The Book of Cthulhu 2 Page 14

  All that would be left would be tales. Weird tales.

  •

  Rapture of the Deep

  Cody Goodfellow

  The old man tried to walk on his own as they lifted him off the chopper. They let him fall on his face, then lifted him off the helipad deck by his handcuffed wrists and drove him up the catwalk.

  His mangled nose spewed blood over his mustachioed mouth, glazed eyes rolled back in his bald, heavily sedated head, but the image he sent her almost blinded her with its intensity. She shivered as the brilliant sunny day and the endless ocean vanished behind a wave of frigid white mind-noise.

  Cold.

  White cold. Snow flurries. Cold white and hot red splashing from his frostbitten hand, as he tries to get his black severed fingers from the wolves that haunt the perimeter of the gulag. The laughing guards, the long red wolf-tongues panting behind clouds of breath-mist…

  And then… blackness. Total and crushing darkness. Buried alive under five miles of bone-chilling cold, sunless ocean.

  She gagged on the flood of phantom sensation and clung to the railing as they carried him out of sight.

  The message was clear. Their cruelty was amateurish, next to that of his old masters. An unaccustomed treat they would gorge themselves on until it made them sick.

  He told her even more by assaulting her so, even as they led him down below the waterline, to the interrogation cells. He was more powerful than even his old Soviet handlers had known… but maybe he could only do it when they hurt him.

  Beside her, Roger Mankiw shook the crushed ice in his mojito and turned to look at her through green lenses. “You’re afraid of him, Ingrid?”

  Not half as afraid of him as you should be of me, she thought back, and he might have tasted the sting of it, even he, her skeptical boss. His reedy neck straightened. The sweat rings on his linen shirt deepened. “He’s capable, but he’s a coward,” she told him. “He’s afraid of something he saw down there.”

  “He led us a merry chase, you know. Two contractors topped, untold collateral damage over there. Thailand’s off-limits, now. Our legal eagles are triple-billing us for—”

  “Three.”

  “Pardon?”

  “A contractor jumped out of the chopper, a half hour out. Pulled his grenade pins and jumped. Sergei touched him, they say. Just once.”

  He didn’t ask her how she knew. “Christ!” He tossed his drink over the side. The glass shattered on the lower railings of the research ship and dimpled the heaving sea. Some lucky fish got the bits of mint and ice. Some luckier fish in the indigo deeps far below would get the ones who ate the glass.

  “I never signed on for any of this One Step Beyond shit,” Mankiw growled. “The data shows a steady warming trend with trace radioactivity that’s sweeping the whole South Pacific starting right here, but I’d just as soon keep tossing five million-dollar drone submersibles into the breach, until the head office wises up and drops this entire idiotic venture.”

  Easy for him to say. He was vested, and would fail up the ladder to a corner office in Hong Kong. She would sink like a stone. “Roger, pressing with that kind of urgency sends the wrong message. Sergei will read it as weakness—”

  “Then show none. If you don’t get anything out of him now, I for one will go to the mat for you. But if he doesn’t produce immediately, no more games. No more threats. One way or the other, he’s going to the bottom of the Marianas Trench. Today.”

  * * *

  She waited until he was lucid and beginning to show visible discomfort before she entered his cell. “Perhaps now, Sergei Vasilievich, you will take us a bit more seriously.”

  “This is why you did this? So I would respect you? I know a thing or two about torture. You could have asked me for advice…”

  “We don’t do torture, Sergei. We do negotiation. Nobody forced you to take our money. We only want what we paid for.”

  A fat girl, gobbling sweets and cake under a table at a wedding reception.

  Sergei Lyubyenko reclined as much as his shackles and the bolted-down steel chair allowed, and slid his mangled, three-fingered hand out of its cuff. He flashed his sly, sorry grin, as if they’d both tried to flee, as if they’d been caught together, and would both be punished.

  A gray-faced mastiff rolls in a laboratory cage, licking his prodigious cock and balls.

  “I need your goodwill like my asshole needs a tongue,” he finally replied. “I told you where to find the Rybinsk in less than an hour. I assumed our business was concluded. Was I wrong?”

  The dog again, now busily devouring its own hind legs.

  Ingrid pinched the bridge of her nose. She could smell the dog with the clarity of memory. “You described something else you saw while under hypnosis…”

  “Remote viewing is not hypnosis, but no matter. You got what you paid for. The Rybinsk is unrecoverable, yes? But you know exactly where she is. Now, I believe when I came in, I had a hat…”

  “We paid you to remote view the wreck, but also the source of the unusual radiation signatures, and to find out what happened to the Nereid and Triton 3 submersibles.”

  Sergei produced a pouch from his breast pocket and, using only one hand and his agile lips, rolled a scrawny cigarette. “You rose to this job not just for your good looks, yes? You are a sensitive, but your talents are unformed. They have never been pushed…” He waggled the cigarette at her. She lit it, hand shaky, flinching when he almost touched her.

  “Sergei, my superiors are very disappointed in you and, to put it frankly, they’re also highly dubious of your alleged abilities.”

  He smiled and shrugged. President Nixon hunches over on the toilet aboard Air Force One, masturbating grimly into a Sears catalog.

  “Maybe you think that because you survived the KGB treatment, you’re invincible and answerable to no one. But we are not a government. This is not a country. This is a private ship in international waters, over the deepest hole in the earth. And my superiors in Hong Kong, Moscow and San Francisco may deal in shit most of them don’t believe in, but they expect results. Whatever you think you’ve endured before, I can guarantee you it’s nothing compared to what’ll happen to you, if you don’t show us what we want to know.”

  Sergei yawned, exposing yellow but sturdy, straight teeth. “Do you know where I was going? I stopped in Bangkok, who would not, but I was going back to Russia. If you truly know anything about me, think about that.”

  She nodded. When Sergei slipped the KGB and defected, they arrested his wife and two sons. Somewhere in that dizzying succession of Premiers in the late 80’s, all of them were executed. They did this to make him come out to the South Pacific to view something they called Opaque Zone 38a, so they could drop a tactical nuclear weapon on it.

  “Moscow is worse than ever, but is five time zones from nearest water.” He sighed and rolled another smoke. “You were a very fat girl, when young, yes, Ingrid? Nobody liked you or understood, but is clear to me.”

  “This is not getting us any closer to our objective, Sergei.”

  “You were not just piggy little girl, no. You thought if you ate faster, if you ate everything, you would grow up faster, not so? But you only grew fat.”

  Ingrid declined to play his game.

  “It must eat at you, no?” he pressed. “To be unable to do this, yourself. Such a fool, you actually want to do it, don’t you?”

  Her doctorate was in psychology, but her training as a remote observer required intense concentration on a host vector—the pair of eyes through which she would see whatever her handlers set as her objective. Her success rate was near perfect, with targets she’d slept with.

  Sergei was more properly classified as a projector. He could leave his body and roam freely on what mediums used to call the astral plane or the aether. He needed no prior contact with the target, nothing but a cigarette and his preposterous fee. His hit rate was legendary, before Opaque Zone 38a drove him insane.

  He killed th
e cigarette and gestured for another. In the past, he would go into his trance after taking his first drag, and rest his hand on the table before him with the lit cigarette gnawing away at the stained paper. In about seven minutes, the cigarette burned his fingers, and jolted him awake. Back into his body.

  She reached out with her Bic disposable lighter and lit the shaking cigarette. He took one hit off it and held the smoke in until the burst capillaries on his nose and cheeks flared deep violet. His frosty blue eyes sparkled at her, then went vague and rolled back under drooping lids.

  Ingrid reached out and took the cigarette from his unfeeling fingers, stubbed it out on the table.

  Now, they would get to the bottom of this. He would not come back without answers.

  His three-fingered hand shot out and seized her arm, pulling her across the table towards his empty face. His other arm snaked around her neck to cradle her head, and somehow, she was powerless to push back or strike him.

  When her body fell across the table and settled against Sergei, Ingrid was not inside it.

  * * *

  Everything goes blue.

  A blue so pure and bright, she thinks, he’s taken my sight, I’m blind.

  Blue deepened to indigo as she began to understand that she was seeing all there was to see. When confronted by a featureless color field, the human eye tends to fill the void with visual hallucinations—the ganzfeld effect—but no optical illusions rose up out of the darkening blue, leaving her to conclude that she was not viewing this with her eyes.

  Let us go and see, Sergei whispered, let us go together. She did not hear him or feel him—or anything else—but he was there. The only sensation she felt was a tugging that echoed his gnarled, nicotine-stained grip on her wrist, dragging her inexorably down into the void.

  One time on assignment in Thailand, Ingrid got so stoned on opium that she felt like she tumbled up out of her body. She saw her empty vessel on the silk pallet, drooling as the boy loaded another bolus of tarry resin into her bowl, and then the jumbled rooftops and skeins of wires and cables connecting every synapse of the city, and she was terrified beyond anything she ever experienced before. She fought a raging riptide that tried to pull her up into the smoggy sky, battled back to her body to find herself shivering in a pool of cold urine as the boy and his family went through her pockets.

  Sergei chuckled at her panic, and offered her a body.

  Through a pair of dead black eyes that perceived the ocean as layers of heat and gradients of food trails, she watched the light fail and felt the pressure build as their perfect cruise missile dove beyond the reach of the sun.

  The rude nub of brain that housed them both was little more than a binary box flashing eat/don’t eat as it scented trails of organic waste streaming away from the research ship.

  You could learn to love life as a shark, I think, he thought at her. I could leave you here—

  Sergei trampled the mako shark’s hardwired instincts and drove it to descend ever deeper. The indigo zone gave way to a blue-black twilight, broken by the murky horizon of the ocean floor at the edge of the Marianas Trench. The sheer cliffs of slimy basalt tumbled away into perfect blackness.

  The flow of water over their gills grew frigid and forced them back. Expelling the contents of its bowels and compressing its tissues with the agonizing relentlessness of a wringer, the shark struggled downward for another mile until the pressure crushed its cartilaginous skeleton.

  Expelled out through the shark’s collapsed eyes, she spilled helplessly down into almost total darkness that soon became a starry night sky filled with swooping, stalking, luminescent life.

  An anglerfish drifted past, bloated black head bisected by a grin of needles painted eerie thallium green by the glow of its bobbing barbel lures. Other creatures she saw only by the fitful glow of their beguiling witch-lights, fluttering or skulking through the drifting sleet of organic debris from the surface.

  Tiny jewels of glistering ectoplasm and endless garlands of stinging tendrils and greedy gullets seemed to pulsate with arousal at the passage of their bodiless ghosts, but the predators’ attentions were diverted by the rich feast of the imploded shark’s carcass that came tumbling after them.

  It abruptly dawned upon her that, as a mote of pure intelligence, her senses were limited solely by her will. Whatever caught her mind’s eye seemed to magnify itself until it loomed over her bodiless mind or engulfed her whole. And yet she was drawn inexorably downward, into zones of pure darkness and paralyzing cold, by the invisible grip of the mad Russian psychic.

  Falling, flowing through the inky void, she still felt some inkling of the mounting pressure above them. Water is a thousand times denser than air, yet seawater is only one tenth as dense as lead. The pressure at their destination would exceed six tons per square inch. Exposed to this environment, her physical body would implode long before it could drown.

  Ingrid was not claustrophobic, and as her instinctual fears for her body receded, she began to feel a kind of creeping exhilaration, the euphoria that submariners called the rapture of the deep. No human had ever been where they were going. No one had ever seen what they were going to see. Not like this.

  The last fleeting traces of glowing marine life faded away far above, and the blackness again became absolute. Only by painful degrees did her mind begin to discern the deeper contours of tortured stone, little more solid than the water laying heavy upon them.

  They touched down before a cathedral of bones—the skeleton of a whale, trailing tattered banners of putrefied blubber to feed swarms of gulper eels and dragonfish. Swarms of giant brittle stars squirmed and spawned in the calcareous ooze that coated the ocean floor.

  How deep? she asked.

  This is the bottom of your bottomless pit. We are nearly five miles beneath the surface. You are only a breath away from your body, but the mind plays tricks, yes? To return so quickly would kill us both.

  Floating over a plain of basalt slabs fragmented into disturbingly tessellated geometrical patterns, they approached a towering column like a skyscraper volcano, easily twelve stories high.

  Festooned with giant tubeworms and anemones that twisted in the gelid gloom to bask in the torrent of superheated water and clouds of molten minerals that gushed from its peak.

  Swarms of enormous shrimp sported on the corona of the boiling outflow, only to be ensnared and devoured by monstrous arachnids, which farmed globules of cooling heavy metals, and bore them off across the plain, like leaf cutter ants harvesting fungi from carrion.

  And beyond the chimney lay more chimneys, and larger ones. Hundreds of them, in a uniform field. A farm.

  This was what they had really been sent to find, though Ingrid knew the company would lie to her as blithely as they’d deceived Sergei. The energy wasted here could power a city, if only they could harness it.

  Beyond the last chimney, the plain was broken by dozens of octagonal pits, each hundreds of yards across, and seemingly bottomless. But as she reluctantly floated over them, Ingrid perceived honeycombs of wormholes in the walls. Their hypnotic complexity suggested that they were inhabited by something utterly alien, yet older—and perhaps wiser—than humankind.

  They live, Ingrid railed, and they’re still active, the ones you supposedly exterminated at Opaque Zone 38a?

  Men try to steal the power from their enemies by numbering them. Call it what it was, and what it will be again—R’lyeh.

  Something gleamed in the nearest pit, and she warily reached down to focus on it. Massive metal hulks hung suspended over the void—the missing company submersibles, and the sunken Soviet sub. All were badly crushed, but also dismantled. Rybinsk’s empty nuclear missile silos gaped like the holes in a toothless jaw.

  The Russians said they destroyed them all, Ingrid railed.

  Destroyed them! Girl, even if you could believe a Russian, never suppose that they can be destroyed. This is their world. We live in it only so long as they sleep.

  Beyond the
wells lay a vast plain of fluted lava spires and craters that might have covered a mile. They sped over it to stop suddenly at a gaping, glowing rift in the abyssal plain, which seemed to hold the sun in it.

  No, my dear. All we did was wake them up…

  Tornadoes of heavy black smoke roared up out of the spreading rift in the floor of the trench, which seemed far too hot for even the best-adapted inhabitants of the ocean floor. Slurping waves of fresh magma oozed up over the lips of the rift, melting the crust of Archaean basalt and remaking the earth’s crust at the rate of a flood engulfing a levee.

  This isn’t natural, is it?

  Everything is natural, you fool. Watch…

  Something splashed in the white lava flow, lurched up out of the molten stone and thrust a net of barbed tentacles after her. She almost felt their razored heat, until she was chilled by Sergei’s intangible laughter.

  It was at least as large as the biggest submersible in the company fleet, and resembled a fusion of trilobite and salamander with snarls of segmented tentacles for a head, but only the merest portion of it emerged from the rock-river before it sank again.

  This is retaliation for what you did, twenty years ago.

  What we did, all those years ago, was done with your country’s secret blessing. It was perhaps Soviet Russia’s first and last true selfless act for the good of the world. To end the nightmares, yes? Or perhaps it was not so pure… Moscow could not imagine a world without itself at the helm. Perhaps they meant to rid the world of its nightmares by awakening the sleeper who sent them.

  But it mattered not. The bomb hit its target, and the mission was a success, yes? And yet the one they sought to slay, they did not even disturb his sleep. His children… they are awake again, but they would not trifle in revenge upon insects.

  Away across the plain they flew, to the red mouth of the lava river. A glowing seam of fresh faultline sprouted from it and arrowed away across the plain. The cracked earth subsided like a misfit jigsaw puzzle, and eager gouts of magma bubbled up between the jagged edges.

  At last, they came upon a mountain that crawled across the murky plain, gouging open the earth’s brittle crust with thousands of armored claws like steamshovels. Pitted with age and clotted with colorless, glowing coral reefs, infested by clouds of submarine parasites, its colossal, chitinous shell hid all but the countless antennae and eyestalks that emerged from seams, fissures and faults in the cyclopean exoskeleton.