The Book of Cthulhu 2 Page 7

  I realized at that moment that I had a hundred questions for Marken. That I’d finally begun to understand. That the wet coming down from the sky in infinite raindrops was different than the wet that was gathered together in the lake. And that Marken was, I suppose, an officer of a greater law than I’d ever served, with answers as far above my own eyes as if a child had been asking me about mine.

  I began to understand that he had much to tell me. That he had been keeping many things hidden. That I wasn’t ready. That I had only a drop of knowledge. Just the taste of an ocean.

  We were still, I swear and believe, a hundred feet from the edges of the lake. But that makes no matter. None at all.

  We still fell in.

  There was a rush of earth, of water, as if the lake had nabbed us from below in the manner of a mole stealing vegetables from a garden. The dogs were in chaos, paddling as best they could, but the water was churning and alive and I lost sight of the surface, of Marken, of everything. I tumbled and flailed. There was nothing but the water. For long moments, there was nothing but the water. And me, of course, being drawn down below. Then… old Steggs, the police dog, came sinking past me, struggling as he was for air. I dove for him, needing to save something, to act for a cause, to believe in something. I dove for that dog. Down and down. Down and down. Always down. My lungs should have been bursting. My lungs should have been furious. But I felt nothing. Only dove for the dog. He was just out of reach. Looking to me. Scared. Trusting. But I couldn’t reach him.

  I pulled up short when I saw the city.

  Nothing could induce me to put onto paper what I saw of that city. Of its people. Police psychiatry be damned… I will not bid my mind to speak of what I will never forget. Those temples of stone. Those streets made of nothing but water, curling through and around and over the buildings, and men walking about them as if these streets were a true surface, as if water could hold them, as if the wet were solid. And the men were not men, of course. I only call them men to save my mind. They were as much slugs as men. Creatures of jelly. Blobs of flesh that changed shape with every facsimile of a step. Tendrils always and ever reaching out, but tendrils changing to arms, to wings, to faces, to legs, then all of these at the same time, and then they were nothing, nothing at all, only whisked away by the water that whirled around the spires and the rooftops, each surface of each building worn by untold millennia of footsteps, grooves worn into the stone of the rooftops and the walls and everywhere, all of the motion a mad whirl around me, and down past it all at the bottom, down at the bed of the lake, past Steggs, past the sinking dogs, there was the source of the light. A glacier, I thought, at first. A strange white glacier that was beneath the water, that covered the bottom of the lake, that stretched into caverns that went even farther below, that sank deep into the heart of this world.

  A glacier.

  But of course it was not. I will not write anything more of it in this report. Nothing of how, without eyes, it looked up to me. Nothing of how, without a mouth, it spoke my name.

  I swam madly for the surface. I swam away from the buildings, from the city that stretched beneath me. I abandoned the dogs that were floating past me, their dead eyes bulging in fear, then closing in death, then opening once more, staring at me, though I had no thought that they had come back to life. None of that.

  I could see the surface. It was like a roll of clouds above me. A hundred feet, it seemed. I swam as a madman. Closing the distance. Planning how I would run when I was on land. No destination. No stopping. Just running. I would run.

  A hand went on my shoulder.

  Marken, I hoped. I hoped for Christopher Marken.

  But when I turned it was Maple Cabershaw.

  At first I thought she was drowning. At first I wondered how she had traveled from Wath-upon-Dearne, where I knew she was being kept, to find herself in the waters of Lake Henpin. But then I saw the look of blackness in her eyes. The depths of space within her. The smile that was somehow both uncaring and malignant at the same time. I heard her laugh, even underwater, casting aside Earth’s rules and speaking to me even as water filled her lungs, even as her skin flashed into impossible colors and her limbs flickered into tendrils, or thick seaweeds, and then back to human again.

  But she was not human. She had never been human. The Cabershaw family were guardians and I had come too close to their secrets and their domain. Maple slid her fingers into my hair and began to pull me back down, back down, laughing at my struggles and whispering through the water and into my ears. She spoke of citadels. Of rulers. Of servants. Of sustenance. Of life. But nothing of her words was of Earth. It was all madness. Grand madness. And all true. Her madness was true.

  I fought. I fought and I clubbed her with the Webley that I still held clutched in my hands. I brought it down on her face, shattering nothing. Her features merely moved aside. Slid around the impact. My lungs were heaving and I clutched at her throat; I clenched at her throat while trying to choke the life out of the beautifully strange creature, but her smile never changed. I was nothing. Only a minnow swimming against a whale. Still, a minnow may fight, and fought I did. I fought until I saw how we were near the surface of the lake, how I was nearly to freedom, separated momentarily from the creature I once believed was human, who I once believed was Maple Cabershaw, a woman who had sat for long years in silence, and who had once nearly drowned in this lake.

  She swam for me, and I saw no humanity in her eyes. Only death.

  But then, before she could reach me, hands came down from above. A man’s hands. Maple gave a start of surprise, and then a grin of realization, and then she smiled at me as she was plucked up and out of the waters. She went limp as she surfaced.

  Air. Sweet air. I heaved to the surface and into… sunlight. My face was barely above the waves. My face was only inches from a boat. My eyes, looking up, saw my father, my father who has been dead so many years. He was gasping and he was holding the still frame of Maple Cabershaw, desperately trying to breathe life into her limp form, as all around him the boating party came to the aid of the young girl who had nearly drowned in the lake.

  * * *

  Time is nothing to them. What of it to me, then? Why should I care how I found myself in the lake house? Why should I care that the floors were new? The curtains clean? The smells of fresh bread in the kitchen so delicious? I remembered little of finding my way. Of slipping beneath the waves, away from the past, away from my father, swimming unseen and away from the newest madness, rising from the lake, sodden, dripping, always dripping, hearing nothing but the echoes of barking dogs but being drawn by something, some thread that was dancing me on its string, and then I was in the great hall of the lake house, where I found Christopher Marken holding Cecil Cabershaw by his hair, raising his brittle-looking axe and bringing it down, beheading the man. There was a hiss of smoke without flame, cold without a source, and Cabershaw’s body shivered, but the head, God save us, still lived. The head still lived. It grew tentacles, tendrils like seaweed, and it began to run, to escape, to flee the promised kiss of that brittle axe.

  “Shoot it!” Marken said, seeing me. “We can’t let it escape! Bring it down!”

  And I rose my gun, and I fired four shots. Four. Only three bullets missing from my Webley, but I know what I have done. I fired four shots. Four bullets. But they curved. The trajectory of my bullets curved. They slammed into Marken. Brought him down. He was an innocent. He was a good man.

  I have been misquoted, you understand. I never said he killed the dogs. I never said he killed young Joslie. I only said he was responsible. He said as much to me, cursing his failure, as he died.

  It was not blood that came from his veins. It was water. Water from the lake.

  Despite this, I believe that Markie was a good man.

  When I awoke, I was sprawled outside the decrepit and long-unused lake house, with the waters of Lake Henpin slapping at my feet.

  * * *

  Captain Levetts, I fear I am no l
onger writing a shooting report. This is now a note to you. And to my wife, if you think that is best. I have learned many things in the days since Marken’s death. I have recovered some of what he left behind in the tower, ferreting them away before the mysterious fire that claimed the lives of his workmen and collapsed the entire tower into the basements and caverns below. I have read of the Cabershaw family in such books as the Cthäat Aquadingen and Unaussprechlichen Kulten. I now have more knowledge that I can possibly hold. My brain wants to scream it away. I will allow my brain to do this in the only way possible. I am writing this in your office bathroom, now, where I have excused myself for some moments from Mr. Ulton, the psychiatrist, and where I am watching the sink in your bathroom dripping and dripping and dripping, and I could stand here and speak to it. But I won’t. I won’t do that.

  I know that you have my gun in your desk. My Webley is there. Taken from me. For the best, it was said. It will be a simple matter to force open your locked desk. I will find my gun.

  First, before that, I will save you from the embarrassment of having a suicide on your force. I hereby resign.

  It has been a great honor to serve the people of Leighton. Tell my wife I love her, and to never let the water run for too long. It’s a waste, you know. An awful waste.

  Oh.

  A thought.

  I have just now solved the mystery of my Webley.

  Three bullets or four?

  I understand, now.

  Time means nothing to them.

  The fourth shot has yet to be fired.

  •

  The Ocean and All Its Devices

  William Browning Spencer

  Left to its own enormous devices the sea

  in timeless reverie conceives of life,

  being itself the world in pantomime.

  —Lloyd Frankenberg, The Sea

  The hotel’s owner and manager, George Hume, sat on the edge of his bed and smoked a cigarette. “The Franklins arrived today,” he said.

  “Regular as clockwork,” his wife said.

  George nodded. “Eight years now. And why? Why ever do they come?”

  George Hume’s wife, an ample woman with soft, motherly features, sighed. “They seem to get no pleasure from it, that’s for certain. Might as well be a funeral they come for.”

  The Franklins always arrived in late fall, when the beaches were cold and empty and the ocean, under dark skies, reclaimed its terrible majesty. The hotel was almost deserted at this time of year, and George had suggested closing early for the winter. Mrs. Hume had said, “The Franklins will be coming, dear.”

  So what? George might have said. Let them find other accommodations this year. But he didn’t say that. They were sort of a tradition, the Franklins, and in a world so fraught with change, one just naturally protected the rare, enduring pattern.

  They were a reserved family who came to this quiet hotel in North Carolina like refugees seeking safe harbor. George couldn’t close early and send the Franklins off to some inferior establishment. Lord, they might wind up at The Cove with its garish lagoon pool and gaudy tropical lounge. That wouldn’t suit them at all.

  The Franklins (husband, younger wife, and pale, delicate-featured daughter) would dress rather formally and sit in the small opened section of the dining room—the rest of the room shrouded in dust covers while Jack, the hotel’s aging waiter and handyman, would stand off to one side with a bleak, stoic expression.

  Over the years George had come to know many of his regular guests well. But the Franklins had always remained aloof and enigmatic. Mr. Greg Franklin was a man in his mid or late forties, a handsome man, tall—over six feet—with precise, slow gestures and an oddly uninflected voice, as though he were reading from some internal script that failed to interest him. His much younger wife was stunning, her hair massed in brown ringlets, her eyes large and luminous and containing something like fear in their depths. She spoke rarely, and then in a whisper, preferring to let her husband talk.

  Their child, Melissa, was a dark-haired girl—twelve or thirteen now, George guessed—a girl as pale as the moon’s reflection in a rain barrel. Always dressed impeccably, she was as quiet as her mother, and George had the distinct impression, although he could not remember being told this by anyone, that she was sickly, that some traumatic infant’s illness had almost killed her and so accounted for her methodical, wounded economy of motion.

  George ushered the Franklins from his mind. It was late. He extinguished his cigarette and walked over to the window. Rain blew against the glass, and lightning would occasionally illuminate the white-capped waves.

  “Is Nancy still coming?” Nancy, their daughter and only child, was a senior at Duke University. She had called the week before saying she might come and hang out for a week or two.

  “As far as I know,” Mrs. Hume said. “You know how she is. Everything on a whim. That’s your side of the family, George.”

  George turned away from the window and grinned. “Well, I can’t accuse your family of ever acting impulsively—although it would do them a world of good. Your family packs a suitcase to go to the grocery store.”

  “And your side steals a car and goes to California without a toothbrush or a prayer.”

  This was an old, well-worked routine, and they indulged it as they readied for bed. Then George turned off the light and the darkness brought silence.

  * * *

  It was still raining in the morning when George Hume woke. The violence of last night’s thunderstorm had been replaced by a slow, business-like drizzle. Looking out the window, George saw the Franklins walking on the beach under black umbrellas. They were a cheerless sight. All three of them wore dark raincoats, and they might have been fugitives from some old Bergman film, inevitably tragic, moving slowly across a stark landscape.

  When most families went to the beach, it was a more lively affair.

  George turned away from the window and went into the bathroom to shave. As he lathered his face, he heard the boom of a radio, rock music blaring from the adjoining room, and he assumed, correctly, that his twenty-one-year-old daughter Nancy had arrived as planned.

  Nancy had not come alone. “This is Steve,” she said when her father sat down at the breakfast table.

  Steve was a very young man—the young were getting younger—with a wide-eyed, waxy expression and a blond mustache that looked like it could be wiped off with a damp cloth.

  Steve stood up and said how glad he was to meet Nancy’s father. He shook George’s hand enthusiastically, as though they had just struck a lucrative deal.

  “Steve’s in law school,” Mrs. Hume said, with a proprietary delight that her husband found grating.

  Nancy was complaining. She had, her father thought, always been a querulous girl, at odds with the way the world was.

  “I can’t believe it,” she was saying. “The whole mall is closed. The only—and I mean only—thing around here that is open is that cheesy little drugstore, and nobody actually buys anything in there. I know that, because I recognize stuff from when I was six. Is this some holiday I don’t know about or what?”

  “Honey, it’s the off season. You know everything closes when the tourists leave.”

  “Not the for-Christ-sakes mall!” Nancy said. “I can’t believe it.” Nancy frowned. “This must be what Russia is like,” she said, closing one eye as smoke from her cigarette slid up her cheek.

  George Hume watched his daughter gulp coffee. She was not a person who needed stimulants. She wore an ancient gray sweater and sweatpants. Her blonde hair was chopped short and ragged and kept in a state of disarray by the constant furrowing of nervous fingers. She was, her father thought, a pretty girl in disguise.

  * * *

  That night, George discovered that he could remember nothing of the spy novel he was reading, had forgotten, in fact, the hero’s name. It was as though he had stumbled into a cocktail party in the wrong neighborhood, all strangers to him, the gossip meaningless.
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br />   He put the book on the nightstand, leaned back on the pillow, and said, “This is her senior year. Doesn’t she have classes to attend?”

  His wife said nothing.

  He sighed. “I suppose they are staying in the same room.”

  “Dear, I don’t know,” Mrs. Hume said. “I expect it is none of our business.”

  “If it is not our business who stays in our hotel, then who in the name of hell’s business is it?”

  Mrs. Hume rubbed her husband’s neck. “Don’t excite yourself, dear. You know what I mean. Nancy is a grown-up, you know.”

  George did not respond to this and Mrs. Hume, changing the subject, said, “I saw Mrs. Franklin and her daughter out walking on the beach again today. I don’t know where Mr. Franklin was. It was pouring, and there they were, mother and daughter. You know…” Mrs. Hume paused. “It’s like they were waiting for something to come out of the sea. Like a vigil they were keeping. I’ve thought it before, but the notion was particularly strong today. I looked out past them, and there seemed no separation between the sea and the sky, just a black wall of water.” Mrs. Hume looked at herself in the dresser’s mirror, as though her reflection might clarify matters. “I’ve lived by the ocean all my life, and I’ve just taken it for granted, George. Suddenly it gave me the shivers. Just for a moment. I thought, Lord, how big it is, lying there cold and black, like some creature that has slept at your feet so long you never expect it to wake, have forgotten that it might be brutal, even vicious.”

  “It’s all this rain,” her husband said, hugging her and drawing her to him. “It can make a person think some black thoughts.”

  George left off worrying about his daughter and her young man’s living arrangements, and in the morning, when Nancy and Steve appeared for breakfast, George didn’t broach the subject—not even to himself.