The Madness of Cthulhu Anthology (Volume One): 1 Read online

  I counted nine rats, sticking to the side of the dumpster like spiders, each of them connected to its fellows by long cables that no one would mistake for cables, segmented tubes that rippled with life. The rats sniffed the air and regarded me with fierce sentience, an intelligence too acute to be their own. Something eager and immense watched me through them, and the scientist within me sought—and not for the first time—some way of defining what manner of creature that might be, but, in fear and its consequent confusion, I retreated to some limbic memory that shouted, “Something evil!”

  I stood up with care, never letting the creatures out of my sight. I slowly moved my right hand back, seeking the door’s handle. It didn’t move. I exerted more pressure. It still didn’t move, and my heart revved up as I imagined—or remembered—a slight click as the door had closed behind me.

  I turned away from the altered rats and shook the handle, which served only to shake my body. I looked back over my shoulder. One of the rats … it was hideously cold now, an ancient cold that was disorienting … one of the rats moved down the dumpster’s side, its comrades closing around it, the cables that connected them shrinking to accommodate this new condition. More of them had crept over the edge of the dumpster, and there were a dozen, maybe more, teeth and glittering eyes sparkling in this V-shaped rat-platoon.

  I did not think to scream, and, in retrospect, had I been in possession of all my faculties, I still would have refrained from screaming. Who would come? Who would come with sufficient speed?

  Something boomed on my left, a rattle of metal, a rush of hot air. I jerked my head to the left and saw that the door to the kitchen had banged open and a stout man in an apron was silhouetted in light and steam. He wrestled a heavy trash can down the steps, nodded, scowled at me, and dragged the trash can toward the dumpster.

  “Don’t—” I shouted. I turned again to point at the rats. They were gone.

  The man emptied the trash can’s contents into the dumpster, turned, and said, “You cannot be here.”

  “I got locked out,” I said.

  “You cannot be locked out here!” he shouted, flapping his arms like some flightless bird’s ritual of aggression. I nodded, turned, and ran into the kitchen as he shouted after me.

  * * *

  When I woke up the next morning, I didn’t have a hangover, but I was not at the top of my game. I was halfway to the lab when I realized it was Saturday. I drove home, stared at the phone, went upstairs, and lay in bed but couldn’t sleep. Finally, I called Marissa.

  The phone rang a couple of times before it switched to the answering machine. It occurred to me that I didn’t know what to say, and when the machine beeped, I still didn’t know what to say.

  Marissa picked up then. “Jerry?”

  I hadn’t talked to her in twenty years. “How’d you know it was me?” I asked.

  “Caller ID.”

  “Oh.”

  “What do you want?” she asked. The chill was still there; I hadn’t been forgiven. Fair enough.

  “I saw some of those rats. You know, Harley called them recon rats. He felt they were engineered to scope out the territory before … before the Big Event. Whatever he meant by that.”

  “It figures. I knew something was happening. It’s back.”

  “What’s back?”

  “The General Store.”

  “Elders?”

  “Well, let’s see. How many general stores do we know that go away and come back?”

  “I thought it was gone for good.”

  Marissa was silent for so long I thought the connection had failed. “Hello?” I said.

  She spoke then: “I guess I thought it would come back.”

  On the drive out there, I had half an hour to think about the past. Marissa lives less than thirty miles from me, and we haven’t met, we haven’t spoken to each other for the last twenty years. We avoid each other because we share an obsession.

  * * *

  Harley James liked to go hiking, and he brought us along, his two acolytes. He was tireless, dragging us up and down mountains, through forests, into tick-infested fields and snarls of thorny vegetation. I remember how he lectured us while he waded in a muddy creek: “I’d be a naturalist if it wasn’t such a discouraging career, checking a box each time another species goes belly up, watching habitats disappear, watching humanity infest this world—yes, an infestation of busy, greedy, arrogant apes so completely out of touch with their natures that ‘animal,’ that vibrant word that describes a joyous bounty of extraordinary creatures, means, on humankind’s sour tongue, brutish!” His hand then plunged into the water and retrieved a crayfish that he displayed as though this squirming crustacean were the tangible proof of his words.

  He had become more orotund in his rants, some part of which was self-parody, I’m sure. I told Marissa I suspected him of taking amphetamines. I suspected no such thing, but I hoped to dampen her hero worship with whatever reservations I could engender. And, of course, I didn’t make a dent in her adulation. She was falling in love (by which I mean she had already fallen in love, and I was slowly assimilating this new state with shock and dismay).

  Symbiosis was one of Harley’s favorite subjects during the time we knew him. For him, the word meant something very specific. Generally, the biological definition defines symbiosis as an association existing between two very different organisms that may or may not benefit both individuals. Harley was only interested in relationships that were, in fact, mutually rewarding, “a bargain for both,” as he put it.

  He had no use for the notion that lichen, because it consisted of a fungus and one of several green algae, was a symbiotic organism. “That’s like saying a man’s heart and his liver are engaged in symbiosis.” Indeed, when, in the course of one of our walks, he came upon pale blue lichen decorating a rock and very much resembling one of my grandmother’s doilies, he reviled it at length, as though he considered its existence some personal affront. I was prepared to rush him if he tried to scrape it off with his shoe, but we moved on, and he shifted into his yucca-moth rant, which always restored his spirits.

  The yucca moth and its yucca plant were Harley’s heroes. The yucca moth very deliberately pollinates the yucca plant, no honeybee accident about it, so the yucca plants reproduce; they live on and their moths lay their eggs in them. I confess I grew sick of these hymns to the yucca moth.

  Harley acted as if he’d discovered symbiosis and had the right to rail against those who applied it wantonly. He would shout: “And a burrowing owl that lives in a tunnel made by a gopher turtle. That’s symbiosis? Come on, that’s simple opportunism.”

  I could go on, but why? I was no longer Harley’s doting disciple. When he graduated from Filmore, I assumed that the fall would find him in some elite university where he could surround himself with a new lot of admirers. I wished him well, and I wished him away from Marissa and me.

  * * *

  I missed the turn onto Griffith Lane and had to pull into the rest stop where a couple of forlorn picnic tables had sunk to their knees waiting for happy families, frolicking children, and Frisbee-chasing dogs. Let’s take our smartphones on a picnic! Maybe not. Forget picnics, Mom and Dad. Your kids have moved into the virtual. Wave goodbye. No, wait, text goodbye; they’ll never see you wave.

  I rolled down the window and took some deep breaths. It was still cold, but bright, the sunlight meticulous in its illumination, every blade of grass, every leaf getting its goddamn due, while I was morose, sullen, afraid, and hopeful, a motley bunch of emotions that you’d think would shun one another’s company, but I know they were all there because I took the time to sort them out. Marissa tells me men aren’t very self-aware, and I think maybe we are, but not in a good way. I know I haven’t had much luck with self-awareness.

  I turned around and found Griffith Lane and followed the winding road to Marissa’s little faux farmhouse on the edge of the forest and thought—I swear, for the first time—that she had moved into this
house to wait for Harley. I hated not being able to tell her that Harley was gone for good. But I couldn’t tell her without telling her how I came by that knowledge, and there’s no way she would have been happy with the truth.

  Marissa came out on the porch. She was wearing a backpack, and she held another by one of its straps. That would be mine. I got out of the car and walked up to her, and we both were uncomfortable in a dozen ways, and I said, “You’re looking well,” and she frowned. She was looking better than well. She had been a cute teenager in an all-American way: dark curls stirred by the breeze, brown eyes catching the light of any sun or candle or stadium light. Now—I hadn’t seen her in years—she looked amazing.

  We hugged—or rather I hugged her and she endured it. Neither of us knew how to act; we were chaperoned by our miserable pasts.

  “Are we going to trek into the forest—” I began, but then I realized there was a more pressing question. “How do you know the store is back?”

  “I saw it last night,” she said. She paused, not wishing, I suppose, to diminish the truth of this statement, then added, “In a dream.”

  “Okay.”

  I didn’t doubt that it was out there. If the recon rats were back, so were their masters. Their spaceship or whatever the hell it was would be resting in the middle of the forest, looking like … well, not a house made out of candy … an old-fashioned general store. That’s right: Elders General Store, a sort of run-down, silvery structure that would have been unremarkable in an earlier America, say 1930. On closer inspection, Harley had noted that the wood had been replaced by quartz and other more exotic materials. “It’s petrified wood … sort of,” he said. “That would require an absence of oxygen and maybe fifty million years, much longer I think.” And when we had entered the store, which was so much bigger on the inside, limitless, perhaps, Harley had said, “Hundreds of millions of years.”

  * * *

  When Harley graduated from Filmore, he didn’t go on to college. Marissa, who I hadn’t seen much that summer, told me he was still in town.

  “I thought he was going to college,” I said. We were sitting in the cafeteria, three days into a new school year, and I was already sick of the months of boredom that lay before me. The hopeless smell of overcooked food, as unforgettable as torture, did battle with the hormonal noise of my fellow scholars.

  “Harley said there was no way he was going to spend the next six or seven years defending his mind from the depredations of tired dogma and academic senescence,” Marissa said. She had acquired the irritating habit of tossing Harley-phrases into her conversation, even reproducing the snooty inflections that indicated disdain for the vast, benighted bourgeoisie. “Harley says that if you look at the progress of science in nineteenth-century Britain, it’s the people who didn’t go to school who did all the heavy lifting, all the innovative thinking.”

  I didn’t think that was true, but I didn’t say anything. I wanted to get away from Harley-pronouncements, from all things Harley, actually.

  But Marissa kept on about Harley. Apparently she and Harley had done lots of hiking and exploring that summer, and no one had thought to ask me along. I pointed that out, and Marissa said, “Harley says you don’t like him.”

  I didn’t like him, so what was I going to say? I just sulked some, which is every young male’s strategy in the face of unrequited love.

  * * *

  That, and I stalked her, although not in a creepy way. I had a used car (a 1985 Dodge Aries purchased from an aunt who no longer drove). My parents bought it for me when I made all As, and I happened to be driving by Marissa’s house when I saw her come out of Harley’s house. Where are your parents, Marissa? I thought, with the righteousness of the unloved.

  Harley followed her out, and they tossed backpacks and other stuff into the back of his car (a new Jeep because, I guess, the CIA paid better than my dad’s job, which was selling stuff to restaurants). Without much ado they drove away.

  I followed them. I stayed way back, and Marissa didn’t even know I had a car, much less what kind of car, and when they turned off on this little winding road called Barker, I slowed down, pulled over at a farm gate, and sat there for a while. I knew where they were going. They would park beside the old barbed-wire fence, carefully insinuate themselves through its rusty strands, pay no attention to the No Trespassing signs, run across the meadow, and enter the forest. This was Old Man Turnip’s land, and he was still alive then, and sometimes he would chase kids off his land with unintelligible shouts, firing his shotgun in the air and generally filling a folktale niche in the history of any country-born boy.

  I waited for about twenty minutes, and then I continued on up Barker and passed Harley’s Jeep about where I expected to find it. And that was all the tailing I did that day. Overzealousness is, I suspect, often a stalker’s undoing.

  The next day was a school day, so I cut class. I wasn’t worried about my folks getting a call from school. I was a model student, never missed a day, so everyone would assume I had a good reason for not showing up.

  I figured Marissa would be at school, and I wanted to see what I could find in the forest without accidentally running into her or Harley James.

  I guess.

  I didn’t have a plan. I desperately needed a plan, but I didn’t have one. I just wanted to be doing something. I wanted to save Marissa from the malign influence of Harley James, whose interest in her was not—I was sure of this—remotely intellectual.

  I followed their trail, which was marked according to Harley’s ingenious system that utilized nature’s variety to encode a series of instructions far more precise and less destructive than anything achieved by stripping tree trunks of their bark. I was one of the three people who knew these codes, and as their language came back to me, I felt sadly abandoned.

  I had brought a sleeping bag and other supplies in case I would have to spend the night. Harley was an intrepid explorer, and, to my credit I think, I was willing to endure some hardship myself. I might not have had a plan, but I was prepared to suffer for the sake of love. That’s what redeems teenagers. Passion trumps stupidity.

  It was getting dark, and I told myself I needed to stop and establish camp, but I pushed on, ignoring my good advice. I spied an arrangement of rocks that was not random and approached it, reaching for the flashlight on my belt. Before I could decipher the rocks’ message, my feet leapt out from under me and I found myself upside down, a human pendulum describing ever shorter arcs.

  We learn in school that the eye, that marvelous machine, presents an upside-down image that our brain is required to flip upright and does, reflexively and effortlessly. This is always presented as a wondrous accomplishment, but I would be more impressed if this same brain could refrain from that flipping when we find ourselves upside down, since, at such a time, the upside-down image would be just the ticket.

  In any event, I recognized the sneakers right away, and then there was a light blinding me, and a voice: “Jerry!”

  Harley leaned his face in, illuminating his features by holding the flashlight under his chin. “It’s just me,” he said. “Sorry.”

  He got me out of the trap quickly. I waited while he reset the trap, and then we headed back to his campsite.

  “No offense, but that was a disappointment,” he said. “Like stringing a line for catfish and getting a snapping turtle.”

  I didn’t much like being compared to a snapping turtle (an ugly and belligerent species), but I was feeling too sheepish for a rebuttal, and that’s when Marissa popped her head out of Harley’s tent and smiled shamelessly.

  “Excuse me,” Harley said, and he went into the tent with Marissa. I assumed they were discussing me, so I just sat there steaming. In truth, there had been no betrayal. I had never kissed Marissa, never said I loved her.

  They took me to see the store that night. “It’s not far … if you’re up for it,” Harley said.

  “Sure.”

  I didn’t really want to s
ee whatever it was that had them so enraptured. I should have turned and walked away. That was my first impulse, and I should have obeyed it.

  * * *

  Now Marissa and I stood on her front porch. It’s hard to contemplate millions of years and imagine anything that feels like the truth, but contemplating twenty years isn’t that easy either. It wasn’t that anything much had happened. I’d gone to college, grad school, had a couple of really bad jobs. The jobs frightened me, and I went back to the university, acquired more credits, and contemplated the academic life; then I wound up back at my parents’ after an unfortunate affair with a lap dancer named Dawn—anyone can make a mistake, especially the sexually sheltered—and while I was home my parents said I should apply at Enderson Labs, and, to appease them, I did and was shocked when they hired me.

  Marissa had moved away for a few years, but when her mother died of cancer she moved back to look after her father, who had always been a sad man in an ill-fitting suit. He called me “Harry” and seemed to get most of life’s details wrong, maybe lacking the stamina for recalling names and faces and facts. He had inherited a good deal of money, and, too apathetic to spend it, he was still rich on the day he died. He killed himself with an automatic pistol he’d bought at a gun show. He shot himself in the stomach, in the leg (probably an accident, the coroner noted), and finally through the heart. I wasn’t in town for the funeral, but I was surprised when I moved back in with my folks to find that Marissa had bought a small farmhouse out on Griffith Lane.

  * * *

  Here we were.

  “Maybe we should leave it alone,” I said.

  “Why?” she asked.

  I thought that was obvious. “To avoid being killed,” I said. “That’s what comes to mind first.”

  Marissa glared at me, and I thought I saw Harley’s disdain in her eyes. “I thought you were a scientist. Isn’t curiosity sacred? Don’t you want to know what happened?”