Cthulhu's Reign

of us into the car and drive up to the reservoir for an afternoon out.”

On the far side of the house, the near curtain of light, on which he had watched the sunken island rise for the twentieth, the thirtieth time, settled, dimmed. With the slow spiral of food coloring dropped into water, dark pink and burnt orange spread across its upper reaches, a gaudy sunset display that was as close as the actual sky came to night any more. A broad concrete rectangle took up the image’s lower half. At its other end, the plane was bordered by four giant steel and glass boxes, each one open at the top. To the right, a single skyscraper was crowned by an enormous shape whose margins hung over and partway down its upper storeys. Something about the form, a handful of scattered details, suggested an impossibly large toad.

The first time Ransom had viewed this particular scene, a couple of weeks after Matt and their neighbors had embarked north, a couple of days after he had awakened to the greater part of Main Street and its houses gone, scoured to gray rock, he had not recognized its location. The polar city? Only once it was over and he was seated on the couch, unable to process what he had been shown, did he think, That was Albany. The Empire State Plaza. Those weren’t boxes: they were the bases of the office buildings that stood there. Fifty miles. That’s as far as they got.

He was close enough to the house for its silhouette to block most of the three figures who ran onto the bottom of the screen, one to collapse onto his hands and knees, another to drop his shotgun and tug a revolver out of his belt, the third to use his good hand to drag the blade of his hatchet against his jeans’ leg. The crab paid no more attention to the aurora’s display than it ever did; it was occupied withdrawing one of the red slugs from a beer trap. Ransom cleared his throat. “Heather said she never noticed William Harrow until his work boots were clomping on the front stairs. She looked up from her book, and there was this guy climbing to meet her. He must have been around our age, which is to say, late thirties. Tall, thin, not especially remarkable looking one way or the other. Beard, mustache. when I saw the guy, he struck me as guarded; to be fair, that could have been because he and Heather were already pretty far into a heated exchange. At the sound of the guy’s feet on the stairs, Bruce had stood; by the time I joined the conversation, the dog was trembling.

“The first words out of Harrow’s mouth were, That’s my dog. Maybe things would have proceeded along a different course. maybe we could have reached, I don’t know, some kind of agreement with the guy, if Heather hadn’t said, Oh? Prove it. Because he did; he said, Noble, sit, and Bruce did exactly that. There you go, Harrow said. I might have argued that that didn’t prove anything, that we had trained the dog to sit ourselves, and it was the command he was responding to, not the name, but Heather saw no point in ducking the issue. She said, Do you know what shape this animal was in when we found him? Were you responsible for that? and the mercury plummeted.

“Matt came for me in the kitchen. He said, Mom’s arguing with some guy. I think he might be Bruce’s owner.

“All right, I said, hold on. I turned off the burners under the scrambled eggs and home fries. As I was un-tying my apron, Matt said, Is he gonna take Bruce with him?

“Of course not, I said.

“But I could see. as soon as I understood the situation, I knew Bruce’s time with us was over, felt the same lightness high in the chest I’d known sitting in the doctor’s office with Heather a year and half before, that seems to be my body’s reaction to bad news. It was. when Matt — when I. ”

From either end of the plaza, from between two of the truncated buildings on its far side, what might have been torrents of black water rushed onto and over the concrete. There was no way for the streams to have been water: each would have required a hose the width of a train, pumps the size of houses, a score of workers to operate it, but the way they surged towards the trio occluded by the house suggested a river set loose from its banks and given free rein to speed across the land. The color of spent motor oil, they moved so fast that the objects studding their lengths were almost impossible to distinguish; after his initial viewing, it took Ransom another two before he realized that they were eyes, that each black tumult was the setting for a host of eyes, eyes of all sizes, shapes, and colors, eyes defining strange constellations. He had no similar trouble identifying the mouths into which the streams opened, tunnels gated by great cracked and jagged teeth.

Ransom said, “Heather’s approach. you might say that she combined shame with the threat of legal action. Harrow was impervious to both. As far as he was concerned, the dog looked fine, and he was the registered owner, so there was nothing to be worried about. Of course he looks good, Heather said, he’s been getting fed!

“If the dog had been in such awful shape, Harrow wanted to know, then how had he come all the way from his home up here? That didn’t sound like a trip an animal as severely abused as Heather was claiming could make.

“He was trying to get as far away as he could, she said. Had he been in better condition, he probably wouldn’t have stopped here.

“This was getting us nowhere — had gotten us nowhere. Look, I said. Mr. Harrow. My family and I have become awfully attached to this dog. I understand that you’ve probably spent quite a bit on him. I would be willing to reimburse you for that, in addition to whatever you think is fair for the dog. Here I was, pretty much offering the guy a blank check. Money, right? It may be the root of all evil, but it’s solved more than a few problems.

“William Harrow, though. he refused my offer straightaway. Maybe he thought I was patronizing him. Maybe he was trying to prove a point. I didn’t know what else to do. We could have stood our ground, insisted we were keeping Bruce, but if he had the law on his side, then we would only be delaying the inevitable. He could call the cops on us, the prospect of which made me queasy. As for escalating the situation, trying to get tough with him, intimidate him. that wasn’t me. I mean, really.”

With the house in the way, Ransom didn’t have to watch as the trio of dark torrents converged on the trio of men. He didn’t have to see the man who had not risen from his hands and knees scooped into a mouth that did not close so much as constrict. He didn’t have to see the man with the pistol empty it into the teeth that bit him in half. And he did not have to watch again as the third figure — he should call him a man; he had earned it — sidestepped the bite aimed at him and slashed a groove in the rubbery skin that caused the behemoth to veer away from him. He did not have to see the hatchet, raised for a second strike, spin off into the air, along with the hand that gripped it and most of the accompanying arm, as the mouth that had taken the man with the pistol sliced away the rest of the third man. Ransom did not have to see any of it.

(At the last moment, even though Ransom had sworn to himself he wouldn’t, he had pleaded with Matt not to leave. You could help me with the garden, he had said. You’ll manage, Matt had answered. Who will I talk to? Ransom had asked. Who will I tell things to? Write it all down, Matt had said, for when we get back. His throat tight with dread, Ransom had said, You don’t know what they’ll do to you. Matt had not argued with him.)

Its rounds of the garden completed, the crab was waiting at the gate. Ransom prodded the top of a carrot with the blunt end of the spear. “I want to say,” he said, “that had Heather been in better health, she would have gone toe-to-toe with Harrow herself. weak as she was, she was ready to take a swing at him. To be on the safe side, I stepped between them. All right, I said. If that’s what you want to do, then I guess there isn’t any more to say. I gestured at Bruce, who had returned to his feet. From his jeans pocket, Harrow withdrew another blue collar and a short lead. Bruce saw them, and it was like he understood what had happened. The holiday was over; it was back to the place he’d tried to escape. Head lowered, he crossed the porch to Harrow.

“I don’t know if Harrow intended to say anything else, but Heather did. Before he started down the stairs with Bruce, Heather said, Just remember, William Harrow: I know your name. It won’t be any difficulty finding out where you live, where you’re taking that dog. I’m making it my duty to watch you — I’m going to watch you like a hawk, and the first hint I see that you aren’t treating that dog right, I am going to bring the cops down on you like a hammer. You look at me and tell me I’m lying.

“He did look at her. His lip trembled; I was sure he was going to speak, answer her threat with one of his own. warn her that he shot trespassers, something like that, but he left without another word.

“Of course Heather went inside to track down his address right away. He lived off Main Street, on Farrell