Cthulhu Lives!: An Eldritch Tribute to H. P. Lovecraft (19 page)

2:24

My face stared out of the bathroom mirror at me. I didn’t know whether Jean was still in the bedroom or not. Sometimes she skipped out before I could return, something about not wanting our relationship to get too cozy given that we were still sharing office space. With the water running as loudly as it was, I couldn’t hear anything either way. Why had I started the shower? I was completely dressed. I also wasn’t sure how I knew what the time was. Perhaps it just seemed like 2 am. Why would I be at home otherwise? It’s not like we ever had days off at the Command. I couldn’t remember taking one, at least. The steam from the shower was beginning to coat the mirror, my face slowly melting into a blank smudge.

I shook my head and looked to the doorway. The door to my bedroom was just across the hall, and I heard a soft moan from inside. Had I looked because of the sound, or had it happened because I looked? I went toward the bedroom, leaving the water running.

The room was dark, and there was a quivering lump on the bed. I felt a burst of relief that this was, in fact, Jean still sleeping off an earlier encounter. The lump moaned again. She must have been dreaming. I reached out and patted what I thought was her shoulder. As I did so, I noticed that the lump was bigger than I remembered. It shifted under my hand with a noise like gelatin squishing into a bowl. I pulled the blanket back.

The large woman was there, phone in hand, its glow suffusing her face and making the black hollows of her eyes even more prominent. She was naked and drenched in sweat, but she took no notice of me. Instead, she was intently focused on her screen, and occasionally moaning softly in a language that I couldn’t make out. I stood there, blinking, gears churning in my head. Why was she here? Had I imagined Jean while inviting this woman home from the diner? I looked down at her slabs of skin. Varicose veins made blue circuitry across the fishbelly-white peaks and crevasses that shivered in time with her soft exclamations.

Her vast thighs became a mass of tentacles somewhere around what should have been her knees. They were writhing against themselves in a bath of mucus, pulsing with each of her breaths. They appeared to be tattooed with code, which scrolled across them in the same way as when the compiler was rolling – as if she were assembling Dylath in her very being. Not tattoos, then. Her skin was the screen. I recoiled, not just at the sight, but because the feeling growing inside my chest, knifing through the shock and confusion, was inexplicable lust.

One of her tentacles separated from the pack and slithered across the sheets. It slipped over my hand and pinned it to the bed. The code continued to roll, and suddenly her mutterings were much louder. She was chanting, in the same language that Jean had shouted in my ear as she came. Fighting my inclinations, I tugged back, trying to pull my hand free. The tentacle gripped me. I threw myself back with a shout.

The sheets released my hand. I lay there alone, in my bed, most of the covers halfway to the floor. Dreaming. I’d been dreaming... Except that I was fully clothed. I could still hear the water running in the bathroom, and steam drifted through the light across the hall.

10:13

Roger was standing in the center of the room. He seemed taller, as if absorbing the darkness to cast a longer shadow. I still couldn’t see his face well, but I could see his watch quite clearly from where I was. Considering the size of its face, I was surprised that the blue-green numerals were so visible. I hadn’t expected someone of his stature to wear a digital watch, either. Once a tech geek... He didn’t speak to any of the programmers around him, buried in their keyboards, but he did seem to lean in appreciatively over some of them. Maybe I was just trying to humanize him. I felt the need for some human contact after the moment in my bedroom. I needed to reassure myself that it had just been a bad dream, no matter how real it’d seemed. I didn’t see Jean anywhere.

“Have you – have you always been in the intel game, Roger?” I was surprised to hear my own voice.

He turned his head, and looked down at me, as if surprised that I’d shown enough initiative to speak without prompting. “I’ve been in this game for a very long time, yes. ‘Always’ is probably a good way of putting it.”

I had no idea what that meant, so I kept at it. “Ever do any field work, or have you always been stuck behind an office door like me?” I tried to smile as I said it, but it was difficult while being stared at like a dog that wouldn’t heel. His manner relaxed a bit, though.

“Field work. Yes. I spent a lot of time in Egypt. It was long ago.” His eyes looked deep enough to contain the memory of fifty lifetimes. “Much of it isn’t relevant any more.”

I nodded. “Guess that happens. The game changes.”

His gaze finally softened. “Ah, but some things stay very much the same.” He spun on his heel and clicked away towards the hallway. With a jolt, I noticed that the sound wasn’t in time to the movement of his feet.

“He’s lying.” Jean spoke softly, behind me. She was crouched down by the opening to my cubicle. She’d gone from pale to outright ashen. Her hair didn’t shine any more. I got out of my chair and knelt down beside her.

“Hey. What’s going on with you? What do you mean? Lying about what?”

She looked at me, halfway between irritation and panic. “About everything. About what we do. About who he is. It’s all lies.”

I took her hand. She was clammy. “OK, look. Don’t panic. If there’s really a problem, we’re not military. Cyber Command or not, we’re contractors. We can go outside the chain of command and talk to a superior. Now, tell me, what did you find out?”

Her mouth set in a line. “It’s right in front of you, Stephen. It’s in the program. It’s in Dylath.” She laughed unhappily. “You’d have to go a very long way to speak to his superior, and you probably wouldn’t have much luck.”

She pulled her hand away, and headed to her desk. I could see Dylath on her screen. The windows on her monitor opened out onto that magenta sky, and I caught snippets of something coming from her speakers. I couldn’t tell whether it was feedback or a badly played flute. Her whole screen conveyed menace, as if something was watching me through it.

I turned back to mine. The compiler was still running. The kill switch, F9, would shut it off, bring everything to a null state. It was dangerous to do, without some preparation. Besides, if I brought the compiler down, Kleiner would have a fit. Wherever he was. I probably needed to find him first, and see if he knew more about what we were actually doing. Why didn’t I know? What was happening here?

4:58

I’d been lying there for some time. I didn’t remember getting any sleep, but how would you remember that? I lay spread-eagled on the cool bed, the sheets twisted around my hands like they’d been trying to prevent me from escaping. My alarm clock blinked to 4:59, the bluish-green numerals firm and accusatory. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d heard the alarm actually sound. A parade of images of the past however many days sauntered through my mind as I lay there. The one consistent aspect was that of the waitress’s strange, three-pupiled symbol as it moved from cotton shirt to computer monitor to the magenta-limned clouds of another world. It hit me that the burning, steady gaze was not three eyes, but one. Its hideous gaze bore into my brain as I writhed again upon the bed.

I sat up, determined to resist my imagination. I looked around for something that would reassure me of the real world, and my presence in it, but nothing came. Yellowing moonlight coming through the window was a seeming assurance of normalcy... until the moonlight flickered, and I knew what had happened.

They had soared in front of it as they descended.

The creatures from the pyramids. They were out there. Waiting. I could hear their claws shuffling on the roof. Once, I’d believed it was just that the trees were too close to the building, but now I knew differently. The shadows were too obvious and regular to be branches. I could picture their blank faces, shrouded by their segmented, black wings. I’d seen them. I knew I had.

We had to be making progress. They were closing in because Dylath was starting to threaten their link to this world. Whatever they were. I had no idea how I’d stumbled to that conclusion, but it felt right. They’d been coming after me – the large woman, the creatures – because we were doing our jobs. We were building the wall between their home and ours. That
had
to be what the image of blocks on my screen had signified. That’s what Roger had meant. As the compiler ran, we were cutting them off, so they’d begun to threaten us. Threaten me! Trying to confuse me, and keep me from doing my job! I gripped the sheets.

But Jean seemed to think that Roger was doing something wrong. Was there something I didn’t understand? But if we were protecting the world from... well, from them, what could be wrong by comparison? I looked back to the clock.

6:47

The familiar, overlarge clock. I turned my attention to my usual black coffee, resting on the countertop.
Identical
, my mind whispered snidely.
The same damn coffee.
I ignored it. I figured that I had to gaze into my coffee quite a bit, which was why the waitress was so especially disinterested in me as a customer. She was leaning over the counter, reading a magazine, her back to me. I slowly looked the other way, toward the booths. They were empty. I let go the breath I’d been holding.
She
wasn’t here.

At the service window, the cook had his head down over his hissing grill. But the hissing was different, a series of sibilant words. I couldn’t hear them well, and wouldn’t have been able to pronounce them anyway, but they were there. His spatula’s scrapes on the metal surface became rhythmic and high-pitched. The sound stretched out, as if the tool was being forced to resonate, keeping time with the hissed chant like a musical accompaniment. Like a flute.

I wanted the man to raise his head. I wanted him to acknowledge what he was doing. He was interfering in government business, possibly threatening all of our efforts. I darted looks from side to side, searching for someone who might help me. The waitress was still completely oblivious to anything that wouldn’t increase her tip.

People moved outside, past the broad bay windows, but the brightness and condensation made them into phantoms, a crowd of shadows at a concert. The chanting and music continued, growing louder. I couldn’t believe the waitress wasn’t reacting. I turned back to the windows as one of the figures stepped forward, body flailing. Rage? Terror? I couldn’t tell. The movement was reminiscent of seizures. The face pressed to the glass and rolling from side to side was utterly blank, flesh melted like candle wax. His head shuddered, and his arms battered the window either side of him.

“Hey!” I shouted. “Hey! He– I think he needs help!” My voice sounded distant. I couldn’t even imagine what kind of help the figure might need most urgently. Airways?

The cook had finally raised his head. His face was a sheet of flesh, just like the man outside – except that a crude star had been etched into it with the corner of his spatula. The wounds seeped blood and bacon grease in equal measure. The middle of the pentagram held three slashes, alight with flame.

I pushed back from the counter with a gasp. My coffee toppled over the edge to shatter on the floor, right in time with a high note from the flute-spatula. The waitress finally turned around. Her face was also a pulsating slab of flesh. Her button was pinned to the middle of it, simulating the cook’s wound. The three-lobed eye. Her limp hair radiated away from her face, whipping in seeming rage. Mouthless, she screamed directly into my mind at a volume that threatened to shatter me, but even that still couldn’t drown out the chant and its flautist.

I ran for the door, and pushed outside, desperate to escape. The man was still there, shuddering against the window. The whole crowd was like him – faceless, drone-like, swaying and shivering in time to music all their own. They seemed oblivious to the rain, and to the horrible chant and flute, which blasted out from the diner without any drop in volume. I froze in my tracks, aghast. I recognized the foreheads of some of these people. I’d seen them time and again, in shadow, over the edge of my own monitor. My colleagues.

A fluttering of wings pulled my attention to the roof of the building. One of the creatures was there, faceless and rubbery and vile. Rage boiled up inside me. I spotted a rock, snatched it up, and hurled it at the hideous creature. It did not react, and my throw went wide.

“You can’t stop us!” I shouted. “We’ll keep moving forward and you’ll be banned from here forever! We’ll –”

Someone grabbed my arm. I turned to look into a blank disk of pale skin surrounded by bright red hair. Jean. She shook her head violently from side to side, trying to speak, tugging furiously on my arm. Finally, she released me. She brought her hands up to where her mouth would have been, and dug her nails in. Her face ripped apart in a shower of gore that blended with the rain on the sidewalk.

“... uhhhauughhhh! Stephennn! The gaunts!” She pointed at the creature on the roof. “They’re not the enemy! We are! The gaunts are trying to warn us! Warn you!”

She fell to her knees, whimpering. I grabbed her shoulders, crouching on the rain-slicked concrete. Blood streamed from her chin. “They’re a warning.” Her voice was weakening. “Of the chaos. We’re
opening
the doorway. For Roger. For...” She coughed some impossible tangle of syllables that slid off my mind and vanished in the rain. The chant intensified, and she gagged, and began howling in time with it. The figures all around us stiffened in unison and started writhing, their faceless bodies joining a chorus of which they were incapable. The flute’s frenzied piping climbed higher and higher, to an impossible crescendo. The diner’s windows shattered. Glass ripped through the crowd. Many of the figures dropped, as if shot. I leapt to my feet and ran. Glancing fearfully back at the diner, I caught sight of the large digital clock.

11:57

The time was a stark banner across my monitor, rather than its usual gentle corner reminder. I could see Dylath still compiling behind it, and the magenta sky, riven with bolts of energy and roiling clouds, in the background. I felt a presence, beyond. The screen’s borders seemed to bend as it neared. No one else was in the office. Had I fallen asleep at my desk? I couldn’t remember ever being alone here before, but there seemed to be a lot I couldn’t remember these days. Just islands of memory in seas of dumb fog. A clicking noise echoed down the hallway.