Silvia Moreno-Garcia - Future Lovecraft

“Stag-Face,” she whispered. “Oh, no!”

“That man has a deer’s head!”

“Come on!” Dicle would not be thwarted. She yanked Yıldız up up up the sacred stair, until they reached the flat top of the altar. She heard clomping on the stairs behind them as Stag-Face’s hooves rang on the iron. Mean old Stag-Foot! He wouldn’t stop her, not now!

Dicle rummaged in her bag and, under the roasted balık , found the sack of her mama’s bones. She placed those at the base of the big circle and found the thing that Wriggler said was called a lever —it was just where he said it would be, on the left-hand side.

“No!” cried Stag-Face. He had reached the top and was pointing. “Dicle! Whee! told me you’d be here! Such a bad girlie! You don’t know enough, yet! You haven’t purified your heart; you haven’t learned the right songs! The Mother will not accept you for changing! She will punish us all!”

“The Mother knows our hearts and loves us all , her children,” shouted Dicle, as she wrapped her hands round the lever.

“Stop!” cried Stag-Face and Dicle heard his hooves pounding on the roof.

“He’s got a knife!” shrieked Yıldız. She was fumbling with something hanging on her belt. “Wait! Wait! ”

But Dicle wouldn’t wait, even if Stag-Face had a knife. She yanked on the lever and big, crackling shafts of lightning began to curl around the circle, writhing and touching each other, just like Wriggler’s arms, and they were even the same purple-blue colour. Dicle felt a burst of heat behind her; she heard the angry sound of Stag-Face in pain, and then the salt began to sing. It was so beautiful, it made Dicle’s heart shudder and her skin crawl all over, and she felt a sudden gush of sticky hot wet over her face as she pressed her hands to the sides of her head in agony. It was blood, flowing from her eyes and ears and nose— ugh! But that was the sign of the Mother and, as the Mother emerged, Dicle began to pray, harder than anyone had ever prayed before.

Yıldız, who was now Spots, came back to K’pah-doh-K’yah with Dicle, who was now Jackrabbit. Spots took over bossing everyone because she had teeth and claws like a leopard, and she’d also killed Stag-Face with what she told Jackrabbit was called a “laser pistol”. And that was okay, because the Mother had made her understand, and afterwards Spots was the smartest of them all.

“Ahmet and I went through the Hypersaline Resonator, thinking we could visit this other place, a place up there in the sky that the star-watchers had said was okay for us to breathe and see,” Spots had explained. “The Resonator was supposed to help with the problem of too much time passing here while we were gone. But when we got there, we saw a Mother—a different Mother, or maybe the same one, I dunno—and we were afraid it would come back here through the Resonator, because we didn’t understand that the Mother loves us all, her children, and that would be a good thing! Silly us! But now everything is better.”

Jackrabbit, who had been Dicle, was sure that Mother loved everyone, but she wasn’t sure everything was better, even though she had finally changed. It was true that the Mother had granted her prayers to be the fastest of everybody, but she was now also the scaredest and rarely wanted to come out of her hidey-hole in the caves. All the sounds were so loud in her big ears! She’d almost gotten gobbled by the ghouls on the journey back home because, every time she heard something or saw something, it terrified her and she couldn’t always control her urge to run away and get deep underground.

But, she reminded herself every day, at least she could dance in the revels and she could jump higher than anyone. Not that she felt like jumping or reveling much, even for the sake of the Mother. She was very sad, all the time. Wriggler hadn’t lived more than a few months after snuggling with her. When he’d seen her true self, he’d said she was so pretty and they’d done the huff-and-puff a lot, but only for a few weeks. All of a sudden, he’d gotten sick and pale and told her to go away, so she’d gone away. When she next worked up the courage to bolt down to the lake, she’d found his corpse washed up and rotten on the bank. No one had eaten his meat and that was sad. All Jackrabbit could do for him was clean his bones and put them with the rest, for the time when the next little babies grew up and made their pilgrimage to the Mother in the Salt. And nobody else wanted to be her snuggler, not even Whee!, because Wriggler had put a baby inside her, but when it had come out, she’d gotten so scared when everyone had crowded around to see it that she’d gobbled it right up!

Being changed was sure not like she’d thought it would be. Jackrabbit was always frightened and always alone. Nothing was wonderful. Not at all.

Helen Marshallis pursuing a PhD in Medieval Studies at the University of Toronto, for which she spends the majority of her time in the libraries of London, Oxford, and Cambridge, examining 14th-century manuscripts. Her poetry has been published in ChiZine, NFG and the long-running Tesseracts anthology. “Mist and Shadows”, published originally in Star*Line , appeared in The 2006 Rhysling Anthology: The Best Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror Poetry of 2005 and her poem, “Waiting for the Harrowing”, has been nominated for a 2011 Aurora Award. Her poetry chapbook, Skeleton Leaves , was released by Kelp Queen Press in 2011 and her collection of short stories, Hair Side, Flesh Side , is forthcoming from ChiZine Publications in 2012.

COLLEAGUES, AS MANY of you know, I have been at some pains over the last months to complete the research which your very kind donations have made possible. If it has taken a toll on me—if you can detect something of a dreary languor in my demeanour—I beg your indulgence. The archives can be an unkind place and History, herself, the cruelest of mistresses.

But I must tell you that it is more than the simple rigours of study that send a wild light to my eyes; it is far more than that. As you know, I have been engaged for some time in a study of a certain manuscript come to light recently in Biblioteca Estense in Modena, a small volume written on a fine vellum, much-damaged by fire, but still clearly one of the earliest copies of a Latin work thought to be attributed to Aristotle. Recent research has indicated—and my colleagues in Harvard have verified the results, checked transcription after transcription and traced both dialectal and paleographical evidence—that the book can be reliably placed near Heliopolis in origin, and may once have been housed in the lost Library of Alexandria.

The ramifications of such a find are far-reaching and will require far more study than I myself in a lifetime could ever hope to achieve, even with such generous donations as you may wish to give toward the endeavour. Nevertheless, it is not the contents themselves that disturb my composure. No, it is the parchment—the stretched and tattered skin, barely readable, discoloured by fire, yet still beautifully resilient after all these years.

In May, I departed for Cairo at the request of this esteemed governing board. My passport was stamped, my visa checked in triplicate, and the manuscript eyed hairily by authorities who neither understood its value nor my own purpose. “Where is the usstaz ? The professor?” they would ask, ignorant of my protestations that I was the professor.

Finally, a small, svelte man with immaculate English arrived to take me to the Museum of Egyptian Antiquities. ‘Khaled Nassar’, he said his name was and he was a godsend, though, no doubt, he’d dispute the term bitterly.