The Dark Rites of Cthulhu Page 14

  I fought the resistance on the path, walking the turns and twists. Each step felt like a static charge waiting to shock me and make me fall off, or explode. I kept at it. Colors and starlight swirled around my feet and crawled up my legs as I walked. The steps became smaller, more precise. There, at the corner of one of the impossible angles I had drawn, I thought I saw an image of myself, arms out, blood raining from the gashes in my arms as my flesh was peeled away.

  On the next turn I saw Jessie. Her beautiful smile coated in blood from the slash across her throat, her face caught in a perpetual scream. I watched her, staggered and caught myself before falling into nothing, forever. The image of her mouthed the word no and then faded away like a bad dream.

  Two lines crossed and I didn’t know which way to turn. I didn’t remember drawing this. But so much of the day was a green blue haze burning at the very back of my consciousness, intruding upon my sanity. I was getting tired, weak. I’d lost too much blood. I wondered just for an instant what would happen if I failed. They’d find me face down, dead in the alley. I smiled, it seemed like an escape from this task that was consuming me.

  I risked a look down at my legs, the color and lights had slithered up in tendrils past my waist to my chest. Among the swirls of color I saw my legs, bare, patches of skin gone, blood being stolen, a hint of muscle and a shiny spot of bone. I cried out.

  There before me I saw it, the end of the symbol. The finality of this path I was seeking. I tried slowing, but I was being pulled along now. The book flipped open, the cover slapping against the plastic milk crate, the pages fluttered, as if caught in a breeze, and stopped.

  The lights and colors left me then, stripping me of flesh, blood and marrow. They swirled and gathered at the end of the symbol. I started to fall. As I looked down, I saw myself dissolving into dust. At the end of the rune, a figure took shape, nude in the moonlight, hovering above the ground, surrounded by light and color.

  “With death comes life.” I saw Jessie then, her body caught in the stars spinning slowing, forming. Floating above the pavement she turned to me, faceless, hair caught in an endless static cascade.

  With my last moments, her mouth formed, an endless gaping void full of stars. I saw it and understood. I saw the crystalline honeycombs burst, and the shards fly into eternity. There was a rush of wind as if from massive wings, a roar so mighty it crushed consciousness. And the first of many tentacles slithered through her mouth, through the dimensional portal into this world.

  Then it all was gone. Darkness. Stars. Void. Pain.

  The Dogs

  By Jeffrey Thomas

  There were two conditions March needed fulfilled when he entered into his search for a new apartment. One, was that pets be permitted. Some places, he had found, allowed dogs under a certain weight, or only of certain types, excluding such breeds as pit bulls, Akitas, and so on. This apartment building, a former factory in the heart of the city, followed the latter policy, but fortunately March’s dog was a three-year-old retired greyhound, Snow, white mottled with faint brown. His wife had stayed on in their house. She had let him take the dog.

  To determine the second condition, March took a sheet of paper out of his pocket, unfolded it, and held it against the brick walls of the apartment he was shown in the old factory, which like his dog had outlived its original purpose. He placed the sheet against one spot, spread flat under his palm, then another. Progressing from room to room, though the third-floor loft was mostly all one large room. The worn boards creaked under his feet as he shifted about.

  “Is that a witchcraft symbol or something?” his prospective landlord asked as he watched March, chuckling nervously as he tried to make his apprehension sound like a joke.

  “I’m an artist,” March lied, though he had spent quite a lot of time getting the complex geometric figure on his sheet of paper just right. “This is one of my designs. I was just trying to get a feel for how my work would look hanging in here. I love the look of artwork hanging on brick walls.” He turned to smile at the older man, to allay his fears. “It’s great that you haven’t over-gentrified this place. I love these old exposed pipes, the original wood ceiling and support beams.” He gestured around him.

  “They give the loft character, yes,” the landlord said. “You wouldn’t be the only artist who lives in this building.”

  March resumed pressing his sheet of paper to various places on the rough walls. The bricks had been painted over thickly, white, looking like scales in the flank of some immense reptile. Then, when he held the intricate design he had drawn against a windowless stretch of wall in the sprawling main room, he sucked in his breath sharply. He hoped the man standing behind him hadn’t heard his little gasp, wouldn’t ask if something were wrong. March could feel a current vibrating up his arm…spreading down into his chest and up his neck, as though some heavy piece of factory machinery – left behind, forgotten – still thrummed with power on the other side of this wall.

  He snatched the paper away from the spot quickly, before the vibration could spread up into his head. He wasn’t ready for that. Not yet.

  March looked around to smile at the landlord again. “I’ll take it.”

  It had been three years since that day.

  One wall of March’s main room faced onto the gray street, admitting gray light through the large windows that ran its length. The other walls were covered in taped-up sheets of drawing paper, all of them crowded with arcane symbols and geometric patterns either copied from the esoteric books that filled his shelves and stood in precarious piles on the floor, or of his own design. Seen all together, the sheets of varying size partly overlapping each other, they looked like a strange web of ink surrounding him, enclosing this space in which he lived.

  This space and the little it contained – himself, his six-year-old dog, his books -- was all that he had left, all that might define his forty-two years on this globe. Two months ago he had been laid off from his job of the last nine years. He was experiencing frustration in finding another that would pay adequately. Of course, he knew he wasn’t the only one experiencing life’s difficulties. Somewhere beyond the walls of his little cave, with their inked caveman’s graffiti, right now someone was setting off a bomb strapped to their body in a crowded outdoor market. Some teenager was walking into his school’s cafeteria at noontime with his father’s shotgun in his hands. Someone was being burned as a witch and stoned with cinderblocks while other townspeople stood around taking videos of it on their cell phones. All the while, men in expensive suits sat around tables as large and glossy as ponds, laughing and laughing, like gods looking down at the entertaining cruelties of their playthings.

  Thinking these things as he paced his creaking floor, with a mug of coffee in hand, March stopped to look down at Snow, curled on the floor near the foot of his bed. “If only we could aspire to be like your kind,” he said to the animal. She lifted her head in her gently timid way, her protuberant brown eyes fixed on his. “But humans will never be as loving as you are. As devoted. As loyal. As noble.” Snow perked her ears up. Was he babbling something about going for a walk, perhaps? He smiled at her fondly. “Isn’t that right, my noble little girl?”

  He still couldn’t understand why his former wife, whom he had once thought was so in tune with his mind, his spirit -- now the wife of a man she had met online twelve years into her marriage with March -- hadn’t understood his desire to know if there were other, better worlds or realities than this. Was it really “crazy” to hope for and seek such possibilities? Was it really “nuts” to be dissatisfied with the limitations of this floating ball of miseries? In the end she had flat-out called him “insane.” As if it wasn’t this world that was insane.

  Just last night, in fact, according to a local news web site he had been perusing on his computer, a young woman had been found murdered in the city’s largest graveyard, Hope Cemetery, savagely mutilated. Yes, right here in this very city. Hope indeed, he thought.

  He hoped
for something better. Or if he couldn’t have that, he hoped for this all to end.

  Still holding his coffee mug, he turned away from Snow, leaving her to lower her long snout onto her paw again, her hopes for a long walk, for the moment, crushed. March faced the wall where he had on that day three years ago held the page of a sketchbook, and known that a window could be opened on this blank space where no window existed.

  It had taken him over a year to accomplish it. He had taped up innumerable drawings, which had since been moved to other walls or destroyed in frustration, entirely. Now, only one large sheet of paper was mounted there, by thin nails driven into the mortar between the bricks. He had learned that instead of erasing certain lines and drawing new ones -- in order to modify the view this window offered him -- he could alter the configuration with lengths of black thread instead. So he had driven other nails into the wall (fortunately his landlord had never needed to set foot in his apartment again), and he would unwind one end of a thread from a nail, shift the line of thread to another location, creating a new angle, and loop its end around a different nail.

  The design as a whole was enclosed within one large circle extending to the edges of the paper, but other circles overlapped/intersected it, and complex angles created stars that subdivided into triangles. At various critical points and vertices in all these angles and curves he had handwritten words learned from his obscure personal library. Without these words to imbue the formula with power, it would all have only been black ballpoint on white Strathmore.

  At the very center of the design there was a decagon formed from strands of black thread. This was, in effect, the window pane itself. It put him in mind of a porthole, which he now approached as if to stare out at a storm-tossed sea from the relative safety of his ship’s cabin. But first, he picked up a pair of sunglasses from a little side table and put them on, resting his coffee aside.

  March put his face close to the window, but he never touched it. He didn’t even know what the sensation would be like. He didn’t believe his hand would pass through – after all, he felt no breeze from the scene beyond, no whiff of air or scent from another land, and he never even heard sounds from the other side – but some intuition told him it was better to limit his curiosity to observation.

  Ah, he thought, peering through, soon he probably wouldn’t need the dark glasses anymore. Day by day the nuclear blaze of white light continued to diminish, where it showed between the vast black shapes that hung like continent-sized boulders in the sky. When he had first succeeded in opening this scrying lens, nearly two years ago now, nothing at all had been visible past the light streaming into his apartment like a concentrated ray beamed from the molten heart of a star, from which he had shielded his face with a cry. He had been blinded for over an hour, had feared he would never see again. The skin of his face had been burnt red and tender.

  Gradually, over the weeks and months thereafter, as the brightness of the light grew less intense, he had been able to make out a city on the other side. And those looming black forms that hovered above it.

  He couldn’t tell how many there were; the one in the foreground blotted out most of his view of the sky, but other, similar shapes were suspended behind it. Slight adjustments he had made by shifting the angles of his threads had afforded him other views from the city’s streets, but the position of the dark shapes crowding the sky hadn’t noticeably changed, so tremendous in size were they.

  It was not only a city out there…it was this city. His own gray city, grayer still, at some unknown future time. He had recognized the buildings, or the shells of them at least, since many had been burned charcoal black from within or without, while most had simply been abandoned to disrepair, their windows broken into silently howling fanged mouths.

  When he had finally been able to make out the details of his city, he had realized that lying strewn throughout its streets were the bodies of its former inhabitants.

  At first, disregarding the titanic hulks levitating in the sky because he couldn’t yet process them, he had thought a nuclear war had transpired and these people had perished in the initial blast. But then he had grasped, scrutinizing the corpses from various different views of the city’s streets as he tweaked his window’s perspective, that all of them – whether man, woman, or child – bore the same strange injuries. Quite simply, their heads appeared to be smashed into unrecognizable pulp, bone and all, as if they had actually exploded... as if a grenade had been implanted into every skull.

  Yet when the glare of light dimmed further over time and he was able to make out finer detail, he noticed that thin black cords, not so unlike the black threads he utilized in his formula, streamed out of each exploded head like sticky strands of web. These strands extended straight up into the sky. Though the silhouetted hovering mountains were too far up for him to see it, he felt intuitively that the far ends of the strands were connected to the amorphous titans themselves. It was, of course, not that these black strings had reached up into the sky from those myriad shattered skulls, but that the cords had been extruded from the shapeless shapes that almost occluded the sky above this dead city.

  But the city, the Earth, wasn’t entirely dead.

  Whatever cataclysm had befallen humanity, it had apparently not annihilated other forms of animal life. Pigeons would waddle about this nightmare world as nonchalantly as if awaiting bread crumbs in the park. Gulls still wheeled in the sky, white motes against the unmoving black giants. March occasionally saw cats. But mostly it was the dogs that captured his attention. They skulked through the streets singly or in packs, their ribs showing ever more vividly through filthy coats. They looked lost, disoriented, and March imagined they were searching for their masters. He had always felt it was cruel that beautiful animals like his Snow were used for racing, so that humans might wager money on these sensitive unquestioning creatures, but seeing the stray dogs wander the stilled future city made him feel it was just as cruel that human beings had made dogs dependent upon them for food, for shelter, for the love they craved…too often, in vain.

  Night never fell in this world beyond the brick wall; the steady radiance in the sky prevented that, or had the Earth been jolted to a stop so that it no longer even turned? The dogs stole about constantly, flitting from alley to alley. Sniffing through the streets, searching. Hunting, March thought, for cats and squirrels. He once saw a collie pounce upon a pigeon, successfully snatching it in its jaws then shaking its head wildly to kill it. Iridescent feathers floated to the ground.

  Finally had come the day when the dogs had lost their inhibition, their sense of the previous order of things. March suspected, though, it had more to do with their desperation than any kind of breach in their loyalty. He saw a mongrel creep up on one of the corpses lying on a sidewalk – the body of a young woman in a short skirt turned to rags -- sniff at a withered and discolored leg warily, as if the woman might sit up suddenly and scold it as a bad boy, then lean in at last and bite into the half-mummified flesh.

  After that day, he had seen the dogs eating human bodies on a regular basis. They fought over them, savagely. They dragged them off whole, like a leopard with a broken-necked antelope, or in dismembered pieces. The tethers that bound the near-headless humans to the overhead colossi snapped free and trailed across the ground.

  Watching the starving dogs go mad with desperation, knowing how unnatural it was that they had been driven to feed off their very masters, made March’s heart ache. As for all those dead humans themselves…well, their extinction was a fate they had earned, through their actions and their inaction and their unworthiness. And if his own future self lay in one of those streets out there, his own head turned to mush, cables of black web running up from it to connect him to one of those Outsiders in the sky, that had manifested to reclaim this world – for he had later come to admit to himself that that was what those leviathans were: the beings that the rarest of the books in his collection had foretold – well, then that was okay, too. He didn�
��t count himself all that much better than the rest of his breed. To his way of thinking, his own dog, Snow, was superior to him. And if Snow were out there hungry and afraid, then he’d want her to feed from his corpse rather than starve to death.

  Today, March turned away from the scrying window and removed his sunglasses. Not much had changed out there over the past two years but for the slow dimming of the light that had heralded the appearance of the Outsiders. He felt a familiar itch, a deep grumbling hunger like that which had started him on this quest for knowledge back when he had still been married.

  The need to know…to see…even more.

  He had been too long content with his success in opening this window, doing nothing more radical than changing his street view from time to time. But now, finally, he had determined that he had to make more dramatic adjustments to his formula if he hoped to understand the destiny of his race more clearly…and exactly when it was that the Outsiders would tear their way into this reality. Once again, he had to truly experiment.

  Then one day, more through that sense of intuition he possessed than through his exhausting reexamination of his book collection, he struck upon the answer. It was so simple he hadn’t even considered it until now. What had really inspired him, ultimately, was a dream he had had the night before, in which he had been standing on the deck of a ghost ship at sea, the Mary Celeste perhaps, the only human aboard but with Snow faithfully by his side. He had taken up an incongruously modern pair of binoculars so as to scan the gray, stormy horizon for land. His view through the lenses had been blurry, so he had had to turn the diopter adjustment ring to sharpen his focus.

  Yes! An adjustment ring!