Cthulhu's Reign

lamps and end tables, capsizing the TV.

The book, hisses the voice in his ear. This time, he understands, and knows he has to obey.

He dashes through the den, toward the hall and the utility room at its end, but one of the black ropes twines around his ankles, and then the thing is pulling itself on top of him, wailing in Meaghan’s voice. Keening syllables that are almost words.

His bare hands tear at the cables of black flesh sliding against his skin, but it’s as if two tendrils replace each one he breaks, lashing around his forearms and thighs and belly, struggling to hold him still. The thing is still screaming, now with Lynda’s voice. A snake-smooth band of contracting muscle coils around his neck, starts to tighten.

But he is stronger. He shoves to his knees, rips out the boneless limbs by their roots, hurls the thrashing tangle across the room.

Lynda screams, screams, screams.

He returns from the utility room with a huge book, its leather binding on the verge of crumbling, its pages flopping as he holds it open. The symbols in dark brown ink mean nothing to him, though they radiate a head- spinning wrongness. If these scribblings form words, he doesn’t know what they say — and yet he does. It’s as if another person inside him uses his eyes to see, his mouth to speak, knows the precise rhythms and pauses. And as this happens the squealing black thing in the den begins to foam, to buck, to lengthen and thicken and lighten in hue. Delmar’s vision blurs, with tears that he understands no more than he does the incantation.

His voice rises in crescendo, and all the space around him seems to ripple, in a way that can’t be seen physically — yet his mind still senses it. The ripple starts where he’s standing and spreads through the room, the house, even the land beyond, and he knows that the power in that subtle wave is setting things to right. The voice tells him so.

The black thing is gone. There’s only Lynda, resting peaceful on the couch, her only motion the soft rise and fall of her breath. There is no sign of Meaghan, but the voice is telling him not to worry about that. He might not see her, yet whenever he asks, she’ll speak, and he’ll know she still loves him.

Lynda’s limp as a bag of straw, but he’s strong enough to lift her. He carries her to bed.

Using the book always makes him uneasy — vaguely, he recalls he’s had to before — but now all is restored. Outside, there are no stars, but neither is there darkness. Just as with the sunlight, an unseen moon bathes his farmland in its shine. He can make out the shapes of the horses, straight-legged and still possibly sleeping.

He snuggles in beside his lovely, witchy wife, no troubles on his mind, and settles his head in the pillows.

He’s back on the sofa, and behind him the projector rattles. Meaghan sits next to him, kicking her legs, which don’t quite touch the hardwood floor. I asked Grandpa to get this out again, she says. We haven’t watched it since forever.

The film unspools in grainy black and white, just like before. But now it resembles hidden camera footage, the view angled down from a corner of the ceiling. From this vantage point the disembodied observer peers into a large room with cinderblock walls, its carpet and other objects, mostly large plastic toys — a playhouse, a hobby horse, a Sit-and-Spin — shoved hastily against the far wall to bare the cement floor. Three figures huddle at the center of the bare floor, a man, a woman, a girl maybe seven years old. And the man has a book, a huge ominous tome. There is a small window in the far wall, placed high, indicating a basement room. The window is just out of the camera’s range of clear focus. Beyond it, through dingy glass, shadows move with chaotic fury. Sometimes blinding light flares there. Sometimes the window goes completely dark.

The man is drawing frantically on the ground. The film speeds, somehow recorded in time lapse, an effect that drastically accelerates the chaos seen in silhouette through the high window. The man completes a huge circle inscribed along its entire circumference with headache-inducing sigils. The circle encloses him and the woman and child.

“You were always so good at drawing when you worked at that school,” Meaghan says beside him.

“University,” he corrects out of reflex.

She giggles. “I remember how you came home all the time with those weird drawings in your coloring book.”

“Sketchpad, darling. It was a sketchpad.”

“How you said you got ’em from some book you were studying and you never let me look at ’em. Never.”

He turns to tell her to stop sounding mad, it was all for her own good, but she’s gone. Yet he’s not alone: he’s looking at a copy of himself, but with bruises on his face, a cut down one cheek, dressed in an oxford shirt with a deeply stained collar, a torn sweater vest, fancy slacks ruined by more flowing stains. He looks like an academic who just escaped from the mouth of hell. He’s dressed just like the man in the movie. He is the man in the movie.

I try to stop you from remembering, this new self says, but you fight me. Some part of you is always warring with me, trying to remember everything. And when you do, you’ll understand why you have to forget again. Understanding means madness. The man’s voice, the voice of this other self, is the voice he always hears whispering in times of terrible stress.

His guardian self keeps talking, but Delmar stops listening, because a new voice distracts him, murmuring right in his ear. It’s Meaghan again; he can practically feel her lips against his skin. “Don’t listen, Daddy. He can’t stop you from knowing.”

Delmar watches himself in the film, scrambling to draw a second, smaller circle, about the size of a manhole, at the center of the larger one. It’s an agonizing, slow process, taking time even in time lapse, with the activity seen in shadow at the far window getting more and more frenzied, impossible to comprehend. Often times the mother, who his mind admits is Lynda, must be Lynda, seems like she’s having an exasperating time keeping the little girl inside the circle.

As Delmar watches, his immediate surroundings fade. Soon there’s nothing left but the picture show flickering on the fog and Meaghan’s voice in his ear.

“Sweet Daddy. Don’t you worry ’cause I still love you. I understand it all. You tried to use evil to do a good, good thing, but you had to be evil to use evil. But you did it ’cause you love us and love can be evil and good together.”

The time lapse reverts to normal speed. In black and white, Delmar and Lynda are arguing. She turns hysterical, terrified as his gestures grow more frantic. In the background, unnoticed by either of them, the little window rattles. Darkens. Bizarrely, it looks like hair is growing around the frame.

The voice changes oh-so-subtly, still with the timbre of a child, but more adult, more knowing. “What you did was so powerful it could never work, never, without the blood of an innocent. I know, Daddy, I know.”

In the film he screams, the contortion of his face grotesque in total silence, and his wife pushes his daughter toward him. He takes her wrist, produces the knife. Still unnoticed, the window pushes open, just a crack, and the hair-tendrils that have worked their way into the room begin to thicken and lengthen into streams, into ropes. Something huge is oozing through the gap around the glass, pouring down the wall as if made from soft clay.

“I should have been smarter, Daddy. I shouldn’t have been so scared.”

The image goes out of focus, becomes a crazy split screen, left and right visions going out of sync. In one lobe, Delmar, weeping as he chants, holds his daughter’s bleeding arm over the inner circle, its black designs coming to life, shining, burning as the blood strikes it. In the other lobe, the windowpane bows and shatters as a slimy mass of dense hairy jelly shoves its way through, unfurls in an explosion of sucking lamprey mouths and clusters of lidless human eyes.

Staring down from the corner again as the insanely hideous thing lands on the debris and springs — and it is as if the creature strikes a wall where the outer circle is drawn, as if it crashes straight into curved aquarium glass. The creature is not repelled by the barrier, but hangs there in the air, sticking to the invisible wall like a tarantula hugged against a fishbowl, its dozens of limbs splayed out radially from its squirming core like a spider escaped from a schizophrenic’s most deranged hallucination.

Delmar has released his daughter’s arm. He’s kneeling by the circle, the book beside him, cords standing out against his neck as he chants. And the little girl sees the horrid thing hanging in the air. And she screams. And she