Silvia Moreno-Garcia - Future Lovecraft

Vincenzo cocks his head. He hears me coming, but he doesn’t pause. His arm moves, his brush stroke jerky, involuntary.

“Ara.” He doesn’t turn.

The scant, pulsing light falling from behind me illuminates the rotting pier. The dark water shimmers, bioluminescence touching the waves but never what lies beneath. It shows Vincenzo’s face and the gaping spaces where his eyes are not.

I was the one who found him. The bathroom tiles—staggered white and black—slick with blood. Vincenzo’s head rested against the edge of a claw-footed tub. He wept.

Rather—his body shook with sobs and his eyes lay next to the drain in the otherwise-spotless tub, darker than the most cerulean sea and incapable of tears. Blood had spattered where they’d fallen, but otherwise, the porcelain remained white, white, white. His palms were stained rust-dark; so were his clothes. I nearly slipped in the blood covering the floor, but in the vast, arctic space of the tub, there were only a few drops, trailing from the drain back to the eyes.

“I can still see .” Vincenzo’s sobs turned to laughter while I held him. I couldn’t make his dreams stop, either, but at least I resisted the urge to taste his bloody tears.

“Hello, Vincenzo.” I can’t tell if he flinches or not when I lay my hand on his shoulder.

“You smell like her,” he says. Did I tell him about Josie? My stomach turns.

“I need information.” My soles should be hard after years of running; my soul should be hard after years of leaving myself behind. Some things R’lyeh will never cure. Not in any place—not in any time.

It’s what I was counting on.

“Watch the painting.” Vincenzo’s voice holds the same quavering tone as Josie’s song.

Pain flickers through the space where his eyes should be, stars shifting through black, bloody caverns. I see blue, crimson-tinged spheres against porcelain-white; I feel him shaking in my arms. It’s too late for apologies.

Vincenzo sets aside a canvas of writhing blues and greens. The paint is still wet, fresh and thick. I want to run my hands through it and feel it between my fingers like river mud. I want to drift in it and be seen by a vast, opening eye. I want to be told I did the right thing.

Vincenzo places a fresh canvas on the easel. His arm jerks, spastic. I watch over his shoulder as he paints. Flames. Venice burns.

“Thank you.” I put my lips close his ear. Vincenzo’s body hitches; he might be bleeding the paint—crimson, saffron, umber. He doesn’t stop. I leave him to his colours and his pain.

I shift. Sideways, cross-wise, moving through a cold space as crushing as the deepest parts of the sea. My lungs compress. I could not scream if I wanted to. Tendrils wrap me, loving me. They lap my heart, sucker-hold it; they caress every part of my spine. They take a bitter-sweet song sung in a smoky voice like burnt almonds. I shiver as it fades; salt lingers on my tongue. It leaks from my eyes and I don’t bother to brush it away.

Venice burns.

Heat batters my cheeks, drying stinging eyes. I throw an arm up to shield my face. Inhuman tongues hiss unknown words, shiver laughter, babbling inside the flames. The stars spin. The canal heaves. Angles and rounded nubs of stone-not-stone—worn by untold eons—rise, dripping. The city would shudder in revulsion if it could; instead, it screams as it burns.

Against all reason, I turn toward the city’s fire-wrapped heart. Sweat pools beneath my leather. My scars itch, pulling tight between jutting blades of bone.

Marco is here. I was wrong. He wasn’t seeking the end of the world, just the end of his world.

I find him in the little restaurant off Calle Mandola—Josie’s restaurant. The soles of my boots have almost melted. Heat-cracked, multi-coloured glass from the shop across the street crunches under my feet.

The restaurant’s walls are black, curling with smoke-wrought shadows. They don’t shift and unfold yet, but they will. Everyone else has either fled or burnt to death. Only Marco remains, belly-up to the bar. His hair, greasy as it is, should burn. Instead, it clings to his collar, loving. I think of water-wet tendrils cupping pale skin.

He turns a pock-marked face towards me, unsurprised. Flame makes his already-dark skin ruddy. His eyes shine, and not only with the glow of alcohol. He mimes a toast, lifting his glass, and throws the liquor back, grimacing.

“I knew my mother would send someone.”

I don’t bother to answer. How long until the flames reach us? I pour myself a drink, and refill Marco’s glass. Nothing unfolds against my tongue as I drink. My eyes don’t water. It’s only alcohol.

“She wants you to come home.” I pour again.

Marco slugs the drink in his glass. His eyes shine empty, staring into a middle distance only he can see. When he ran, how far did he go? Has he seen the end of all things? Did he watch his mother die screaming? His eyes are unsettling. Not burnt-wood, something else.

“What are you running from?” he asks.

My stomach lurches. I try to pour another shot, but most of it spills on the bar. It will evaporate soon; the bar will go up in flames. All this alcohol—we’re a Molotov cocktail, waiting to happen. “What do you mean?”

“You wouldn’t have chased me this far if you weren’t running from something.” Marco’s eyes fix me. I know the colour now—river-mud brown.

I shudder. The sensation goes all through me. I don’t taste what’s in my glass; I taste cheap wine stolen from a funeral table the day we buried our parents—my father, his mother.

Jason. My stepbrother.

I saved his life once, pulled him out of the river after he slipped on a rock. He was nine; I was ten. Lying on his back, rocks darkening with the water running from his skin, squinting up into the sun, he called me his guardian angel.

I breathe deep, and draw in a lungful of wet leather and hay. Firelight flickers from the old trashcan we dragged into the barn. Rain drums the roof. Our feet hang over the edge of the loft, heels kicking dust-pale wood. A horse whickers softly.

“I hate them,” my stepbrother says.

“Who?” I drink straight from the bottle, bitter tannins clinging to my skin, staining cracked lips red.

“All those people at Mom and Dad’s funeral. They’re all a bunch of fucking phonies.”

He takes the bottle from me. I nod. A storm hangs over us that has nothing to do with the rain. A weight presses between my shoulder blades; my skin itches. I know Jason feels it, too. There is something waiting to rise.

Then, there, I am pulled out of myself. I am in Venice, looking at Marco across the bar, watching the world burn. I am floating above the vastness of a star-filled eye. Time means nothing.

I know what I will do to survive.

My stepbrother hes the rest of the wine, tosses the bottle against the far wall where it shatters, spraying glass. A few droplets fall into the fire, making it snap and sizzle. I retrieve another bottle, pen-knife out the cork. We stole a whole armful as we left the funeral.

My stepbrother says, “They’re lucky they aren’t alive to see what happens next.”

I don’t have to ask what he means. He feels what’s coming, but has he seen the end of the world? Does he know what I’ll do to make sure I will?

“What’s the worst sin you can think of?” I squint into the dark on the far side of the barn. “Not that Bible shit. Something real.”

Shadows shift, fold and unfold. Jason looks down, heels drumming the wood, dust spinning up every time they hit.

“Hurting someone you love and meaning it.”

I nod. The stars shift. They’ve always been right. They prick the sky, prick my skin, and draw blood. I know what I have to do to survive. Tendrils reach for me, the colour of starlight and as cold as the moon. I have to wrap myself in a sin I can never forgive, the worst thing I can think of, a pain I can never forget or give away. It’s the only way to stay human.