Carrie Cuinn - Cthulhurotica

Having forgotten how gray Innsmouth can be some days, I thought it was dusk when I opened my eyes. It had been a long evening of pillow talk, interspersed with another orgasm (or three) each. But after the sleeping and cuddling, there was silence. I was afraid to say much, and I think Anna was, too.

There was a herd of elephants in the room, now.

I didn’t mention being woken up by whatever dream she was having that made her heel hit my shin, or being kept awake by her incoherent mumbling in her sleep. I didn’t want to say anything that could broach the topic of how things used to be, because that would lead to talk of how things should be, and could or could not be, despite what had happened last night. The only innocuous words I could think of were, “How about breakfast?”

She let me fix her something simple, and we ate out on the balcony outside her bedroom. When she finally looked at me with a wide smile and told me, “I can’t believe how you could make me fuck like that at this age,” I was on top of the world. Overlooking the Harbor, eating breakfast with a woman I hadn’t expected to see again, I couldn’t just let myself sit there and grin like an idiot. I had to open my mouth.

“You trained me well,” I said. “You turned this prince into a frog.”

The smile disappeared from her face, and suddenly that perpetual wide-eyed stare of hers wasn’t as endearing. “What was that?” she said quietly.

I realized what I’d said.

“No, no — frog into a prince .” I didn’t listen when my head screamed to my mouth, Shut up! “Why, do you have something against frogs?” I joked.

Anna let her fork drop and bounce off her plate, and then pushed away from the table, spilling both our juice glasses. She stormed up the staircase to the widow’s walk. I gave it a moment before following her up. Even at our closest, she always insisted that she wouldn’t let herself be smothered, not at her age.

I found her looking out at the Harbor, standing just as she was the night before. My first instinct was to hold her. I crossed my arms and supported myself on the walk rail next to her instead. I should have told her she was being too dramatic for a woman her age.

Instead I said, “I’m sorry.”

Anna sighed. “Don’t be,” she said. “I’m just crazy these days. Now I’m wondering if this was such a good idea.”

“Why?” I asked, fixing my eyes on that famous blackened rock jutting out of the ocean known as Devil’s Reef, praying she wasn’t about to push me away again.

She shrugged. “Too many changes lately.”

“Change. That’s the real c-word. Always looking to mess things up,” I said. “Change isn’t always a bad thing.” She tensed, getting ready to make some big pronouncement, and I knew it was happening all over again.

I didn’t know what I was thinking when I got down on one knee. I didn’t even have a ring. I just knew I had one chance to keep her from sending me away.

“Anna Waite-Saothwick…” I said.

She put her finger on my lips. “Please, don’t.”

“Why not?” I said. I pulled a speech out of my mind that I’d been rehearsing for the better part of a year. About how a seventeen-year age gap didn’t matter. That I wouldn’t be better off with someone my own age. That there wasn’t any way her body could change that would matter to me (though, she really scoffed at that one). “Let me prove it,” I said, squeezing her hand. “That was all I’ve ever wanted.”

“What about the c-word?”

“What, cougar ?”

She slapped my shoulder.

“Screw the c-word,” I said.

“You’re not worried about what I might change into?”

I smiled. “I didn’t before. And definitely not, after last night.”

Except for any evidence of tears, Anna had that look people get when they laugh and cry at the same time. “But you don’t know—”

“I don’t care.”

“Really?” she asked.

“There’s only one way you’re going to find out,” I said. “Let me stay.”

“Actually, there’s another way.”

Anna slipped her hand from mine and faced out toward Devil’s Reef. She cupped her hands and shouted some words I couldn’t understand, but that reminded me of her mumbling last night. And unless I was hearing things, she was answered, from the Reef, with the most bizarre and disturbing sound I had ever heard.

As I stared at the Reef in awe, with my stomach churning at what I heard, I reached my hand out towards Anna. She took it.

I felt better.

“Turn it on,” she said.

When he didn’t move, she cocked the gun. Even so, Marc hesitated, his hand over the knife switch at the heart of the sprawling machine.

“It’s not safe,” he said, trying not to whine.

“I know,” she replied. The raw silk in her weary voice turning to rusted steel. “That’s why I need it.” She laid down the gun, certain of his obedience, and began to unbutton her long black dress. It slithered off her angular, hungry curves to pool round her feet. Her stockings were the color of smoke. She wore nothing else. The sheen of her perspiration made her pale body glimmer in the moonlight. Her long burgundy bangs hid her eyes. “Turn it on, and open it up all the way.”

He had built it for her, with the weird old components she always seemed to find just when they were needed, and the yellowing circuit diagrams stamped PROJECT BIFROST: ABOVE TOP SECRET. Whenever he asked her about it, she had fucked him until he forgot his questions. But this morning, he had done some digging and found out just enough about what he had built that he tried to destroy it.

Thus, the gun.

She’d told him some of it, when she had to. She didn’t have to spell it out. She had to be an idiot or crazy, not to realize how far out of his league she was. When they’d met on a makers’ message board thread about teledildonics and orgone generators, he’d played along with what he was sure was a joke. Something that’ll make Sex and Drugs obsolete , was all she had to say. Meeting her in person was a shock. Her picture didn’t begin to do her justice.

Like most girls who dyed their hair a new color every week and covered themselves in tattoos, there was damage behind her intriguing façade, desperation and despair between the whirlwind binges of thrill seeking. She warned him she was “a bit of a nymphomaniac,” and there was a sleepy confession that she’d been to rehab, been committed, experimented on. He didn’t care about her past, any more than he cared if she really loved him, or what the hell a Tillinghast resonator was, until it was too late.

They had played with the freaky machine for a week, enjoying the crystallizing buzz it conveyed, like a half-tab of acid with a vasopressin chaser, the weird hallucinations that only got more intense when you challenged them, the sense of the walls of the world withering away from the glowing bones of something hidden in plain sight, and more real than reality itself. Sex in the resonator’s field was a mystical experience — the visible sparks of Shirley’s orgasms coursing up her spine and out the top of her skull like latent lightning — but perhaps too mystical, for he always felt as if something was watching them.