Cthulhu's Reign

The woman is gone the next morning, a note telling me she heads north for the Aberdeen lodge, if it can still be found. Here in Oregon we’ve had no word from the Washington side this year since the river thawed in May, though in past years they’ve come across at Longview two or three times a month by boat during the free flowing season. Priests burned out the Lincoln City Lodge last December, the members stripped and broken and laid before the dark tide of shoggoths, digital prints of their deaths tacked to walls and telephone poles all up and down the Northwest coast as a warning to the remaining feral humans.

No such word of Aberdeen, for good or ill.

I should go back to my own routines, but there are vats of jellyfish toxin to establish. Someone will have to scale the odd-angled walls of the Risen City and carry the stuff in. Or allow themselves to be captured, and pray for a slow enough death to be able to spread the poison first.

In any case, the sauna room smells of sex and me and her, and I know I shall never again experience the sweet caress of a woman. The scent-memories are precious, while they remain.

I work for days, as Madeleine stays with me after the last stragglers depart. She knows that I touched the girl with my body, just as I will never again touch her lidless, staring eyes, and damp, spotted skin. The painful memory returns, that it was she who gave me the wedding band I still wear.

Can she be jealous now, beyond the end of all things?

Still, the little cells grow, the trays glowing slightly in a curious echo of the walls just offshore. Madeleine’s lips are no longer well formed for speaking, and neither is her larynx, but she grunts her fears to me.

The toxins will kill us all, or at least those of us who are transforming. Her. Me. Everyone but the girl from Crescent City. Or perhaps the toxins will kill no one, and this is all but a cruel hoax. Maybe the Old Ones toy with us, even now.

Finally I take her into my arms one night in the old sauna. Though true coupling is not possible for us, I make love to my memory of who my wife once was, while her lidless eyes weep acid tears to scar my chest and shoulder.

V

In the morning, I find her shriveled corpse next to the toxin trays. A faint smear still glows around her lips. I wonder if I should cry, but tears are years gone.

There is nothing more to be done. I gather my strength and purpose. As we were instructed, I press the cells in old cloth, so the toxin can be more easily spread by air or contract. As it dries, I bottle the stuff into old light bulbs from which the metal stems have been broken off, then bind them with duct tape. If the priests beat me upon my capture, they will be very surprised.

I leave detailed notes and diagrams showing our work, for when others of the lodge return. Eventually I step outside into the chilled mist and stare across the water at the Risen City. I shall take a dory and row me down to that watery hell, bringing blindness to the Old Ones, and death to my immortal enemies.

As I ply the oars, I wonder if the girl and Madeleine planned this for me. The waters around me roil with evil, the sky is Armageddon-dark, and I find it does not matter.

“I love you,” I tell the world. Then I row some more.

THE SEALS OF NEW R’LYEH Gregory Frost

“Did you hear something?” Detwiler asked. Stipe paused to listen.

Detwiler couldn’t help himself; he glanced back down the tunnel. He could hear blood ringing in his ears; underneath that he wasn’t sure if he heard wind or the “whump-whump” of leathery wings. It was paranoia. He needed confirmation of that.

“Besides wind, you mean?” Stipe asked.

“Yeah.”

“Just them chanting upstairs. But you have to listen hard.”

“Fine. Let’s hurry up.” Detwiler turned his attention back to his pry bar. He’d already chipped out the mortar around the massive stone block, enough room to wedge the bar in. Whatever else he had to say about life under Cthulhu, he appreciated the dependability of the architecture — dependable in the sense that it made the removal of one stone from the foundation wall a simple matter of physics. Fulcrums, levers, and offset stones. Stipe referred to the form as Ugaritic. In the old days, Stipe had read a lot on the toilet, mostly National Geographics. Detwiler only cared that he could pull out one stone and not have the whole wall collapse on top of him.

Together they revolved the loosened stone. Then Stipe got a rope around it, and they pulled it out. It hit the floor of the tunnel with a boom that must have set off seismographs in Mongolia, assuming either Mongolia or seismographs existed any longer.

They paused to listen again. No wings, no sound beyond the distant roar of wind. Nobody — more to the point, nothing — was crawling down the tunnel after them; and now there was a hole in the wall big enough to climb through.

“This better work,” said Detwiler.

“John. If Cthulhu catches you inside the vault, what’ll he do to you?”

“Pull me apart like your little brother torturing an insect?”

“And if you go back to living in the rubble of our dying world?”

“The same, I suppose. Just, you know, later on.”

“So?”

“Yeah, great.” Detwiler flicked on his halogen flashlight and pulled himself halfway into the hole.

Inside lay a vault exactly as Stipe had described, as huge as a cathedral, with twisted columns of stone supports. It was almost how he’d imagined Ali Baba’s cave to look back when he was a kid. Ali Baba had been something of a role model. Thieves who rode in, got what they wanted, and rode out again to their secret lair. Detwiler figured a lot of his disappointments as a thief were because nobody rode in on horseback anymore. And that was before Cthulhu had shown up and pretty much flattened civilization. Try to find a horse now.

This time, however, things were looking up. The vault abounded with riches, and everywhere golden and silvery objects glinted in the light of his torch. Two enormous soapstone tubs presented heaps of cracked emeralds and what he dared to hope were uncut diamonds, a few as big as his fist. The tubs were covered with carvings, inhuman figures in relief. He wondered who had done the work. Some poor slob enslaved by the hideous Cthulhu, probably destroyed the moment he finished. “There are jewels in here, Stipe!” he called back. “We have to take some jewels. We can’t break in here and not take some jewels.”

“Okay, we’ll get some jewels, but what about the stuff?”

Detwiler waved the flashlight around. Across the chamber, set on clawfooted displays stood five circular seals the size of garbage can lids. “Oh, yeah,” he said.

“Let me see!” Stipe pulled him out of the hole. Detwiler handed him the torch, and Stipe leaped into the hole almost froglike. Then, “Oh,” he said, as if a woman had just unexpectedly made a pass at him — which for Stipe would have been a life-changing event. He drew himself out. “The seals.”

“They’re worth a lot, right?” Detwiler asked doubtfully.

“Detwiler. They’re so valuable nobody even believes they exist.”

He considered that. “Good,” he replied. “Then nobody will believe when they aren’t there anymore.”

Stipe bent down and picked up one of three duffels they’d brought, pushed it into the hole, and climbed in after it. Detwiler sighed. Grabbed the remaining two bags. So typical of Stipe that he had taken only his own duffel. Stipe the solipsist, a curse and a blessing; it meant that he was always looking for a score, but also that once he had his own, he lost all interest in everybody else’s circumstance. This had resulted in Detwiler’s one stretch in juvie two decades ago, and five months in Otisville more recently.

Now that Cthulhu had come along and shredded the fabric of society, not to mention time and space, everybody he’d known in the joint was free. A lot of them, he thought, probably shouldn’t have been. And because of Stipe, Detwiler felt he bore some responsibility for Cthulhu in the first place, an opinion that was not going to