New Cthulhu: The Recent Weird Part 22

"You say he?" the younger Jorny asked. "Not it?"

"Right-he has gender. But little else we can comprehend. Once he's changed a world enough, he can eat what you eat, feel what you feel. Some he will already have changed, in your world-the rest he will change later. He changed our world about eighteen years ago. We've resisted-but most people don't. They get changed-the Great Appet.i.te removes whatever there is in them that checks appet.i.tes and desires and impulses. Any kind of strong controlling intelligence, he takes it out. Makes psychopaths of some people, and zombies of just feeding, of different kinds, of others-"

"Like Gunnar Johansen!" Deede burst out.

The older Deede stopped on a landing and turned to look at her. "Yes," she said gravely. "He killed my mother too-before the Great Appet.i.te took over. Like him. He was already under Yog-Sothoth's control . . . without knowing it."

She looked like she wanted to embrace the younger Deede-but Deede was afraid of her, and took a step back.

The older Deede shrugged and turned to follow the older Jorny through a doorway-the door at this landing had been wrenched aside, was leaning, crumpled against the wall, hinges snapped. They pa.s.sed through and found themselves in the lower Mezzanine lounge, exactly like the one they'd left-sterile in its furnishings and design.

They walked over to the window and stared out at the world-the transformed world.

There was no sky. Instead there was a ceiling, high up, just above the tallest building, that stretched to the horizon. And the ceiling was covered with images, enticing objects and enticing bodies flashing by and intermingling and overlapping. She saw an advertis.e.m.e.nt for BLENDER-and the indeterminate segments of fleshy material that she'd seen in the Skymall shop window; she saw an ad for something called BRAIN BLANKER: For really changing your child-remake it exactly as you please! She saw an ad for INTER-REACTIVES, INC, the sea urchin helmets she'd seen in Skymall; she saw an ad that said simply, WE ELIMINATE PROBLEM NEIGHBORS-GOVERNMENT CERTIFIED AGAINST RETALIATION; another ad asked, WANT A PET THAT REALLY SCREAMS? ORDER LITTLE PEOPLE! and there was an image of a frightened, dwarf sized semi-human figure lifted by its neck from a "home-grow vat"-by a grinning man holding a two-by-four with nails sticking out of it, in his other hand; there was an ad for LATEST FACE: THE TOP TEN FACES, WITH NEAR-INSTANTANEOUS TRANSFER GUARANTEED, AT REDUCED PRICES. The images were sometimes blurred by great gray clouds of smog-clouds pierced by people who flew through them, people mechanically enhanced to fly, their bodies pierced by pistons and wires, shrieking as they went; other people crawled up and down the sides of buildings like bugs; cl.u.s.ters of junk material floated by, clouds of metal with people clinging to them, wailing and t.i.ttering and fornicating; unspeakably fat people drifted by on flying cushions tricked out with pincers and mechanical hands; emaciated people drifted by too: their heads penetrated by wires, their faces twitching with pleasures they no longer really felt, their vehicles suddenly spurting with speed to deliberately crash headlong into other vehicles, going down in spinning, flaming wreckage to join the acc.u.mulation of twisted metal and weather-beaten trash that filled the streets hundreds of feet deep, black with insects . . .

"That's pretty much the way the whole world looks," the older Jorny said, his voice cracking. "There are attempts at changing it, in places-but the influence of the Great Appet.i.te is too strong . . . unless you have with you . . . " He turned to his younger self. "What you are supposed to have."

"What? What do you mean?"

"You have something I need . . . " The older Jorny took off his backpack, and took out a boxy device that had speakers at both ends, like a boombox, but no place to put in CDs or an iPod-only a small recess at one end. "You see? It goes here . . . "

"You're expecting something from us?" Deede asked, confused.

The older Deede looked out the window. "When we found the locus of the Great Appet.i.te, in the temple, we found I had a kind of . . . a sensitivity to it. I could pick up information from it. By something I think of as 'looking fast.' "

Deede nodded. "I'm like that too."

"I saw you, then-saw that you were coming and that you carried something the Great Appet.i.te is afraid of. A many-voiced note of refusal."

"A what?"

"Do you have a recording device with you?"

Jorny stared at them . . . then slowly reached into his pocket and drew out his iPod.

The older Deede frowned. "That's not what I saw . . . "

"It's inside it!" The older Jorny said. He s.n.a.t.c.hed the iPod from Jorny's hand and-ignoring Jorny's protests-smashed it again and again on the metal window frame till it burst open.

"There it is!" The older Deede shouted, pointing at the wrecked device. "That thing!"

"It's a microdrive!" the older Jorny said excitedly. "We use them to make sounds too-but we put them directly in our sound machines. We have only sounds that have been appropriated, co-opted by the Great Appet.i.te. Now . . . "

"This better work," Jorny grumbled.

The older Jorny plucked the microdrive from the wreckage and pressed it in the recess of the alternate boombox. It fit neatly in place. He hit a switch and the box boomed out-with a roaring cacophony.

"s.h.i.t!" the younger Jorny yelled, reaching over to snap the boombox off again. "It's not picking out any one song-it sounds like it's playing all of them at once! There's more than a thousand songs in there!"

"So that's it . . . " the older Deede murmured. She looked at the older Jorny. "Remember? 'A thousand voices will silence his roar!' That's what I heard from the green light-it tried to cover it up but I saw it! It's supposed to play them all at once!"

A vast moaning shook the floor then, and the ceiling shed bits of plaster. It was coming from the elevator banks . . .

"We've frightened him with the sound-for just that one second!" the older Jorny said. "He's coming for us!" He handed the younger Jorny the boombox. "Play it as loud as possible in the temple! Go on! It'll make everything possible! We'll draw it off!"

They he looked at the older Deede-and, to Deede's exquisite discomfort, the two adults kissed, kissed hugely and wetly. She looked away-so did Jorny. Then the older Jorny and Deede turned and ran past the elevator. The elevator doors opened and something red and green and endlessly hungry reached from it, stretching after them . . .

"Oh no . . . " Deede said.

"We'd better try this . . . " Jorny whispered. And they turned and pounded down the stairs.

In minutes they'd reached the upside down bas.e.m.e.nt room, and dropped through the ceiling, coming up, spinning in s.p.a.ce with momentary weightlessness, in the temple room . . .

Deede found herself on the floor, with the sphere-within-spheres, the Great Appet.i.te, Yog-Sothoth looming over her, reaching for her, making its unspeakable offering. . . .

And then Jorny reached to switch on the boombox, at full volume. . . .

"Jorny!" His hand hesitated over the boombox and he looked up to see his mother, trapped in one of the transparent tentacles, compressed and terrified. "Jorny-wait! I don't know what you're doing but it'll punish me if you do it! Stop!"

He drew his hand back. Deede knew she had to trigger the box-but she was afraid of what she'd see if she reached for it. This thing had the power to hurt, to punish, beyond time. It could reach into your soul. It was evil times evil. It was the dark side of pleasure and it was the green light of pain. It wasn't something to defy . . .

But she remembered what the world looked like, after the Great Appet.i.te was done . . .

"I don't know what to do," Jorny said, covering his eyes with his hands.

Deede knew what to do. She reached for the box . . .

"Deede-don't!" Jean's voice.

"Deede, wait!" Lenny's voice. "Look-we're here-you can't-"

Deede refused to look. In defiance, she stabbed her fingers don't on the play b.u.t.ton.

The sound that came out of the box was the joined booming of a thousand songs at once, the sort that Jorny would choose-a thousand songs of angst, rebellion, uncertainty, insistence, fury. Everything but a certain kind of surrender. They all had one note in common: a sound that was a refusal to be anything untrue.

One great thousand-faceted roaring white noise, black noise, every noise of the sonic spectrum . . . roaring. Roaring refusal-roaring defiance!

And the sphere-of-spheres withdrew into itself, dropping everything it touched in the two worlds connected by the temple, retreating to other planes, where it could find surcease from the amplified, crystalized sound of refusal to surrender to its dominance.

The temple shuddered, and the spiral grooves seemed to spin for a moment, like an old fashioned record-then the ceiling tumbled down and smashed the boombox. Came tumbling toward Jorny- Deede pulled Jorny aside, at the last split-second, and the great ceiling stones tumbled down in the center of the room, leaving a crust of chamber, the edges . . . and a pile of stone that blocked off the hole into the other Skytown, and rose in a cluttered k.n.o.b into the bas.e.m.e.nt room above . . .

"You did it?" Jorny asked, coughing with dust.

"I had to. It couldn't have been worse for anyone . . . "

He nodded and they climbed, together, silently, through the dust cloud, and up into the bas.e.m.e.nt room. They found their way to the stairways . . . where they found dozens of people, clothes soaked and skin wet with blood. They were weak-but most were alive, lying one to a step, up and up and up the stairs, feebly calling for help. Among them, they found Lenny and Jean and Jorny's mother. They couldn't remember where they'd been. No one could quite remember it.

Not all of them were alive. Koenig was there-crushed almost flat.

The elevators were no longer blocked, the security guards were gone-except the ones who were dead. The front doors were wide open. When the ambulances came, no one could completely explain where they'd been or what had happened to them. Some internal disaster was inferred, and explanations were generated. Deede's father returned that night, summoned to deal with the emergency, and they moved out, to a hotel on the other side of town-the same one that Jorny and his mother were staying at. He asked remarkably few questions.

Lenny and Jean spent most of the second day away from the Skymall in the hospital, getting transfusions, getting tested-they seemed dazed, slowly coming back to themselves.

It was just three days later that Deede set out for Portland, to visit her cousin. "Just need to get away from this town, Dad," she said. "Just for a few days. I want to go to Mom's grave . . . "

He simply nodded, and helped her pack-and he put her on a plane.

She had to go to the trail by the old quarry for three days before Johansen showed up. She'd let him see her go there, every night, but he'd been cautious. Still, since she was wearing as little as she could get away with, he couldn't resist.

That night he followed her along the trail under the moonlight . . .

She went to the precipice, where her mother had taken her fatal plunge. She waited there for Johansen, humming a song to herself. No particular song-bits of many songs, really.

Johansen came up behind her, chuckling to himself.

She turned to face him, feeling like she was made of steel. "No one's here-I'm sure you checked that out. And you can see I'm not wired. Not wearing enough to cover up a wire. You may as well say it. You killed her. You want to kill me."

"Sure," Johansen said. His hair was a jagged halo in the moonlight; his teeth seemed white in a face gone dark because the light was behind him. His eyes were two dark holes. "Why shouldn't I kill the little s.l.u.t as well as the mama s.l.u.t?"

"I don't think you can, though," she said calmly. "You know what? I used to be afraid of you. But I'm not now. I'm not afraid anymore! You're small time. I stopped what made you. I can stop you easily-you're so very small, in comparison, Johansen, to the Great Appet.i.te itself."

"You're babbling, kid."

"Yeah? Then shut me up. If you can. I don't think you can, you limp-d.i.c.ked jerk.

You're nothing!"

His face contorted at that, and he rushed her-and she moved easily aside, drawing the razor-sharp buck-knife she'd hidden in her belt, under her blouse in back. Then his ankle struck the fishing line she'd stretched, taut and down low between the roots, over the little peninsular jut of the cliff. And he stumbled and plunged, headlong, into the quarry, just as she'd known he would. She wouldn't need the back-up knife, after all, she decided, pleased, as she watched him fall wailing into the shallow water, to break on the jagged rocks she'd arranged down there.

He lay face down in the shallow water on the rough-edged stones, struggling, calling hoa.r.s.ely for help, his neck broken, unable to lift his head but a few inches . . . finally sagging down into the water. Drowning.

Smiling, she watched him die.

Then she stretched, and waved cheerfully at the moon. She cut the fishing wire, put it in her pocket, tossed the knife into the quarry, and, humming a thousand songs, trotted back along the trail to the street. When she got to the sidewalk, she called first her Dad, then Jorny on her cell phone, said she'd be coming back soon.

And then she caught a bus to the cemetery to have a talk with Mom.

Of his vast collection of strange, rare books on forbidden subjects I have read all that are written in the languages of which I am master; but these are few as compared with those in languages I cannot understand. Most, I believe, are in Arabic; and the fiend-inspired book which brought on the end-the book which he carried in his pocket out of the world-was written in characters whose like I never saw elsewhere.

"The Statement of Randolph Carter" H.P. Lovecraft (1919).

* BRINGING HELENA BACK *

Sarah Monette.

I was contemplating the fragments of an unidentified animal's skull, late on a wet, windy Friday in March, when a voice said, "Booth? Is that you?"

My head jerked up; Augustus Blaine was leaning against my office door, as if his body were too heavy for him to support on his own any longer. I recognized him at once, although I had not seen him for ten years. He looked forty-two instead of thirty-two. I would have known his voice anywhere.

"My G.o.d, man," he said, staring, "what happened to your hair?"

My hand went up involuntarily to touch it. My hair had gone white eight years previously, over a period of about four months. It was a trait of my mother's family; all the Murchisons went white before they were twenty-five.

"Doesn't matter," Blaine said before I could do more than begin to stammer a reply. "I came here for help."

He sounded exhausted, but his eyes were feverishly bright. Carefully, I set the skull fragments down on my desk, and said, "Come in. Please, er, sit down. I think . . . there's a chair clear."

He dragged the chair across to my desk and sat, a little warily. "All your bits of pot and bone," he said, his voice somewhere between fondness and contempt. "Are you good at your job, Boothie?"

"People, er, seem to think so."

"The thing is," Blaine said, "the thing is that I think I need a spot of help."

"Anything you need, Blaine. I . . . that is, you know that."

He looked at me for a moment, his face stiff with suspicion like an African mask, and then he smiled. "By G.o.d, I think you mean that. All right, then. It's this book." He set his briefcase on his lap and opened it. The lid concealed the contents of the briefcase from me, but he closed it again swiftly, left-handed, and put it back on the floor. His right hand was holding the book.

It was a slender quarto, leather-bound and badly chipped. The t.i.tle had once been on the spine, but someone had carefully burned it out. "You don't want to know how much I paid for this," Blaine said, with a grin on his face that I found frightening. "It'll all be worth it, though. I'm sure. But the deuce of it is, Boothie, I can't read it."

"What do you mean?"

"It's in some kind of cipher. I've been tearing my hair out over it for weeks, trying to crack the d.a.m.n thing. And then I thought of my old friend, Kyle Murchison Booth." He rolled the syllables of my name out of his mouth as if they were at once contemptible and marvelous. "This should be right up your alley, Boothie."

"What, er . . . what's the book about, Blaine?"

"Didn't I say? I think there's a way I can bring Helena back."

I was so startled-as much aghast at his matter-of-fact manner as at what he had said-that I knocked the skull fragments off my desk.

Blaine and I had met as freshmen in college. Blaine had almost immediately decided and announced that we were going to be friends. To this day, I do not know why. The things we had in common-education, wealth, the sort of genealogy that pa.s.ses in America for aristocratic-did not seem to me as if they could possibly bridge the gulf between us, the gulf I had always felt between myself and people like Blaine. The only theory I had was that I offered Blaine someone with whom to discuss topics other than athletic pursuits and alcohol. He could talk to me as he could talk to no one else in his world. He was my only friend-that says, I imagine, as much about me as anyone needs to know.

Blaine was interested in everything; it was part of the way he was put together-a relentless, bright-eyed interest in everything under the sun. The action of his mind often reminded me of a lighthouse light, revolving and revolving, sending its bright, piercing beam out into the darkness in every direction, never stopping on any one thing for long, but continuing to search. He was interested in chemistry and biology and physics; he was interested in history and archaeology and anthropology; he took cla.s.ses in French, German, Russian, Greek, Latin, never more than a semester or two of any of them, the beam sweeping restlessly onward. He must have taken courses in every department on campus, and he could talk for hours, scintillatingly, compellingly, about any of them.

In this, as in so many other respects, I was Blaine's opposite. Next to him I was a dull, ugly crow, without even the wit to hide myself in peac.o.c.k feathers. I listened to Blaine for hours, but could find nothing of any interest to say myself. I stuck to my dry, safe work in history and archaeology, looking already toward the dim, dusty halls of the Samuel Mather Parrington Museum.

Blaine had always teased me about my love of puzzles: crosswords, acrostics, ciphers, anagrams. I solved them obsessively, as I solved the archival puzzles set by my professors; they were practice for what was to become my life's work. I am sure that Blaine remembered timing me on the ciphers I found in books of logical puzzles; I am sure that the memory is why he sought me out, and therefore my freakish skill makes me responsible for his death.

I sometimes offer myself the false comfort that Helena was even more to blame than I. Helena Pryde was the sister of Blaine's friend Tobias Pryde. Blaine met her because Tobias-good-natured, warmly gregarious, not very bright, one of the few of Blaine's friends who did not treat me like some strange pet of Blaine's-invited us both home with him for the spring vacation of our junior year. The Prydes' house ("the House of Pryde" Blaine kept calling it and snickering at his own pun) was well-proportioned and handsome, beautifully situated in an oak grove. Mr. and Mrs. Pryde were people as imperceptive and generous as their son. Helena Pryde, Tobias's younger sister, was a changeling.

She was tall and slender, with hair of an amazing dark, ruddy gold. Her hair was also unusually thick and heavy, and she habitually wore it loose, so that it hung like a cloak of fire past her hips. The effect was stunning, quite literally so; I heard Blaine's breath hitch in at his first sight of her. I suppose she was pretty-at least, everyone seemed to think so-but her mouth was small and ungenerous, and her eyes were hard. Her voice was high-pitched and always rather breathless, and she lisped just slightly. The quality of her voice was childlike, innocent, and that was a deception worthy of the Serpent in Eden.

She flirted with Blaine from the moment they were introduced. Blaine-who had dated one girl after another for the three years I had known him, an endless parade of Elizabeths, Marys, Charlottes, and Julias-responded enthusiastically in kind, and before the week was half over, he was spending more time with Helena than with either Tobias or me.