Discarded playthings are sometimes still alive when we reach them, maybe without teeth, or with a tiny worm swimming in a single gaping double-yolked eye, gibbering softly, leaking, no longer seeming human; we dispatch those with a spade blow, those of us who remain.
Our leader has gone; Thomas Henkel is taken. So am I in command now, promoted from adjutant on the disastrous field of battle, or rather of massacre? The others seem to expect this, and I can’t reasonably demur. Jimmy Garrett blesses me.
Garrett is taken, to meet his new master, intimately.
By now, those of us who remain are myself and Katie Drummond and Anne Gijsen and Alice Goldman and Jack Ballantyne. Four young women, one young man. Is a vile parody of Adam and Eve to be enacted? To my best knowledge no one has fucked anyone else since this all began, for mutual comfort. Stone floors, for a start; and who would sneak off into the softer sheltering groves? I think Anne and Dionijs came close, some time after brother Wim’s death, but they were too upset.
Even though there’s supposed to be an instinct to propagate the race, in extremis. Can it be that we’re the only surviving human beings? Or are other iterations of Cthulhu playing variations on this vicious game all over the world? The latter seems more likely than that we should be the.
When we awake from dire dreams this morning, Katie is dead, apparently strangled, to judge by bruise marks. Of course we gave up posting guards weeks ago now.
“If one of you doesn’t confess,” I say, “then we must assume that
“Naw,” says Australian Jack, “that would be too merciful.”
I wait for him to fess up.
“It was me,” says Anne. “I go, I went, to judo classes in Holland. It’s a judo strangle.” She crossed her hands, back to back, grips an imaginary shirt or blouse collar, and rotates her wrists. “Pressure of the wrist bones on the carotid arteries. Unconscious in fifteen or twenty seconds, death in maybe a couple of minutes. Katie begged me. She was so scared.” Anne looks from face to face, almost expressionlessly. “Well. Does anyone else want this? If only,” she adds, “I could strangle myself.”
“
Anne nods. “I shall not strangle more of you, though. No more of us. Only Alice. I don’t wish to leave myself alone.”
“Do you want,” Jack asks Alice, “that we leave, then come back after a few minutes?”
“No! Watch! Witness me!”
In what sense, witness? Witness her being
Alice lies on her back across two slabs. “Like this?”
Anne nods.
“What if my blouse snaps?” Our clothes are by no means in tatters, merely very soiled.
Anne advances on hands and knees, then she lowers herself beside Alice, one leg across her body as if to restrain her; and her reversed hands slide round the American girl’s neck as if lovingly.
After several seconds Alice does slap her entire free arm upon the slab as if in submission at a judo contest, but only once. Her exposed feet drum a little, then are still.
Anne remains pressed upon Alice for what seems a long time, before the young Dutchwoman rolls aside.
“See,” she says, sitting up, “I can be a murderer too, just as well as
“I’d hardly say — ” begins Jack.
“Say nothing.”
None of us wish to be left alone, so we all go out together to hunt for our food, or be hunted. Like an offering, we find two vacuum-packs of sliced mortadella sausage and half a dozen oranges on the step under a grandiose melancholy memorial attended by a kneeling, praying woman and a bearded man who stands respectfully with gaze downcast. That woman’s crocheted shawl is so intricate. Her ruffled cuffs, the teardrop the size of a lemon pip spilling upon the side of her nose. He, with a coat over his arm, clasping his hands before him, a couple of fingers loosely — though inseparably — holding a grey bowler hat. Midway between the petrified pair, our meal.
“
And Cthulhu comes.
for her.
At least there’s no distant screaming tonight. Maybe a tough tentacle is down her throat, no doubt allowing her to breathe, though, as she writhes.
Jack and I don’t catch sight of Anne’s corpse anywhere on today’s search for more food. This takes us hours, but there are no birds to steal. Finally, we find what we seek upon the simple marble tomb of Mazzini’s mother, within a railed little garden in front of the squat Doric columns supporting the massive architrave carved with the name of the great Italian patriot, wrapped over by creeper-clad rocks — for the atrium and then the crypt beyond, very dark within, burrow into the hillside in this part of the wild woodland. Paradoxically, quite close to our sanctuary, almost the last place we think to look.
On his mother’s tomb by a towering tree: a single plate of white pasta scattered with clams. Brought from where, and how?
“Ladies first?” enquires Jack with an effort at humour.
Together we advance into the little railed garden.
A soft stirring sound from within the mausoleum.
comes.
I do hear the shrieks tonight, and try to stopper my ears. Maybe I should jam into my ears the long-expired Pope candles. The scene repeats in my mind: stooping to pass under the architrave, the tentacled monster had surveyed us. No point in fleeing; we knew it could catch us.
Heads or tails, male or female, Jack or me?
Then Cthulhu had swooped upon Jack and swept him away howling back inside that mausoleum. Is it so shameful that I seized the plate of pasta and clams and ran off with it?
So I’m all alone in the labyrinth now; and I’m hungry. Does something
Maybe a boiled lobster, and no evil consequences on this particular occasion.
I’m in the gallery where a boy and his sister, hair and clothing perfectly rendered, are witnessing the departure of their mother’s soul to heaven — the bronze door of the sepulcher above is already half-closed as the boy gestures upward, his other arm tenderly embracing his sister. Beside the children’s feet lie a big bar of nut chocolate and an overripe banana. Chocolate! Immediately I’m tearing off the paper and silver foil, and biting into the sweetness.
But for the sudden assault of stench, I almost fail to notice Cthulhu coming until it is upon me, entangling me, its suckers tearing off slacks and shirt and underwear. The suffocating smell is of sewers and rotting fish.
Face tentacles sliding into my ears,
A storm of ecstasy like a blinding enveloping light! A momentary shaft of terrible agony as if I’m burned alive!
The ectasy again! I would crawl begging to the beast for this, like those rats that burn off their paws by pressing a red-hot plate that stimulates the pleasure centers in their brains.
