No introduction, no condolences no business card. I sat back against the couch, deciding if I should cry, rage or just give up. It still didn’t feel real to me. She had just kissed me earlier that morning before getting out of bed.

  The ba
rrage of standard questions began. “Did you notice anything strange? Was she acting peculiar? Was there a note? Why did you move the body? Where’d she get a scalpel?”

  “No, no, no, I had to, she’s a nurse, was a nurse.” He stood and shook his head walking away as he slipped his notebook into his coat pocket. Jessie had been working day shift at the hospital for three years; I worked in the admin office. I never saw anyone at the hospital. She was in the ER, she saw and knew everyone. I watched, damp rag pressed to my face, as they zipped up the body bag and wheeled her towards the apartment door. I stood and walked over.

  “Give me a minute, please.” The EMTs looked at each other and then to the cops who nodded at them. I unzipped the bag, just to show her face, not the awful fissure in her throat. Her skin was pale, almost grey. Her lips would have been blue if she hadn’t been chewing on them to repress screaming. I wanted to run my fingers through her hair and kiss her. The thought of kissing the cold bloodied flesh sent a shiver through me. Instead, I kissed her tepid, rubbery cheek and mouthed words “good bye.”

  When my lips touched her cold cheek, a flash of something ripped through my mind. A picture? The last thought trapped in her dead brain? I stumbled back and covered my face as the tears rolled down my freshly shaven cheeks. The cop came back over and ushered me to the couch.

  “Is there anyone we can call for you?” There was a sympathetic tinge to his words this time. I heard the zipper on the bag closing and the squeak of wheels on the gurney as they wheeled Jessie out of the apartment.

  “Call my boss, please.” I tossed my cell phone at him and leaned back against the soft cushions. I tried to remember the image from the contact with Jessie’s corpse. An old book, and a symbol on the page that glowed in the darkness or was it starlight? When the cleaning crew came in I went for the bedroom.

  There was no way I was going to stay and witness them sloshing her blood across my kitchen floor with a mop, or whatever they used. In the ER, they used pads to absorb blood spills. In the kitchen, I had no idea. I sat on her side of the bed; I could smell her on the sheets, the scent of her shampoo on the pillow case. I reached for my cell, but the cop had it. I had the dubious task of calling friends and family and letting them know what happened.