New Cthulhu: The Recent Weird Part 38

It opened easily, without a sound. The occasional m.u.f.fled noise from the street seemed so distant it was like a memory. I entered.

She had covered the windows very carefully, and still no light made its way through from outside. It was extremely dark. I waited until I could see better in the ambient glow from the outside hallway.

I was alone.

My old coat and jumper lay spreadeagled in the corner of the room. I shivered to see them, went over, and fingered them softly. They were damp and mildewing, covered in wet dust.

The white paint was crumbling off the wall in scabs. It looked as if it had been left untended for several years. I could not believe the extent of the decay.

I turned slowly around and gazed at each wall in turn. I took in the chaotic, intricate patterns of crumbling paint and damp plaster. They looked like maps, like a rocky landscape.

I looked for a long time at the wall farthest from my jacket. I was very cold. After a long time I saw a shape in the ruined paint. I moved closer with a dumb curiosity far stronger than any fear.

In the crumbling texture of the wall was a spreading anatomy of cracks that-seen from a certain angle, caught just right in the sc.r.a.ps of light-looked in outline something like a woman. As I stared at it it took shape, and I stopped noticing the extraneous lines, and focused without effort or decision on the relevant ones. I saw a woman looking out at me.

I could make out the suggestion of her face. The patch of rot that const.i.tuted it made it look as if she was screaming.

One of her arms was flung back away from her body, which seemed to strain against it, as if she was being pulled away by her hand, and was fighting to escape, and was failing. At the end of her crack-arm, in the s.p.a.ce where her captor would be, the paint had fallen away in a great slab, uncovering a huge patch of wet, stained, textured cement.

And in that dark infinity of markings, I could make out any shape I wanted.

. . . the dreams began. They were very spa.r.s.e and insidious at first, but increased in frequency and vividness as the weeks went by. Great watery s.p.a.ces opened out before me, and I seemed to wander through t.i.tanic sunken porticos and labyrinths of weedy Cyclopean walls with grotesque fishes as my companions. Then the other shapes began to appear, filling me with nameless horror the moment I awoke.

"The Shadow Over Innsmouth" H.P. Lovecraft (1936).

* ANOTHER FISH STORY *

Kim Newman.

In the summer of 1968, while walking across America, he came across the skeleton fossil of something aquatic. All around, even in the apparent emptiness, were signs of the life that had pa.s.sed this way. Million-year-old seash.e.l.ls were strewn across the empty heart of California, along with flattened bullet casings from the ragged edge of the Wild West and occasional sticks of weathered furniture. The st.u.r.dier pieces were pioneer jetsam, dumped by exhausted covered wagons during a long dry desert stretch on the road to El Dorado. The more recent items had been thrown off overloaded trucks in the '30s, by Okies rattling towards orange groves and federal work programs.

He squatted over the bones. The sands parted, disclosing the whole of the creature. The scuttle-shaped skull was all saucer-sized eye-sockets and triangular, saw-toothed jaw. The long body was like something fished out of an ash-can by a cartoon cat-fans of rib-spindles tapering to a flat tail. What looked like arm-bones fixed to the dorsal spine by complex plates that were evolving towards becoming shoulders. Stranded when the seas receded from the Mojave, the thing had lain ever closer to the surface, waiting to be revealed by sand-riffling winds. Uncovered as he was walking to it, the fossil-exposed to the thin, dry air-was quickly resolving into sand and sc.r.a.ps.

Finally, only an arm remained. Short and stubby like an alligator leg, it had distinct, barb-tipped fingers. It pointed like a sign-post, to the West, to the Pacific, to the city-stain seeping out from the original blot of El Pueblo de Nuestra Senora de la Reyna de los Angeles de Rio Porciunculo. He expected these route-marks. He'd been following them since he first crawled out of a muddy river in England. This one scratched at him.

Even in the desert, he could smell river-mud, taste foul water, feel the tidal pull.

For a moment, he was under waters. Cars, upside-down above him, descended gently like dead, settling sharks. People floated like broken dolls just under the shimmering, sunlit ceiling-surface. An enormous pressure squeezed in on him, jamming thumbs against his open eyes, forcing liquid salt into mouth and nose. A tubular serpent, the size of a streamlined train, slithered over the desert-bed towards him, eyes like turquoise-shaded searchlights, shifting rocks out of its way with muscular arms.

Gone. Over.

The insight pa.s.sed. He gasped reflexively for air.

"Atlantis will rise, Sunset Boulevard will fall," Ca.s.s Elliott was singing on a single that would be released in October. Like so many doomed visionaries in her generation, Mama Ca.s.s was tuned into the vibrations. Of course, she didn't know there really had been a sunken city off Santa Monica, as recently as 1942. Not Atlantis, but the Sister City. A battle had been fought there in a World War that was not in the official histories. A War that wasn't as over as its human victors liked to think.

He looked where the finger pointed.

The landscape would change. Scrub rather than sand, mountains rather than flats. More people, less quiet.

He took steps.

He was on a world-wide walkabout, buying things, picking up skills and scars, making deals wherever he sojourned, becoming what he would be. Already, he had many interests, many businesses. An empire would need his attention soon, and he would be its prisoner as much as its master. These few years, maybe only months, were his alone. He carried no money, no identification but a British pa.s.sport in the name of a newborn dead in the blitz. He wore unscuffed purple suede boots, tight white thigh-fly britches with a black zig-zag across them, a white Nehru jacket, and silver-mirrored sungla.s.ses. A white silk aviator scarf wrapped burnoose-style about his head, turbanning his longish hair and keeping the grit out of his mouth and nose.

Behind him, across America, across the world, he left a trail. He thought of it as dropping pebbles in pools. Ripples spread from each pebble, some hardly noticed yet but nascent whirlpools, some enormous splashes no one thought to connect with the pa.s.sing Englishman.

It was a good time to be young, even for him. His signs were everywhere. Number One in the pop charts back home was "Fire," by The Crazy World of Arthur Brown. "I am the G.o.d of h.e.l.lfire," chanted Arthur. There were such G.o.ds, he understood. He walked through the world, all along the watchtower, sprung from the songs-an Urban s.p.a.ceman, Quinn the Eskimo, this wheel on fire, melting away like ice in the sun, on white horses, in disguise with gla.s.ses.

In recent months, he'd seen Hair on Broadway and 2001: A s.p.a.ce Odyssey at an Alabama Drive-In. He knew all about the Age of Aquarius and the Ultimate Trip. He'd sabotaged Abbie Hoffman's magic ring with a subtle counter-casting, ensuring that the Pentagon remained unlevitated. He knew exactly where he'd been when Martin Luther King was shot. Ditto, Andy Warhol, Robert Kennedy, and the VC summarily executed by Colonel Loan on the Huntley-Brinkley Report. He'd rapped with Panthers and Guardsmen, Birchers and Yippies. To his satisfaction, he'd sewn up the next three elections, and decided the music that children would listen to until the Eve of Destruction.

He'd eaten in a lot of McDonalds, cheerfully dropping cartons and bags like apple seeds. The Golden Arches were just showing up on every Main Street, and he felt Ronald should be encouraged. He liked the little floods of Mc.l.i.tter that washed away from the clown's doorways, perfumed with the stench of their special sauce.

He kept walking.

Behind him, his footprints filled in. The pointing hand, so nearly human, sank under the sands, duty discharged.

At this stage of his career, the Devil put in the hours, wore down the shoe-leather, sweated out details. He was the start-up Mephisto, the journeyman tempter, the mysterious stranger pa.s.sing through, the new gun in town. You didn't need to make an appointment and crawl as a supplicant; if needs be, Derek Leech came to you.

Happily.

Miles later and days away, he found a ship's anchor propped on a cairn of stones, iron-red with lichen-like rust, blades crusted with empty sh.e.l.ls. An almost illegible plaque read Sumatra Queen.

Leech knew this was where he was needed.

It wasn't real wilderness, just pretend. In the hills close to Chatsworth, a town soon to be swallowed by Los Angeles, this was the Sat.u.r.day matinee West. Poverty Row prairie, Monogram mountains. A brief location hike up from Gower Gulch, the longest-lasting game of Cowboys and Indians in the world had been played.

A red arch stood by the cairn, as if a cathedral had been smitten, leaving only its entrance standing. A hook in the arch might once have held a bell or a hangman's noose or a giant shoe.

He walked under it, eyes on the hook.

Wheelruts in sandy scrub showed the way. Horses had been along this route too, recently.

A smell tickled in his nose, triggering salivary glands. Leech hadn't had a Big Mac in days. He unwound the scarf from his head and knotted it around his neck. From beside the road, he picked a dungball, skin baked hard as a gob-stopper. He ate it like an apple. Inside, it was moist. He spat out strands of gra.s.s.

He felt the vibrations, before he heard the motors.

Several vehicles, engines exposed like sit-astride mowers, b.u.mping over rough terrain on balloon tires. Fuel emissions belching from mortar-like tubes. Girls yelping with a fairground Dodg'em thrill.

He stood still, waiting.

The first dune buggy appeared, leaping over an incline like a roaring cat, landing awkwardly, squirming in dirt as its wheels aligned, then heading towards him in a charge. A teenage girl in a denim halter-top drove, struggling with the wheel, blonde hair streaming, a bruise on her forehead. Standing like a tank commander in the front pa.s.senger seat, hands on the rollbar, was an undersized, big-eared man with a middling crop of beard, long hair bound in a bandanna. He wore ragged jeans and a too-big combat jacket. On a rosary around his scraggy neck was strung an Iron Cross, the Pour le Merite and a rhinestone-studded swastika. He signaled vainly with a set of binoculars (one lens broken), then kicked his chauffeuse to get her attention.

The buggy squiggled in the track and halted in front of Leech.

Another zoomed out of long gra.s.s, driven by an intense young man, pa.s.sengered by three messy girls. A third was around somewhere, to judge from the noise and the gasoline smell.

Leech tossed aside his unfinished meal.

"You must be hungry, pilgrim," said the commander.

"Not now."

The commander flashed a grin, briefly showing sharp, bad teeth, hollowing his cheeks, emphasizing his eyes. Leech recognized the wet gaze of a man who has spent time practicing his stares. Long, hard jail years looking into a mirror, plumbing black depths.

"Welcome to Charlie Country," said his driver.

Leech met the man's look. Charlie's welcome.

Seconds-a minute?-pa.s.sed. Neither had a weapon, but this was a gunfighters' eye-lock, a probing and a testing, will playfully thrown up against a wall, bouncing back with surprising ferocity.

Leech was almost amused by the Charlie's presumption. Despite his hippie aspect, he was ten years older than the kids-well into hard thirties, at once leathery and shifty, a convict confident the bulls can't hang a jailyard shivving at his cell-door, an arrested grown-up settling for status as an idol for children ignored by adults. The rest of his tribe looked to their jefe, awaiting orders.

Charlie Country. In Vietnam, that might have meant something.

In the end, something sparked. Charlie raised one hand, open, beside his face. He made a monocle of his thumb and forefinger, three other fingers splayed like a c.o.xcomb.

In Britain, the gesture was a.s.sociated with Patrick McGoohan's "Be seeing you" on The Prisoner. Leech returned the salute, completing it by closing his hand into a fist.

"What's that all about?" whined his driver.

Not taking his eyes off Leech, Charlie said, "Sign of the fish, Sadie."

The girl shrugged, no wiser.

"Before the crucifix became the pre-eminent symbol of Christianity, Jesus' early followers greeted each other with the sign of the fish," Leech told them. "His first disciples were net-folk, remember. 'I will make you fishers of men.' Originally, the Galilean came as a lakeside spirit. He could walk on water, turn water to wine. He had command over fish, multiplying them to feed the five thousand. The wounds in his side might have been gills."

"Like a professor he speaks," said the driver of the second buggy.

"Or Terence Stamp," said a girl. "Are you British?"

Leech conceded that he was.

"You're a long way from Carnaby Street, Mr. Fish."

As a matter of fact, Leech owned quite a bit of that thoroughfare. He did not volunteer the information.

"Is he The One Who Will . . . ?" began Charlie's driver, cut off with a gesture.

"Maybe, maybe not. One sign is a start, but that's all it is. A man can easily make a sign."

Leech showed his open hands, like a magician before a trick.

"Let's take you to Old Lady Marsh," said Charlie. "She'll have a thing or two to say. You'll like her. She was in pictures, a long time ago. Sleeping partner in the Ranch. You might call her the Family's spiritual advisor."

"Marsh," said Leech. "Yes, that's the name. Thank you, Charles."

"Hop into Unit Number Two. Squeaky, hustle down to make room for the gent. You can get back to the bunkhouse on your own two legs. Do you good."

A sour-faced girl crawled off the buggy. Barefoot, she looked at the flint-studded scrub as if about to complain, then thought better of it.

"Are you waitin' on an engraved invitation, Mr. Fish?"

Leech climbed into the pa.s.senger's seat, displacing two girls who shoved themselves back, clinging to the overhead bar, fitting their legs in behind the seat, plopping bottoms on orange-painted metal fixtures. To judge from the squealing, the metal was hot as griddles.

"You are comfortable?" asked the kid in the driver's seat.

Leech nodded.

"Cool," he said, jamming the ignition. "I'm Constant. My accent, it is German."

The young man's blond hair was held by a beaded leather headband. Leech had a glimpse of an earnest schoolboy in East Berlin, poring over Karl May's books about Winnetou the Warrior and Old Shatterhand, vowing that he would be a blood brother to the Apache in the West of the Teuton Soul.

Constant did a tight turn, calculated to show off, and drove off the track, b.u.mping onto an irregular slope, pitting gears against gravity. Charlie kicked Sadie the chauffeuse, who did her best to follow.

Leech looked back. Atop the slope, "Squeaky" stood forlorn, hair stringy, faded dress above her scabby knees.

"You will respect the way Charlie has this place ordered," said Constant. "He is the Cat That Has Got the Cream."

The buggies roared down through a culvert, overleaping obstacles. One of the girls thumped her nose against the roll-bar. Her blood spotted Leech's scarf. He took it off and pressed the spots to his tongue.

Images fizzed. Blood on a wall. Words in the blood.

HEALTER SKELTER.

He shook the images from his mind.

Emerging from the culvert, the buggies burst into a clearing and circled, scattering a knot of people who'd been conferring, raising a ruckus in a corral of horses which neighed in panic, spitting up dirt and dust.

Leech saw two men locked in a wrestling hold, the bloated quarter-century-on sequel to the Wolf Man pushed against a wooden fence by a filled-out remnant of Riff of the Jets. Riff wore biker denims and orange-lensed gla.s.ses. He had a chain wrapped around the neck of the sagging lycanthrope.

The buggies halted, engines droning down and sputtering.

A man in a cowboy hat angrily shouted, "Cut, cut, cut!"

Another man, in a black shirt and eyeshade, insisted, "No, no, no, Al, we can use it, keep shooting. We can work round it. Film is money."

Al, the director, swatted the insister with his hat.

"Here on the Ranch, they make the motion pictures," said Constant.

Leech had guessed as much. A posse of stuntmen had been chasing outlaws all over this country since the Silents. Every rock had been filmed so often that the stone soul was stripped away.

Hoppy and Gene and Rinty and Rex were gone. Trigger was stuffed and mounted. The lights had come up and the audience fled home to the goggle box. The only Westerns that got shot these days were skin-flicks in chaps or slo-mo ma.s.sacres, another sign of impending apocalypse.