Cthulhu's Reign

“Even if we did go by chopper we wouldn’t be able to land near the Womb, up in the mountains like that. We’d have to land at a local airport and drive. and there’s just not enough time before They come in force. The government has begun quietly flying officials out of the country in Self Defense Force choppers and military transports, too, and if we happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time they’d shoot us out of the sky.”

A laugh bubbled up from the seat next to Manabe. Hysterical, forced laughter. I glanced back, and Kanako Manabe giggled, “Funny, isn’t it?”

“What is?”

“It’s all just so unreal! Like a shot from a movie, or a play. I mean, it’s like we’re on Candid Camera, right? Or I’m having a really bad dream. That must be it. This can’t be real! It’s just too impossible!”

“Sorry, it’s real. Unfortunately.”

Manabe’s voice was as flat as his expression. Then he told me to drive on.

4

And I kept driving, no sleep and no rest.

We couldn’t stay focused on news broadcasts on the TV, radio, and the Internet sites on our cellphones throughout the whole long drive to Nagano. We began to talk, slowly. Manabe and my wife didn’t want to say much at first, but Manabe’s wife turned out to be a real chatterbox and I finally learned a little bit about her. And him.

She said she’d be thirty-three soon. A little short, maybe about five feet, but she was the embodiment of female beauty: jutting breasts, slender waist, firm ass. My dad would have smacked his lips and called her a hot dame. She was beautiful, and the coquettish smile never left her round face. She always seemed to be smiling in invitation, I thought. And it turned out I was right, I guess, because until last year she had been a hostess at a Ginza club, until regular patron Manabe snapped her up.

Manabe described her quite a bit differently, though, in his disinterested tone: “I needed a healthy woman, with a healthy womb.” It sounded to me like he was just being bluntly honest, no more, no less. He hadn’t said a single kind or loving word to her since we left.

And when Kanako glanced at him, from time to time, I thought I could see cold disdain shining through.

Manabe had taken over the company founded by his grandfather about twenty years before, when his own father has suddenly died. He had been studying ethnology at the university then, he said. He had spent vast sums from his inheritance on occult books, and seemed likely to spend the rest of his life locked away in research by himself. Maybe because he hadn’t come down out of his ivory tower into the real world until his thirties, or maybe just because of his rich boy background, his insufferable attitude made it impossible to get along with him for more than an hour or so. His total lack of human warmth, his coldness, really got under my skin. He suddenly ordered the rest of us to “Stay away from angles!”

After a half a day in the car together, I was through with him. I spoke only with my wife, and Kanako.

Our flight continued, and as we crossed into Nagano prefecture I noticed that there weren’t any other cars on the roads. Driving up the winding mountain roads, there were no people at all. In fact, there were no deer, or bears, or squirrels, or even a single bird. But as dusk that day approached, we began to catch glimpses of grotesque creatures in the woods around us.

We saw a group of four- legged beasts, with hides the color of human skin, huge bodies lumpy with roiling fat, distended bellies swaying. And though many of them had brown hair on their heads, their faces were bare.

“They aren’t people. ” whispered Kanako, voice trembling. “But their eyes and noses and mouths were. ”

I ignored her and kept driving. My wife sat in the passenger seat, cigarette lit. Uneasy silence filled the cabin, pressing down on us all.

Manabe shattered the silence with his monotone. “The locals are regressing, just as Atzous wrote.”

I stepped on the gas a bit harder.

As the sun set, the darkness along the narrow road grew even blacker. There were no more houses visible, no fields, just the depths of the mountains. Sometimes we saw a pale shadow passing in the dark, a four- footed nightmare with the face of a human being.

When we finally reached the Womb, the world was wrapped in iron blue, the darkness just before dawn.

The Womb looked like a giant tennis ball half buried in the earth, I thought, seeing it for the first time. It didn’t seem to have any windows or doors.

“The surface of the sphere irises open and shut, like a camera shutter,” explained my wife. “I’ll tell you where the door is. Go ahead and get out.”

“Um,” I mumbled, opening the door to an uncanny, bestial roar from the forest. It sounded like a wild beast, but at the same like a cry of anguish a child might make.

“I hope there aren’t any juvenile delinquents up here!” half-giggled Kanako as she got out, clasping her shoulders and shrinking.

Manabe’s lips twisted. I think it was the first time I saw him smile, if smile it was. Perhaps he meant it as a wry grin, but all I saw was a sneer, disdain for his wife.

“If they were here we’d be eaten by now,” he said, smiling more broadly than before.

“Stop it!” she cried, terrified.

Sayoko had been walking toward the Womb, and now stopped to take a remote controller from her handbag, pointing it at the dome. No doubt built to Manabe’s specifications, it was a rounded, triangular shape covered with round buttons. She pressed one, and a black hole appeared in the face of the Womb, irising open rapidly to create a circular doorway big enough to walk through.

“We can get the baggage later. First we have to get Kanako to safety,” said Manabe, prodding her toward the circular doorway.

“Not alone!” she wailed, shaking her head violently.

“Izumo, go with her and carry her bags, then,” he ordered.

“There’s a switch on the right just inside for the lights,” added my wife, and I nodded thanks as I picked up one of the huge clothing cases Kanako had brought and began walking toward the Womb. Kanako, relief clear on her face, came with me, and as my wife had said, there was a light switch just inside. The lights snapped on, blinding, white. and illuminating the side of the Womb, tiny glyphs and symbols cut into every inch of the walls.

“What is all this weird stuff?” shrieked Kanako, eyes flying.

“I had them specially carved into the walls to make sure They can’t come in from another dimension,” said Manabe. “Walls, ceilings, even the floor are covered with runes, Naacal and Pnath script. And the sigils and seals they fear have been carven here and there as needed, too. Our magical defenses are perfect!”

“Isn’t that right, Izumo. ” he began, turning back to Sayoko, and suddenly stopped, speechless, transfixed by the thing that had snuck up behind her.

I saw it, too. So did Kanako. Only Sayoko didn’t see it.

She saw the horror in our eyes, and even as her own face began to twist, the white thing leapt on her, hammering her to the ground, atop her. Her handbag and the remote fell from her outstretched hand, and as she reached for them instinctively the white thing leaned over, teeth still showing their human origins chewing into the back of her neck, stripping off skin and flesh. Her screams snapped me out of it, and I dropped the bag to run to her rescue.

Except that Kanako grabbed hold of my arm, hard, shouting at me: “Stop! No! It’ll eat you too!” “Let me go! It’ll kill her!”

But she didn’t. She wrapped her arms around me, holding me, leaving me no way out but to strike her down. I drew back my fist to punch her away when suddenly Manabe moved.

I thought he was running to save her. But he. Manabe was a man without a single shred of humanity in him. My wife was still alive, even with that white monster sitting on her back, shredding her neck. Her hand was still reaching toward the remote, twitching. And Manabe, instead of turning to her, snatched up the remote controller,