Cthulhu's Reign

plastered with concrete except where the covering had cracked off, exposing bare mortared stones. This narrowest of alleys extended for maybe forty meters, and only one body’s width, terribly claustrophobic — what if something appear at the far end when you were halfway along? To relieve slightly the intense gloom, quite a few lanterns, each containing a battery-powered Pope candle, hung from caskets at various heights. Our field marshal ordained that we should each take one of the feeble lanterns with us, along with our gardening weapons — maybe, if lucky, we might later take the monster by surprise.

And so we came, passing by grieving statues, to a most unusual part of this singular cemetery. Although we were still quite high above ground level, we entered a labyrinth of several balustraded levels linked by stairways, walled with more caskets. On a dismal midway level Henkel decided that we should settle ourselves upon the paving stones.

“We shall take turns to be lookouts at the up-stairway and at the down-stairway. I think the kraken may find those stairways a hindrance. If it does come from one direction, we shall escape the other way.”

To sleep eventually on the hard stone floor in our fairly lightweight clothing? After no food or drink? Meanwhile, doing nothing but wait?

“Signora Vigo,” asked Henkel, “are there water taps nearby in the area outside, to fill flower vases?”

Seeming uncertain — does a tour guide pay much attention to taps? — Gabriella asked Rudolfo, whose response was obviously positive.

“Ask him to go, Signora Vigo, to show where. Jack Ballantine, would you go with two or three others to bring water back?” Yes, give the shocked lad something to do; already he was nodding yes.

“But what do we carry the water in.?”

“Why, in vases which you empty and rinse out. Mijnheer Ruyslinck, will you go too? And Mr. Goldman, to keep watch?”

“No,” said his wife Betsy.

“I’ll be all right, honey.”

“But the other Italian guy knows the cemetery.”

“Precisely for that reason,” said our field marshal, “he must remain with us as a source of information in the temporary absence of his superior.”

Just in case Rudolfo met his death vilely outside.

As soon as this little expedition departed, to loud prayers from Jimmy Garrett, Henkel came and sat by me.

“So,” he asked softly, “you think there may now be two separate realities? In one reality our world has been invaded by these multiple iterations of krakens, on various scales? And in the other reality, another world carries on as normal?”

“It was you who mentioned recreating the primitive earliest state of the universe. before physical laws became fixed. A sort of no-time when a different sort of universe could have burst forth and inflated instead.”

“And maybe that universe did come into a parallel existence, remaining faintly linked to our own universe by early. I think the correct word is entanglement.”

“By and large I know what that means, but I’m only a bureaucrat, as you pointed out.”

“Never mind, at least you know something! Maybe as much as I know. If our physicists have recreated that earliest stage of the cosmos in miniature, does this permit a kind of bridge between two possible cosmoses? Or rather a hole, which can be forced open by a powerful and evil intelligence?”

“How do I know!”

“Miss Hughes, surely it’s better to think rationally along such lines than to imagine that hell has invaded us, especially as that creature corresponds to no religion that I know of.”

“At least we won’t die deluded.”

“We mightn’t die. If those krakens are all linked, and are aspects, avatars, of the same entity, we might come across a tinier iteration of the beast and stamp on it!”

Was our field marshal himself deluded, or was this for the sake of morale?

“If they’re all aspects of the same, what did you say, evil intelligence, that must be one very highly developed intelligence.”

“Compared with which we are stupid? Maybe so, maybe not. But maybe we are very stupid to bombard the consituents of matter into a state which hasn’t existed since the dawn of creation, alien to the universe we know today. Stupid to meddle with the fundamental basis of reality. Maybe that’s how the rift happened, when something broke through — something which may even have been able to touch our world in the past by entanglement, though not as sustainedly as now. Supposing that at the beginning the cosmos divided, one of the twins pursuing our own everyday course, the other cursed twin torn away from its mirror image into a ghastly dimension or between-dimension where vile intelligences arose hungry for the substance of our world. How the invaders are reveling now.”

I thought that Henkel too was reveling somewhat in rhetoric, but I had to ask, “What about the normality we saw through that lens? Which cosmos is that in?”

“I think that was an illusion, a lure to attract us back to the gate, as if we are sheep. The kraken is experimenting with us.”

“If the creature can create illusions. and you saw how impossibly it pulled the spine out of. ” I couldn’t continue.

Thomas Henkel patted me on the shoulder. “There now, be brave. As you have been until now. If the kraken possesses such powers, which seem to us paranormal, well, it isn’t exerting them all the time.”

He stood up, and addressed our huddled company, declaring his theory that we might come across a much smaller kraken and be able to destroy it, thus striking a maybe mortal blow at the larger one which menaced us in the cemetery.

Personally I thought that, if what we’d witnessed on TV was authentic, then nuclear weapons would have destroyed at least several of the greater monsters. Unless of course the monsters could neutralise missiles.

At least our group seemed somewhat comforted by Henkel’s idea.

I’d often wondered in what way I would die one day. That’s the big question which most people avoid asking themselves, not least because there’s no answer until it happens, and even then you mightn’t know the answer, supposing your mind has degenerated prior to death, as my mother’s did. Whereas the truck that skidded and mowed down my dad from behind might have obliterated him before he could even realize. So somehow — due to family history — I thought that I wouldn’t know about death when I died. I would simply cease, the way I once ceased due to anesthetic when I needed a kidney stone broken up by laser. Did I hope simply to cease or alternatively to know the very threshold of death? Had the creature come to teach me?

“There’s still no mobile phone signal,” said Wim Ruyslinck’s girlfriend.

“Did you just try to call Mijnheer Ruyslinck?” demanded Henkel.

“Yes, but his phone’s set to vibrate, not ring. I wouldn’t draw attention to him like that.”

“Wise. However, we should conserve batteries, in case there’s any future use for them. Everyone should switch off their phones. I’ll keep mine switched on in case there is any change. When my charge runs out, I’ll appoint someone else.”

“Runs out?” queried Betsy Goldman, who was plump. “When’s that? In a week or a fortnight? What do we eat till then?”

“The human body doesn’t normally die of hunger for forty or fifty days provided it can drink. Fasting is normal for many people in the world, often involuntarily.”

“You mean I’m starting from a good baseline?” Betsy laughed, perhaps a shade hysterically, but others chuckled or grinned, the first hint of good spirits.

“Very good!” Henkel said approvingly.

Fortunately, her husband and Rudolfo, Jack Ballantyne, and the Dutchman all returned safely soon enough, bearing vases brimming with water.

That, comparatively, was the good time, the time when there was still some hope, even if meager.