Cthulhu Land of the Long White Cloud AU Read online

  Behind the wall, beyond the paint, a scratching begins. The three-watched man smiles and whispers to Stacey. He presses something round into her hand. I can hear the raspy panting of a beast, rushing down the alleyway like the fury of a gusting wind. My muscles clench at the lick of cold air against my neck. Then I find I am standing alone on a darkened beach once more. Stacey and the three-watched man lay far across the ocean of years. I inhale the fresh salt air as sadness fills me once more. The waves whisper a lullaby. I am so very tired.

  My eyes close, and when they open the mural stares back at me. Stacey crosses to it in two quick strides, her eyes wide.

  “Hey, I see it now! I can see the Hound.” Stacey lifts her arm, gesturing at shapes in the dark void of the mural. “Those are its front legs and that, in the corner… is its head?” Her voice wavers slightly.

  I look again and see nothing in the black paint. I wonder if Stacey’s faking it but when she turns to me her face is such a strange mix of awe and pale unease, I know she really believes.

  “Step back,” the three-watched man warns suddenly.

  To my surprise, Stacey obeys without comment and hurries to me. She clutches my arm, squeezing too hard. Colour creeps back to her face but her eyes are like flashlights and her breathing is heavy and agitated.

  “It’s in the corner,” she whispers.

  “What corner?”

  “Where the pillar sticks out of the wall.” She points at the edge of the blackness and I see the wall is not flat as I’d thought. There are square columns protruding every couple of metres. The mural has been painted to create the illusion of a flat surface but once you see the columns, it is clear the black space is sunken in between the pillars.

  “The corner. Do you see it?” Stacey asks. She hasn’t released her grip on my arm. It’s starting to hurt. I go to pull her hand off but the sight of her whitened knuckles looks pathetic somehow; her hand seems small and childlike, and I change my mind.

  I lift my gaze back to the painting when a low rumble growls through the alleyway. The ground shudders. The coiled barbed wire atop the alley’s side fence rattles, and the old concrete bones of the building groan.

  The three-watched man smiles and pushes his sleeves back down. He points back the way we came and shouts, “Run!”

  Years of school drills and advice to “Stop, drop and hold” vanish as the tremors increase and we sprint out of the alleyway. The tremors kick up dust in a cloud behind us and I lose sight of the three-watched man.

  The ground shifts and I find myself back on the darkened beach, my feet sunken into sand, my breathing hard and fast. I let the fresh chill in the air, the soothing hiss of rushing waves lull me back to the present and the illusion of safety. Pale moonlight washes over my bare arms. My burns have healed faster than I hoped. Spindly black lines emerge from the edge of the scabbing wound on my forearm like spider’s legs. There’s barely a trace of ink left under the scab. I’ve burned it clean.

  I’m back in Wellington. The earthquake is over but my legs still feel shaky and uncertain. We’re nearly at the station. I can see the building looming overhead.

  I have to tell her. The compulsion to share, to check I didn’t imagine it, is overwhelming.

  Stacey barely lifts her face from her phone as words tumble out of me about how the mist on the painting had shifted when the earthquake started, how the shadows had crawled out of the walls.

  She doesn’t look at me but replies, “I know. I saw it. It was the Hound.”

  On the train ride home Stacey is glued to her phone. She tells me she’s found a video, The Truth of Tindalos on YouTube. I turn down her offer of one of her ear plugs, fear gnawing at my stomach at the sight of the unblinking man ranting wildly from the screen. Whether it’s the creepy guy or the earthquake or the unspoken fear that something terrible is clawing its way into the real world, I just want to forget.

  I stare at the other passengers, try to imagine their names or jobs. My reflection in the train window looks back at me with sad, old eyes. I’m only a kid and a voice inside me whispers that it is the beginning of the end.

  Stacey is still watching the video when we arrive at our station. There’s something in her hand, a metal disc. It’s hard to see past the phone but it looks like a brooch or medallion. The pattern reminds me of the tattoos on the three-watched man’s arms. When we part ways it seems as though there is something cruel in her distractedness, her indifference.

  The world doesn’t end right way. Our friendship drifts. She changes and I pull away. When I make the effort to hang out, she speaks of nothing but some strange new website she’s discovered, or bizarre theories about dimensions. I laugh it off and try to put it all in the past, but I can sense the invisible threads stretching back to the alley, pulling her down the path she’s on.

  Then Paul from my Geography class asks me out and it proves to be the final nail in the coffin of my close friendship with Stacey. His best friend’s girlfriend, Hannah, is fun, relaxed and so much cooler than me. Hanging out with her is easy and, for a while, if I don’t see Stacey, I can forget.

  In a flash of laughter and a long-held breath released, it’s the end of school. Stacey isn’t around for graduation. Her dad died in a car crash when she was sixteen. I spoke more with Stacey’s mum than her at the funeral. Her mum has always liked me. Stacey and her mum have moved away now, and have faded from my thoughts like the girls I met at summer camp when I was ten. She never posts on her Facebook account or replies to the group messages she used to be part of. She has become a ghost, virtually and physically unseen. Yet I think of her as we file out of the auditorium on the last day, finally free of school. I think of her when I see a young man with close-cropped hair, green eyes and a wispy beard standing in the bus shelter, shifting from foot to foot. He looks familiar. It’s not until I’m in bed that night that I remember Stacey and take a moment to wonder where she is. It’s not until then that I realise the bulky bracelets the man was wearing were probably watches; three watches.

  Moments later I’m on the beach, I’m twenty, I’m living in my car and terrified of dying. I want to bury myself in the cool sand, to hide forever. I cannot hide from the past. I fall back into it again and again. The ward, which I’d hoped would hide me from the Hound, has cursed me. My sense of time has unravelled as I sink further into the vortex of swirling memories and fears and relive them all.

  Stacey dies during the summer of my first year at university. I’ve just turned nineteen. A friend from high school shares a story from a local paper in Hamilton on social media. The death, though horrific, has not yet made it into the national news cycle.

  The body of a young woman has been found in a dead end alley late at night, her corpse savagely dismembered, only identifiable through dental records. The photo of Stacey accompanying the article belies the brutality of the event. It is a recent picture, the article says. She’s older, her cheeks narrower, her jaw line more pronounced. Her hair has grown longer and darker, and in the photo she has it in a braid that coils back over her shoulder. She wears a black tank top and has tattoos of black, spiralling runes scrawled down her shoulder and arm. She’s looking at the camera, alive and relaxed. Her eyes accuse me; hazel-green, intense, and lonely. She looks like she knows death is coming for her.

  I travel up to the funeral with four old friends in an aging Toyota Corolla with a boot barely big enough for all our bags. The sight of five stuffed overnight bags and backpacks buried under a layer of neatly pressed black suits and dresses still wrapped in drycleaner’s plastic seems as incongruous as the trip itself. We laughingly swap memories and stories of Stacey and, more generally, of high school, as though we are mourning both. Somewhere along the Desert Road the mood shifts. Tina suggests we listen to some of Stacey’s music. She’s downloaded one of Stacey’s old Spotify playlists. The first track is When September Ends and, listening to that, I weep hard, ugly t
ears.

  Harsh sunlight strikes through the right side windows as the road bends and I’m ripped out of the car.

  I find myself sitting in a strange, small room. Sketches of runes and hideous monsters fill the walls around me. My left arm is splayed and upturned on the vinyl armrest as I recline in a chair, staring numbly at the black lines being etched into my skin with the buzzing needle. I glance at the man wielding the tattoo gun. Long string-like hair sticks to his neck with perspiration, jet-black, unlike the grey stubble on his face. His black vest clings tight to a round belly but exposes his wiry arms, which are heavily tattooed with a maze of runes, writhing tentacles and peculiar creatures with preternaturally large eyes and gaping mouths. I cannot make sense of how the shapes fit together and yet it fills me with cold fear when my eyes fall upon his arm.

  I turn away and see her journal on the table beside me. It is open to a page with the heading ‘The Ward of Tindalos’ and the sight of the intricate design fixes me in the chair. It’s a spiralling coil of many clock-faces bearing unrecognisable numerals, wrapping over one another like a ball of string. I feel the needle clawing my skin like a cat scratching a door as the tattoo grows slowly across my arm.

  On the beach I run my fingers over the scab where I have burned the tattoo out. Weeks earlier I take the knife blade off the camp-burner flame and press it into my arm. My screams echo through time.

  My eyes open as the sound of the engine dies and I see Tina’s Corolla has pulled to a stop. My friends tell me I have slept for most of the drive. Stacey’s funeral is held in an old brick church just north of Hamilton in Rototuna. We walk through a steepled door, sit in pews, and mumble our way through the hymn neatly printed on the crisp service leaflet. It is reassuringly like every other funeral I’ve been to apart from the strange mix of guilt and dread that flows in and out of me like a tide. This isn’t for some old aunt or uncle or even a grandparent. It is for Stacey, Stacey who is a month younger than me. Her face smiles beatifically on the paper leaflet as though defying the idea of death.

  I catch sight of Stacey’s mum glancing at me as we leave the church and again at the graveside. I fear she blames me for drifting away from Stacey, that she wonders why I stand there living while the remains of her daughter are lowered into the ground.

  She speaks to me at the reception and there’s nothing but warmth in her voice. “So glad you could come.” Her lip trembles and she clasps my hand with cold fingers. “Come back to the house, after this. There’s something of Stacey’s I want you to have.”

  The house is small but neat. Stacey’s room is down a short hallway, the door open. “You go ahead, dear. I just need the loo,” her mum says.

  At first the room is not empty. There’s a girl sitting in the wood-backed chair by the mirror, leaning forward and staring at her reflection. She doesn’t move as I step into the room. Stacey didn’t have a sister—not one that she knew about. I can’t see her face but this girl looks so much like Stacey, the way she looked when we were friends.

  The toilet flushes and I look over my shoulder. When I turn back the girl is gone. I stumble a little; sit heavily on the edge of the bed. The room lurches under my feet and a scratching sound starts up. It’s behind the walls, in the corner.

  “Stacey wanted you to have this, I think.”

  Stacey’s mum is holding something out to me. She’s smiling a sad, thin smile. In her hand is a notebook, a journal with rounded edges. She presses it into my hands and pats my shoulder. My fingers close around the journal and the scratching intensifies. My ears are ringing.

  “I don’t think it made her happy, but it kept her busy.”

  I look down at the book, at Stacey’s handwriting on the cover, and I realise that I’m crying. I’m crying out of fear. The walls feel close, too close. I push myself up to my feet and barge past Stacey’s mum. The scratching follows me down the hallway to the front door, but once I’m out of the house, back under grey clouds in the open air, the noise fades. I clutch the book, mumble my condolences, and flee.

  I stumble forward, nearly falling into the hard sand. I glance up at the stars and breathe the smell of the ocean, the darkness embracing me as I lift my leaden foot and take another step.

  I’m back in the small and musty room of my student flat. The lamp by my bed throws little light and in the dimness the walls seem to shrink and draw close. I read Stacey’s journal with an exhausted, desperate hunger. It only partly makes sense. She was terrified but excited about the possibilities of time and other dimensions. One of the first pages describes a visitor, a tattooed woman with her dark hair pulled back in a long braid who came to Stacey’s bedroom at night, who spoke from the shadows with a warning not to look any deeper into the Hound or the three-watched man. A warning that only inflamed her curiosity. There are printed out pages stuffed into the back of the journal, photocopies of old books and photos of manuscripts. I close my eyes and the journal sits behind my lids, floating in my mind’s eye in a pool of light on a reading desk I have never owned, never seen.

  I open my eyes and all the time in the world has passed. I’ve dropped out of University, drifted away from friends. I’m scared to be indoors. The corners of rooms fill me with dread. I hear the scratching of the Hound everywhere. I feel the nearness of its raspy breath when I close my eyes. I have found the sketch of the Ward of Tindalos in Stacey’s journal. I hope that may keep me safe.

  I blink and the gnawing tattoo gun etches my skin. I open my eyes and the painting in the alley fills my vision with shifting blackness and hungry green eyes.

  I return to the beach. The enveloping darkness of the present wraps around me but I feel no comfort. All is lost. The ward could not save me from the Hound even as I spiral through the tightening coils of time.

  I thought I had escaped. I thought I had slipped through the web that caught Stacey. I’m standing in the alley, the same alley with the mural in front of me, the journal in my hand and the tattoo fresh and pink-rimmed and pulsing on my arm. I know that the more I fight the tighter the web will close around me. But what can I do but fight?

  I shift the journal to my left hand, step closer to the wall and form a fist with my right hand. The murky blackness of the mural stares back at me. I slam my fist into the wall, the impact sending a shockwave up my forearm. The pain comes quickly but feels distant, impossibly far away. I punch the wall again, and again. Small circles of darker black begin to form where my split knuckles leave blood spots on the wall. I hit it again. Tears are hot behind my eyes, ready to fall, but I blink them back and strike the wall again. I draw my fist back and open my mouth to scream but something grabs my wrist. I spin around, my voice swallowed, and meet the gaze of the three-watched man.

  His beard is long and grey, his hair thin and his face deeply wrinkled, but it is he.

  “What?” I croak.

  “It’s time,” he replies. “She threw it off the scent for a moment, but I’m tired of running.”

  He lets go of my wrist, gently pushes me aside. He’s muttering something in a language I don’t recognise. I back away, closer to the mouth of the alley. The air shudders and I hear the scratching, the terrible scratching that haunts my dreams. Darkness is gathering in the corner of the alley. I want to turn, to run, but all I can do is stumble backwards, my eyes fixed on the shape of the old man as mist spills out around his legs and the darkness grows in front of him. There is a shape there now, a deeper darkness which moves on long limbs, prowls forward. The three-watched man drops his arms and falls silent as the air splits and the ground begins to shake. I see a thick, barbed trunk snake forward and grip the front of his body. Terrible dark limbs reach out and begin to pull the man apart as his torso contorts and collapses, his insides sucked out and into that gnawing darkness that I cannot look away from.

  I hear my own voice screaming, screaming as I run through dust and panic. I am fourteen, running from the alley. I am twe
nty. Stacey is beside me, is dead, is visiting herself in the past to warn of this day. I’m half blind with dust and tears but ahead of me I see two girls of fourteen running from the darkness of the alley into the light. I stumble, fall, drag myself up onto bloodied knees, onto clumsy feet, into streets unfamiliar and uncaring. I run until my lungs ache and red mist creeps into my vision. The girls are gone. The three-watched man is gone. For a time, I am gone too.

  I try to burn the ward off, to fix myself, to undo the damage. The pain rips me back to the cinema, the alley, her funeral; her journal.

  The more I struggle, the tighter the web becomes.

  And then I’m here, on the beach. Darkness and sand and the soft lapping of the waves comfort me. I recall a fragment from one of the books Stacey found, a translation of a passage about R’lyeh. A sunken city, a dreaming city. I look back at the lights of Wellington and for a moment I can hear that terrible scratching again. I feel the dark eyes of the Hound searching for me.

  Perhaps I can find sanctuary. Perhaps I can be safe? Down in R’lyeh, where Cthulhu lies dreaming, maybe my own dreams will be quiet. There will be nothing but waves, and sand, and the soft curves of a world beyond the Hound’s reach. I stand, drinking in my last taste of the wind, of the night air. It’s time to go where the Hound cannot follow. I walk out into the water, Stacey’s journal clutched to my chest, and I step beneath the waves.

  A BRIGHTER FUTURE

  Grant Stone

  Samuel had been quiet the whole trip, but when Peter pulled the van into the driveway he gave a squeal of delight, jumped out and ran to the door. Then ran back and rapped on the wind­screen. “It’s locked.”

  “Course it’s locked,” Peter said. “There should be a key under a pot plant out the back.”

  Samuel ran off again.

  “Looks nice enough,” Lisa said.

  Peter looked at the house. “It’s new at least.”