New Cthulhu: The Recent Weird (41 page)

Martin felt a sharp flare of anger. He’d seen something awful, he believed that he had risked his life to rescue Dr. John, and his only reward was scorn and derision. “If you want to fuck yourself up,” he said, “do a proper job and score some heroin from that guy who works for those gangsters who beat you up.”

“I found something better,” Dr. John said. “We all did. Something we didn’t know we needed until we found it. You don’t need it, man. That’s why she turned you down. Even if you got hold of some of her stuff and got off on it, you wouldn’t be able to take the next step. You wouldn’t be able to surrender yourself. But we knew where it would take us before we’d even seen it. We ached for it. It’s our Platonic ideal, man, the missing part we’ve been searching for all our lives.”

“One of your little gang killed himself last night. He threw himself off the suspension bridge, right in front of my eyes. He committed suicide. Is that what you want?”

“Suicide? Is that what you think you saw?”

Dr. John looked straight at Martin again. For a moment, Martin glimpsed the worm of self-loathing that writhed behind the mask of his fatuous smile and flippant manner. He looked away, no longer angry, but embarrassed at having glimpsed something more intimate than mere nakedness.

“Something wants our worship,” Dr. John said, “and we want oblivion. It isn’t hard to understand. It’s a very simple deal.”

“If you take another of those pills, you could be the next one off that bridge,” Martin said.

Dr. John stood up. “You have your nice little flat, man, and your nice little shop and your nice little gigs with loser pub rock bands. You have a nice little life, man. You’ve found your niche, and you cling to it like a limpet. Good for you. The only problem is, you can’t understand why other people don’t want to be like you.”

Martin stood up too. “Stay here. Crash out as long as you like. Get your head straight.”

Dr. John shook his head. “My friends are waiting for me.”

“Don’t go back to the river,” Martin said, but Dr. John was already out of the door and clumping away downstairs.

Martin shut up shop early that afternoon and took a walk up to the observatory. Children ran about in the sweltering heat, watched by indulgent parents. People were sunbathing on suncrisped grass. There was a queue at the ice-cream stall by the entrance to the observatory tower. Someone was flying a kite. It was all horribly normal, but Martin was possessed by a restless sense that something bad was going to happen. As if a thunderstorm hung just beyond the horizon, waiting for the right wind to blow it his way. As if the world was suddenly all eggshell above a nightmare void. He drifted back through Clifton village and ended up in the Coronation Tap and drank five pints of Directors and ate one of the pub’s infamous mystery pies, and at closing time walked back to the suspension bridge and thrashed through bushes to the top of the rise.

There they were, leaning at the rail in the warm half-dark, staring into the abyss.

None of them so much as glanced at Martin as, his heart beating quickly and lightly, his whole skin tingling airily, he walked across the grass. They leaned at the rail and stared with intense impassivity at the gorge and the floodlit bow of the suspension bridge. The two women on either side of Dr. John didn’t even blink when Martin tried to pull him away, tugging one arm and then the other, trying to prise his grip from the rail, finally getting him in a bear-hug and hauling as hard as he could. As they staggered backwards, a gull skimmed out of the dusky air and bombed them with a pint of hot wet bird shit. It stank like thousand-year-old fish doused in ammonia, and stung like battery acid when it ran into Martin’s eyes. Half-blind, gasping, he let go of Dr. John and tried to wipe the stuff from his eyes and face, and another gull swooped past, spattering him with a fresh load, clipping him with the edge of a wing. Martin sat down hard, saw more gulls circling in the dark air, one of them much bigger than the rest. It dipped down and swooped towards him, its wings lifted in a V-shape. His nerve gave out then, and he scrambled to his feet and ran, had almost gained the shelter of the bushes when the bird hit him from behind, ripping its claws across his scalp and knocking him down. He was crawling towards the bushes, blinded by blood and bird shit, when another gull smashed into him, and the world swung around and flew away like a stone on the end of a string.

When Martin came to, the swollen disc of the full moon was setting beyond the trees on the other side of the gorge. Its cold light filled his eyes. The person standing over him was a shadow against it, reaching down, clasping his hand and helping him sit up.

“Christ,” Simon Cowley said. “They really worked you over.”

Martin’s face and hair were caked in blood and gull shit. His skin burned and his eyes were swollen half-shut. He gingerly touched the deep lacerations in his scalp, winced, and took his hand away.

“Gulls,” he said.

“Vicious little fuckers, aren’t they? Especially the big one.”

“What do you know about it? And what are you doing here?”

“I came here after your hippy friend spiked my beer. I woke up from a horrible dream and found myself standing at the rail over there, in the middle of a whole bunch of sleepwalkers. I’ve been coming back every night since. And every night someone has gone over the bridge into the river.” Simon’s long blond hair was unwashed and he stank of sweat and sickness. His eyes were black holes in his pale face. A khaki satchel—an old gas mask carrier—hung from his shoulder. He looked around and said in a hoarse whisper, “I think there’s something in the river. I think it swam in from the sea on the last high tide, it’s been trapped here ever since because the drought lowered the level of the river. It’s been living on what they give it.”

“They worship it,” Martin said, remembering Dr. John’s ravings.

“I think it draws them here and makes them jump off the suspension bridge. I think it eats them,” Simon said, “because no one has reported finding any bodies. You’d think, after at least three people jumped off the bridge in as many days, one of them would have washed up. I went down there yesterday in daylight, and took a good look around. Nothing. It devours them. Snaps them up whole.”

Martin got to his feet. Heavy black pain rolled inside his skull. His eyes were on fire and his lacerations felt like a crown of thorns. He said, “We should call the police.”

“You saw what was down there. I know you did because I saw you here last night.”

“I saw something. I don’t know what it was.”

“You think the police can do anything about something like this?” Simon cocked his head. “You hear that?”

“I hear it.”

People were chanting, somewhere below the edge of the gorge.

“It’s beginning,” Simon said.

“What’s beginning?”

“You can help me or stay here, I don’t care,” Simon said, and ran towards the path that led down the face of the gorge.

Martin chased after him. Everything was black and white in the moonlight. Bleached trees and boulders and slabs of rock loomed out of their own shadows. The day’s heat beat up from bare rock. The black air was oven-baked. Martin sweated through his T-shirt and jeans. His feet slipped on sweat inside his Doc Martens. Sweat stung his swollen eyes, his lacerated scalp. He caught up with Simon at the beginning of a steep smooth chute of limestone that had been polished by generations of kids using it as a slide. At the foot of the gorge, people were crossing the road, shambling towards the girl in the white dress, who stood at the rail at the edge of the river. A passing car sounded its horn, swerved past them.

Simon didn’t look around when Martin reached him. He said, “You see her? She’s the locus of infection. She’s been missing for two weeks, did you know that? I did some research, looked at back copies of the Evening Post for anything about people jumping from the bridge, and there she was. I think she jumped off the bridge and the thing in the river took her and changed her and sent her out to bring it food.”

Below, people were climbing over the guard rail at the edge of the road. The river shone like a black silk ribbon between its wide banks of mud. White flakes—gulls—floated above one spot.

“We have to stop it right now,” Simon said. “It’s high tide tonight. I think it wants to take them all before it goes back to sea.”

“All right. How are we going to stop it?”

“I’m going to blow it up. I stole two sticks of dynamite from work. Taped them together with a waterproof fuse. You distract them and I throw the dynamite and we run.”

“Distract them?”

People were slogging across the mud towards the gyre of gulls. They had started up their chant again.

“Shout at them,” Simon said. “Throw rocks. Try to take back your hippy friend, like you did just now. Whatever you like, as long as you get them to chase you. Then I’ll chuck the dynamite in the river, right at the spot under those gulls.”

“Suppose they won’t chase me?”

In the high-contrast glare of the moonlight, Simon’s grin made his face look like a skull. “I’ll chuck it in anyway.”

“You’re crazy. You’ll kill them all.”

“They’re already dead,” Simon said, and turned away. Martin grabbed the canvas satchel, but Simon caught the strap as it slid past his wrist. For a moment, they were perfectly balanced, the satchel stretched between them; then a gull swooped out of the black air. Simon ducked, staggered, put his foot down on thin air and fell backwards. Martin sat down heavily, the canvas satchel in his lap, heard a rolling crackle as Simon crashed away through bushes, saw the pale shape of the gull fall away as it plummeted after him.

Martin got to his feet and slung the satchel over his shoulder and went on down the path, fetched up breathless at the bottom, his headache pounding like a black strobe. An articulated lorry went past in a glare of headlights and a roar of hot wind and dust. Martin ran across the road, clambered over the guardrail, and dropped to a swale of grassy mud, breaking through a dry crust and sinking up to his knees.

He levered himself out and stumbled forwards. He could hear the tide running in the river, smell its rotten salty stink. Inky figures stood along the edge of the black water on either side of the girl’s pale shadow. Gulls swooped around them. Their hands were raised above their heads and they were chanting their nonsense syllables.

Iä! Iä! Iä-R’lyeh!

There was a sudden splashing as hundreds of fish leapt out of the water, shards of silver flipping and thrashing around the line of men and women. Martin ran down a shallow breast of mud, shouting Dr. John’s name, and something huge breached the river. Light beat up from it in complex labial folds, rotten, green, alive. Gulls swirled through the light and flared and winked out. Blazing fault lines shot across the mud in every direction; fish exploded in showers of scales and blood.

The people were perfectly silhouetted against the green glare. They were still chanting.

Cthulhu fhtagn! Iä! Iä!

Martin staggered towards them, feet sinking into foul mud, swollen eyes squeezed into slits, and locked his arms around Dr. John’s neck. Dr. John fought back, but Martin was stronger and more desperate, and hauled his friend backwards, step by step. The light began to pulse like a heartbeat. A virulent jag cut straight in front of Martin and Dr. John. Mud exploded with popcorn cracks. Martin fell down, pulling Dr. John with him, and the giant gull swooped past, missing Martin’s face by inches. Dr. John tried to pull away and Martin clung to him with the last of his strength, watched helplessly as the misshapen bird swept high through the throbbing green glare and turned and plummeted towards them like a dive bomber.

Someone gimped past—Simon Cowley, raising the broken branch he’d been using as a crutch. The bird screeched and slipped sideways, but Simon threw his make-shift spear and caught it square in its breast, and it exploded in a cloud of feathers and rotten meat. Something like a nest of snakes was thrashing in the centre of the light. A thick, living rope whipped across the line of men and women, knocking them down like nine-pins, sweeping them into the river. Simon threw himself flat as another ropey tentacle cracked through the air. For a moment it flexed above Martin, its tip crusted with feathery palps and snapping hooks, dripping a thin slime, and then it sinuously withdrew. The light was dying back into itself. Water rushed into the place where something huge and unendurable had opened a brief gap in the world, bubbled and steamed, and closed over.

Eighteen months later, Martin was with his friends in the middle of the crowd coming out of the Watershed at the end of a Clash concert, his ears ringing and sweat turning cold on his skin under his ripped T-shirt and Oxfam jacket and straight-legged Levis 501s, when someone caught his arm and called his name. Martin turned, saw a guy in a black dufflecoat, short blond hair and a pinched white face, and after a couple of seconds recognized Simon Cowley.

Martin told his friends that he’d catch up with them in the pub, and said to Simon, “I never thought you’d be into punk rock.”

“I’m not really here for the music.”

Martin grinned. He was still pumped up by the concert’s energy. “You missed something tremendous.”

“I heard about your friend.”

“Come to gloat, have you? Come to say ‘I told you so’?”

“Actually, I came to say I’m sorry.”

“Oh. Right.”

“I also heard you gave up your shop, you joined a group, you have a record deal . . . ”

“Those people I was with? That’s the group. And the deal, it’s for a single with Rough Trade. Nothing major,” Martin said, “but we all had three-day hangovers after we signed.”

“Still, a record deal.”

“Yeah. How about you? I mean, I heard you broke up Clouds of Memory . . . ”

“I gave all that up.” Simon hesitated, then said, almost shyly, “Want to see something?”

“You don’t look well, Simon. What have you been doing since . . . ”

Simon shrugged. “I’ve been working. I’ve been waking up every night from bad dreams.”

“I get those too, sometimes.” But Martin didn’t want to talk about that; didn’t want to talk about anything to do with those awful days in that long hot summer. “Well, it was nice to run into you—”