Cthulhu's Reign

Ransom slid his chair back from the table and stood. The crab’s legs dinged on the stainless steel sink. Picking up his mug, he turned away from the window. “That was the extent of my interactions with Gus. To be honest, what I knew of him, what Heather had told me, I didn’t much care for. He was what I guess you’d call a functioning alcoholic, although the way he functioned. he was a whiskey-drinker, Jack Daniels, Jim Bean, Maker’s Mark, that end of the shelf. I can’t claim a lot of experience, but from what I’ve seen, sour mash shortcuts to your mean, your nasty side. That was the case with Gus, at least. It wasn’t so much that he used his hands — he did, and I gather the hearing in Rudy’s left ear was the worse for it — no, the whiskey unlocked the cage that held all of Gus’s resentment, his bitterness, his jealousy. Apparently, when he was younger, Rudy’s little brother Jan had liked helping their mother in the kitchen. He’d been something of a baker, Jan; Rudy claimed he made the best chocolate cake you ever tasted, frosted it with buttercream. His mother used to let him out of working with his father in the garage or around the yard so he could assist her with the meals. None of the other kids — there were six of them — was too thrilled at there being one fewer of them to dilute their father’s attention, especially when they saw Gus’s lips tighten as he realized Jan had stayed inside again.

“Anyway, this one night, Gus wandered into the house after spending the better part of the evening in the garage. He passed most of the hours after he returned from work fixing his friends’ and acquaintances’ cars, Hank Williams on the transistor radio, Jack Daniels in one of the kids’ juice glasses. In he comes, wiping the grease off his hands with a dishtowel, and what should greet his eyes when he peers into the refrigerator in search of a little supper but the golden top of the cherry pie Jan made for the church bake sale the next day? Gus loves cherry pie. Without a second thought, he lifts the pie from the top shelf of the fridge and deposits it on the kitchen table. He digs his clasp-knife out of his pants-pocket, opens it, and cuts himself a generous slice. He doesn’t bother with a fork; instead, he shoves his fingers under the crust and lifts the piece straight to his mouth. It’s so tasty, he helps himself to a second, larger serving before he’s finished the first. In his eagerness, he slices through the pie tin to the table. He doesn’t care; he leaves the knife stuck where it is and uses his other hand to free the piece.

“That’s how Jan finds him when he walks into the kitchen for a glass of milk, a wedge of cherry pie in one hand, red syrup and yellow crumbs smeared on his other hand, his mouth and chin. By this age — Jan’s around twelve, thirteen — the boy has long-since learned that the safest way, the only way, to meet the outrages that accompany his father’s drinking is calmly, impassively. Give him the excuse to garnish his injury with insult, and he’ll take it.

“And yet, this is exactly what Jan does. He can’t help himself, maybe. He lets his response to the sight of Gus standing with his mouth stuffed with half-chewed pie flash across his face. It’s all the provocation his father requires. What? he says, crumbs spraying from his mouth.

“Nothing, Jan says, but he’s too late. Gus drops the slice he’s holding to the floor, scoops the rest of the pie from the tin with his free hand, and slaps that to the floor, as well. He raises one foot and stamps on the mess he’s made, spreading it across the linoleum. Jan knows enough to remain where he is. Gus brings his shoe down on the ruin of Jan’s efforts twice more, then wipes his hands on his pants, frees his knife from the table, and folds it closed. As he returns it to his pocket, he tells Jan that if he wants to be a little faggot and wear an apron in the kitchen, that’s his concern, but he’d best keep his little faggot mouth shut when there’s a man around, particularly when that man’s his father. Does Jan understand him?

“Yes, Pa, Jan says.

“Then take your little faggot ass off to bed, Gus says.

“What happened next,” Ransom said, “wasn’t a surprise; in fact, it was depressingly predictable.” He walked into the kitchen, deposited his mug on the counter. “That was the end of Jan’s time in the kitchen. He wasn’t the first one outside to help his father, but he wasn’t the last, either, and he worked hard. The morning of his eighteenth birthday, he enlisted in the Marines; within a couple of months, he was on patrol in Vietnam. He was cited for bravery on several occasions; I think he may have been awarded a medal. One afternoon, when his squad stopped for a rest, he was shot through the head by a sniper. He’d removed his helmet. to tell the truth, I’m not sure why he had his helmet off. He survived, but it goes without saying, he was never the same. His problems. he had trouble moving, coordinating his arms and legs. His speech was slurred; he couldn’t remember the names of familiar objects, activities; he forgot something the second after you said it to him. There was no way he could live on his own. His mother wanted Jan to move back home, but Gus refused, said there was no way he was going to be saddled with an idiot who hadn’t known enough to keep his damn helmet on. Which didn’t stop him from accepting the drinks he was bought when Jan visited and Gus paraded him at the V.F.W.”

Behind him, a pair of doors would be opening on the front of a squat stone box near the island’s peak. The structure, whose rough exterior suggested a child’s drawing of a Greek temple, must be the size of a cathedral, yet it was dwarfed by what squeezed out of its open doors. While Ransom continued to have trouble with the sheer size of the thing, which seemed as if it must break a textbook’s worth of physical laws, he was more bothered by its speed. There should have been no way, he was certain, for something of that mass to move that quickly. Given the thing’s appearance, the tumult of coils wreathing its head, the scales shimmering on its arms, its legs, the wings that unfolded into great translucent fans whose edges were not quite in focus, its speed was hardly the most obvious detail on which to focus, but for Ransom, the dearth of time between the first hint of the thing’s shadow on the doors and its heaving off the ground on a hurricane-blast of its wings confirmed the extent to which the world had changed.

(What was that? Matt had screamed, his eyes wide. Was that real? Is that happening? Ransom had been unable to speak, his tongue dead in his mouth.)

Like so many cranes raising and lowering, the cluster of smaller limbs that rose from the center of the crab’s back was opening and closing. Ransom said, “I know: if the guy was such a shit, why pass his name on to my son?” He shrugged. “When I was younger — at that point in my life, the idea of the past. of a family’s past, of continuity between the present and that past, was very important to me. By the time Heather was pregnant, the worst of Gus’s offenses was years gone by. If you wanted,

I suppose you could say that he was paying for his previous excesses. He hadn’t taken notice of his diabetes for decades. If the toes on his right foot hadn’t turned black, then started to smell, I doubt he ever would have returned to the doctor. Although. what that visit brought him was the emergency amputation of his toes, followed by the removal of his foot a couple of weeks later. The surgeon wanted to take his leg, said the only way to beat the gangrene that was eating Gus was to leap ahead of it. Gus refused, declared he could see where he was headed, and he wasn’t going to be jointed like a chicken on the way. There was no arguing with him. His regular doctor prescribed some heavy-duty antibiotics for him, but I’m not sure he had the script filled.

“When he returned home, everyone said it was to die — which it was, of course, but I think we all expected him to be gone in a matter of days. He hung on, though, for one week, and the next, and the one after that. Heather and her mother visited him. I was at work. She said the house smelled like spoiled meat; it was so bad, she couldn’t stay in for more than a couple of minutes, barely long enough to stand beside Gus’s bed and kiss his cheek. His lips moved, but she couldn’t understand him. She spent the rest of the visit outside, in her mother’s truck, listening to the radio.”

Ransom glanced out the window. The huge sheet of light rippled like an aurora, the image of the island and its cargo gone. He said, “Gus died the week after Heather’s visit. To tell the truth, I half-expected him to last until the baby arrived. Heather went to the wake and the funeral; I had to work. As it turned out, we settled on Matthew — Matt — instead.”

His break was over. Ransom exited the kitchen, turned down the hallway to the front door. On the walls to either side of him, photos of himself and his family, his son, smiled at photographers’ prompts years forgotten. He peered out one of the narrow windows that flanked the door. The rocking chair he’d left on the front porch in a quixotic gesture stood motionless. Across the street, the charred mound that sat inside the burned-out remains of his neighbor’s house appeared quiet. Ransom reached for the six-foot pole that leaned against the corner opposite him. Careful to check that the butcher knife duct-taped to the top was secure, he gripped the improvised spear near the tape and unlocked the door. Leveling the weapon, he stepped back as the door swung in.

In two months of maintaining the ritual every time he opened any of the doors into the house, Ransom had yet to be met by anything. The precaution was one on which his son had insisted; the day of his departure north, Matt had pledged Ransom to maintaining it. With no intention of doing so, Ransom had agreed, only to find himself repeating the familiar motions the next time he was about to venture out to the garden. Now here he was, jabbing the end of the spear through the doorway to draw movement, waiting a count of ten, then advancing one slow step at a time, careful not to miss anything dangling from the underside of the porch roof. Once he was satisfied