The Dark Rites of Cthulhu Page 15

  First, with white correction fluid he painted over the ten words of power that accompanied each of the ten points on the formula’s central decagon. The moment he painted over the first word, for the first time in two years the window was gone, leaving only an area of blank paper. He didn’t panic, however, or bemoan his decision. As soon as the white fluid had dried he wrote the same ten words of power…but this time he advanced their position by one degree, clockwise, as if adjusting the focus of a lens.

  The window opened again, and this time he had his dark glasses on from the start just in case he got kicked back to the beginning again, and that blasting column of light.

  But no…his instincts had been correct. The lens gave him the same view of the city as last time, but from a point further, deeper, into the future.

  He no longer needed the sunglasses, and removed them. The sky revealed in the spaces between the blob-like masses of the Outsiders was now a subdued, almost twilight violet. Faint rags of mist wisped between the buildings, and grass had grown up lush, if gray, through cracks in the pavement. Sizable trees had even sprouted, their roots displacing cement slabs, leaves dull and waxy. Walls were choked thick with grayish vines. Many buildings had crumbled in on themselves, turning into ivy-choked rubble. The city looked like a vast graveyard, overgrown, its long-dead occupants without surviving mourners.

  He expected to see bones scattered in the streets. Surely no intact skeletons, but at least stray rib cages or femurs, for instance. No skulls, of course, though the occasional lower jaw was conceivable. Still, there was nothing. Had it all turned to dust?

  He unwound one end of a string, shifted it to another nail an eighth of an inch over. It was like changing the channel on a television, with only a brief interruption of fluttering light/darkness between. As a result, he was given the view of a different street in the same demolished city.

  Not only did he discover bones, this time, but he was introduced to the descendants of the city’s orphaned canines, as well.

  At first it was just the bones. They lay in the very middle of the street, heaped up in a neat cairn. He might have believed that dogs would leave them that way after having gnawed the last shreds from them and cracked them for their marrow -- just as a dog will bury a bone for future use -- maybe even as some new territorial behavior, but what then about the flowers?

  The pile of bones was surrounded by a ring of plucked flowers of a type March couldn’t name, with white petals. This was without question no accidental drift of uprooted flowers blown here by a windstorm. The circle was nearly as perfect as those he himself had inked on paper to design this magic lens.

  So, there had been survivors of the apocalypse, after all! He was almost disappointed, but still anxious to see them…what they looked like, how they lived.

  In the next moment, he did. And he gazed through his window with his jaw hanging slack.

  A large dog, so thin it was emaciated – rather like an albino greyhound, but rougher in outline, more feral-looking, with striking pink eyes like a rabbit’s – came loping out from between two tall mounds that had once been buildings. In its jaws it carried a human pelvis. Its intention was clear: it was going to add this prize to the cairn in the center of the street.

  But as the dog neared the cairn, it rose up onto its hind legs. It walked upright the last few steps. With its front legs, which March now realized had something more like human fingers than the toes of a dog’s paw, the animal removed the pelvis from its jaws and added it to the very top of the pile.

  “Dear God,” March said aloud.

  Behind him, he heard the tinkle of Snow’s dog tags as she lifted her head at the sound of his voice.

  He placed a kitchen chair close in front of the window. Outside the actual windows of his apartment, night had fallen, galaxies of windows alight as if each building in the city had begun to burn up from the inside.

  He saw other dogs come and go, as fleet and furtive as white ghosts in the unending violet twilight. Some galloped along on all fours. Some tiptoed past on two legs. No more bones were added to the monument to their dead, beloved masters while March watched, but one dog – and they were all of the same, strange new breed – did come forward to push the ring of flowers into a neater arrangement after the breeze had made its rim untidy. She bunted the blossoms with her nose and also patted them with her white-furred hands.

  Was this, March wondered, a mutation caused by some emanation, conscious or accidental, generated by the Outsiders? Or could it even be that, having lived among human beings for so many generations, in their absence the dogs had begun to adopt human characteristics and behaviors as a matter of natural evolution? Even, in imitating humans, to replace them in some kind of tribute?

  After a while March saw no more dogs in the street. He became conscious that his rump was sore from the hard wooden chair, and he realized he had neglected Snow for too long. He took her outside on her leash. She released a small pond of urine only a few steps from the old factory’s front stoop. As he stood over her, March caught himself glancing up and down the dark street nervously…as if he expected that at any moment, some crouched figure as gaunt as a bundle of birch branches would come tiptoeing out from around a corner, its vivid pink eyes fixed on him hungrily.

  When he was back inside he shuddered, bolted the door, unhitched Snow from her leash, and set about microwaving himself a poor excuse for a Thai dinner. While he waited for it to cook, he walked over to his computer idly and glanced at the local news.

  He spotted the headline immediately: “Second Ghoulish Murder.”

  The body of a sixty-four-year-old homeless man had been found at the back of Hope Cemetery. He had been horribly savaged. A police spokesman was not confirming that these two murders were the work of a single perpetrator. They did not want to use the term serial killer at this time.

  It wasn’t the first time there had been murders in this city, March reflected. It was a big enough city, and the more people you lumped together, the more harm they did each other. It was just the law of Nature. Shadowy predators had always accompanied what passed for civilization, and always would. But somehow these two killings resonated with him on a deep level, unsettling him in a way he couldn’t articulate to himself.

  Naturally, the next thing to do was to white-out the words of power again, then draw them in anew, rotated one more degree to the right. He did this the following morning, after first making sure Snow had had her walk and her food and water bowls filled. He expected to be seated in front of the two-dimensional crystal ball he had created a long while.

  He didn’t know what increment of time had passed -- any more than he could judge the time that had transpired between now and the first view, and the first view and the second – but it was obvious that it was a great many more years (if one were still to portion time into a man-made notion such as years).

  Buildings had lost more of their orderly shape, become more like natural formations of the Earth; he might not even have recognized them as having been buildings if he hadn’t gazed on this scene from his apartment building’s perspective previously. More trees had risen, almost forming a grove. Their leaves, and the grass and underbrush and rampant creeping ivy, still had that grayish poisoned look, but somehow the vegetation flourished. It wasn’t so much that Nature was reclaiming the city, but that a new Nature had come about.

  Yet all of this was secondary to his interest, because there was a new development that made him lean forward on his chair and murmur, “What the hell is this?”

  In the center of the street where the evolving dogs had erected a monument to their masters – and he had decided it must only be one monument of many dispersed across the city, if not dispersed across the globe – the cairn of bones was gone, replaced by something which he couldn’t identify. It appeared to be a two-dimensional black disk maybe six feet across, floating a foot or so off the split pavement, angled slightly away from March so he could see it wasn’t a sphere. Its surface
was flat black, featureless, but the edge of the circle appeared to be rimmed in a fringe of wavering cilia like that of a paramecium. In addition, maybe a dozen strands varying in thickness – from thread-thin to cables as thick as a wrist, perhaps – streamed upwards from various points in the disk’s outer rim. Just like the strands that had once connected the decimated heads of human corpses to the Outsiders overhead, these various cords ran up into the sky to disappear in the distance, but March had no doubt they connected with the immense bodies still hovering above the Earth.

  The sky showing in the gaps between the Outsiders was still that violet hue of early evening, and against its subtle glow he could see that after centuries or millennia of immobility the silhouetted outlines of the Outsiders appeared to be pulsing, throbbing amorphously. He noticed that long whip-like flagella had been extruded by the Outsiders here and there, lazily wavering as if the entities swam in place in the Earth’s atmosphere.

  He returned his focus to the hovering disk the Outsiders had apparently manifested. Just as in the case of the cairn of bones, March strongly suspected this wasn’t the only such tethered disk that had appeared in this city, or upon the face of the Earth. Were those god-like entities at last, moving with the unhurried pace of the immortal, endeavoring to transform this reality into an environment that better suited their needs or desires?

  A low rumbling behind March caused him to spin around on his chair’s wooden seat to look back at his living space, jolted like a man abruptly awakened from a dream. For a disoriented half-second he didn’t recognize his own surroundings, as if someone had bricked him alive in this box while his spirit had been elsewhere. Then he saw Snow. The white greyhound stood just behind him, her gaze fixed hypnotically on the lens as his had been. Her upper lip was quivering. At first he had had the odd notion that she was growling at him, but she had obviously sensed something in the scrying window. Up until this moment, over the past two years that it had remained open, she had never even appeared to acknowledge the window’s existence.

  March faced his lens again to try to ascertain what it was that had caused his pet to take note of it after all this time. The appearance of the levitating black disk? The undulating bodies of the Outsiders?

  New movement, and March flinched as a figure entered the scene from the right, like an actor stepping out from behind a curtain onto a stage. It was one of the dogs, but that much further evolved from the last time he had watched them. It bore no vestige of a tail, and walked more erect than the tiptoeing creatures he had seen before, its upright posture no longer seeming tentative or unnatural. Though still lean, its musculature appeared more like that of a human than a dog. It was still covered in short bristly white hair, its snout still elongated and canine, its eyes still an almost luminous pink, but the creature’s overall aspect conveyed a palpable intelligence.

  The creature was carrying an armful of tinder, perhaps to start a fire. March had no doubt at all that these beings were now capable of creating fire. He realized, however, that it wasn’t bare branches in its arms but a bundle of human leg and arm bones.

  The strange being was moving straight toward the hovering disk. It didn’t bend its path around it. Snow growled again, showing her teeth now, as the creature drew closer to the inky circle. March reached around behind him, without taking his eyes off the viewing screen he had called into existence, and stroked Snow’s neck to calm her. Was the creature going to offer its burden of bones to the disk as a tribute, to appease its new masters?

  Having created this scrying pane from a once empty sheet of paper, March was not surprised when he comprehended the black disk was a portal – though whether it was an intentional creation of the Outsiders, or merely a hole stretched open in the fabric of space and time as a byproduct of the Outsiders’ new activity, how could he judge? However the portal had come to be, March’s first impression when the dog-creature arrived at the disk was that it was going to throw the bones into it. Instead, the thing stepped over the rim of the disk and slipped its whole body into the blackness. In a fraction of a moment, the dog-being was gone, as if it had plunged into a vertical pool of ink.

  No sooner had it disappeared than two more of the canine-things emerged from the same direction, their arms also full of human bones. Snow growled again, as the pair of creatures approached the disk as the first one had. They too, one after the other, hopped up into the black circle and were swallowed.

  Like him, the dogs had figured out that the disk was the mouth of a tunnel.

  “They’re…migrating,” March whispered to Snow, in awe. “And taking their masters’ bones with them.”

  But, he wondered, migrating where?

  Over the next several hours he saw one more dog-being disappear into the disk with a load of bones in its grasp. After that, March was too impatient to watch for more of them. Too impatient to wait until tomorrow to forward the words of power another notch. He decided to do that now.

  First, though, he sat on the edge of his bed and stroked Snow and talked to her soothingly. He told her he was going to tear up some hotdogs for her and add them to her bowl of dry food as a treat, to keep her distracted while he inscribed the last of the ten words of power that would reactivate his decagonal lens. He said, “You’re a good girl, Snow. You’re the only living thing on this planet that I can count on. That I can trust. The only constant in my life. The only living thing in this world that truly loves me. The only thing that I truly love.” His eyes were filling up in self pity, but also with the enormity of his affection. He understood he not only loved this animal, but admired her…and all her kind. To his mind, dogs were already the pinnacle of evolution.

  He went on, “You don’t live as long as we do. What will I do, someday, when I don’t even have you anymore? I’ll be alone. But I guess…I guess we’re all of us alone. Most people just don’t think they are.” He smiled, and ran his hand along her neck again. “We’ll just keep being alone together, I guess, huh? And see what the future brings.”

  She turned her head to lick his hand.

  With Snow digging into her bowl of food at the other end of the long, single room that doubled as March’s bedroom and living room, he penned in the last of the ten potent words.

  March’s initial impression was that he had been unsuccessful, that he had written one of the words incorrectly. The window only showed unbroken blackness. He was reminded, uncomfortably, of the disk he had seen floating above the street in the last view. He imagined a dog-creature’s head suddenly thrusting out of the portal into his reality, pink eyes blazing, to snap at his face. But then he considered that perhaps night had finally descended over that future landscape.

  Eventually, though, he realized he was seeing a churning sort of blackness within the blackness, a restless pulsing almost sensed more so than actually seen. Seen with his mind rather than his eyes. Thus, trusting more to his intuition than his paltry organs of sight, March came to understand that the Outsiders had descended from the sky at long last. Descended, and consumed. They had swallowed up all, until they were all.

  He advanced the ten words another notch, to the fifth configuration he had attempted, so impatient that the correction fluid hadn’t dried fully and the inscriptions were smeary. They still did the trick, but the resulting view was the same as before: only churning, sentient blackness. Nevertheless, he continued this way – sixth configuration, seventh, eighth, ninth, tenth, as though he were the master of time himself, forcing the arm of a clock -- until the only position that remained was the original one, setting number one, which had showed him the Earth still blazing with the white light of the Outsiders’ eruption onto this plane of existence.

  For now, he left the dial set at view number ten. For now, his mind couldn’t assimilate any more than that seething black emptiness. It was almost soothing, that living oblivion. A kind of relief, like an afterlife of blissful nothingness.

  That night, after he had walked Snow and then made himself a sandwich, he sat down
in front of his computer to look in on the news. He almost expected to see that there had been a third killing in his city in or around Hope Cemetery, but there hadn’t. He extended his search to other cities, then other countries, but of course gruesome murders committed in or around graveyards were so prevalent that they could have been the work of a never-ending supply of madmen. Still, wasn’t it possible that some of these crimes he skimmed had been committed by another kind of predator? A predator that had lived in humankind’s shadow for generations, maybe since the earliest days of human civilization? Going back as far, perhaps, as the time when primitive humans and wild canines had first begun living in conjunction?

  The cosmic clock come full circle?

  With the world all peacefully black outside the windows of his third-floor loft, March swiveled his computer chair to watch Snow as she slept, her snout propped on one paw as always.

  “They don’t eat us because they hate us,” March whispered to the dog, while he wondered about the dreams that made her twitch one hind leg from time to time. Was she dreaming the primal dream of hunting prey? Was she dreaming of stalking on her hind legs alone?

  He said, “They eat us to commune with us. Because they still love us.”

  Of Circles and Rings

  By Tom Lynch

  It’s a good bout, up to a point. We’re pretty evenly matched, and this is the farthest I’ve gotten in the elimination rounds, so I’m stoked to be this close to placing first. Then, my opponent switches gears to Bagua Zhang. That’s fine. No problem. He’s probably getting tired, so he’s looking to evade my attacks and let me tire myself out. Fine by me. I’ll just wait till he makes a mistake, then I’ll take home the trophy.

  All of a sudden, he’s doing an elaborate form, almost a dance, still moving in circles, spinning his hands and arms in some kind of demo thing, moving closer, closer. I don’t know who he thinks he’s going to impress, but it won’t be m—