Silvia Moreno-Garcia - Future Lovecraft

However, not even Abeni could say why she took the entire sack of nutmegs. She cradled the sack against her side, as she might a child, while she made the last of her daily rounds and checked the following day’s schedule. The sound the nutmegs made within the canvas sack calmed her: click, click, click-click. She pictured their small brown shapes, pressed against each other and her; their veined insides, worms coiling through flour. These things pleased her, but she could not say why. Later, in her room, she would look at the quantity of nutmegs she now possessed, and her meager jars of soil, and she would mourn, not understanding.

Neither did she understand how, in the depth of night, she came to discover the pendant pressed against her breast. It came away with a puckering sound of sweat, the image of this fishman pressed again into her skin. Soil clung to her, as well, proving that she had truly buried it, but now it was here, with her. Abeni held the pendant between her fingers, stroking the fish until the pendant slid open.

It was not a locket as she understood lockets; there was no place for a mirror or an image. Inside, there was only yawning blackness, as if the pendant were a portal. When Abeni pressed a finger to the darkness, it was as though her finger went inside a space she could not otherwise see. Her finger did not come out the backside of the pendant as it should have. It was simply gone.

And inside? That darkness was warm and wet, vaguely like a mouth, she thought, though it contained no teeth. She drew her finger out and, though it felt wet, she could see that it was not. All the ocean in this little ornament, she thought, and closed her eyes. This was not her sunlit grain.

The darkness belonged to Bolanle, as surely as the shadow man did. This thought came to Abeni upon waking. The day had not yet begun on the station; its crew slept on, tied to the rhythms of the ancient world that had envisioned this place. Did that world exist, still? Abeni often wondered, for to her, Earth was but a dream, a place for other generations. Her place was here, Aphelion in deep space, and she roamed its corridors barefooted, heading toward Bolanle.

In Bolanle’s room, Abeni pulled her to the decking and showed her the pendant, cradled in both hands, opened, the darkness yawning. Bolanle stared. “This is for you,” Abeni said, and pressed Bolanle’s hand to the dark.

Bolanle vanished. It was not a sudden thing; Abeni wished it had been. The woman disappeared bit by bit through the small opening of the pendant, as though she were a piece of paper, folded in on itself over and over. Bolanle shrieked once, as the shadow man ripped himself free from her then pushed her—pushed her as he might a boulder from a great height, hands and feet of abyss pressed against her backside—pushed her until only a toe remained poking out, and then that, too, was swallowed by the darkness. Abeni stared, expecting to see something—there was only that small, yawning circle of dark—then lifted her gaze to the shadow man, now crouched across from her.

“Feeding me will not stop it,” the shadow man said. His voice was a terrible thing, the sliding of oil down Abeni’s throat, and she felt she would be sick. “If you plant all the nutmegs…there will still be the water. Even they cannot drink it all.”

Abeni wondered if she could drink it all and the shadow man laughed. His laughter was like a flood—she wished for that field of grain, so the water might be stemmed, but it rushed onward, over her, into her. She was drowning now, in a water thick like oil, which filled her nose and mouth and ears, until she was mute and could only watch herself float away. In this floating, there was no peace, no peace until Aphelion, herself, bent under the pressure and exploded.

Abeni’s hand snatched out to grab the shadow man. His borealis eyes went wide and she laughed, bubbles streaming through his oily flood. She latched onto his impossibly long arms and held to him, and then—

He vanished as Bolanle had. Folded up on himself, until he could be folded no more, and poof! Abeni fell to the decking, the pendant rattling beside her. She half-expected Bolanle to be vomited out, but no, the pendant had closed and there was no Bolanle. Abeni grabbed the pendant and opened it, but even the small darkness has closed upon itself, no more than a pinprick within the metal. Abeni stroked a finger over it—oily wet—but it did not expand.

She closed the pendant and stood on shaking legs, moving out of Bolanle’s quarters, toward the docking ring. Most of the station was still not awake, but merchants would arrive soon, early ships on clocks different from station time. Even now she could feel the slight vibration in the station as a ship docked. By the time she reached the docking ring, they were unloading and Abeni watched from a shadow. As the goods came onto Aphelion, the iyaloja wondered what else she might have let slip through. All these years, how many pendants? How many shadow men folded inside merchants? She saw nothing out of place, yet—until there, there! Her eyes went wide as a trio of shadows slid out of a shipping container over the wall, creeping upward on obscure feet.

If you plant all the nutmegs….

His words came back to her; Abeni shook them off. Of course, she could not plant all the nutmegs, for she lacked the soil—Or did she? Abeni’s mind turned to the place where she had awakened and that awful, fetid smell. Compost, she thought. Station waste. But he had said no—that even planting them would be of no use. She could not see what was coming, only knew there was something—something in these shadows that crept from the containers of distant worlds. What was Aphelion becoming gateway to? What?

As Mother of the Market, it was her job to stop it. Abeni knew this the way she knew her own heartbeat, the way she knew she craved the light of a distant sun. Sunlight on grain, she longed for it—but no, not yet.

Yes now, sweet Mother.

The whisper startled her and the shadow man curled his hand around her throat. Abeni no longer felt inside the station; the docking ring and its cargo bays seemed far distant, only a smudge of light on the distant horizon. The shadow man pulled her backward, through stars and planets, through nebulae and across black holes. Flashpoint, she thought, and squeezed her eyes shut, but even then she could see the places he showed her and all their terrible creatures. The darkness writhed, reaching for her with questing limbs that were sun-warm and slick. Abeni could not breathe for the horror that spread before her, this rotting land with its dying gods. These creatures reached for her, for Aphelion, to live yet again though so many had forgotten.

The sunlight here was sickly, throwing into shadow more than it illuminated, but she could see winged horrors moving within that light. Abeni tried to make sense of what she saw, but could not; she found that when she stopped trying, she could see more, more that made her want to shriek, but she had no breath, for the shadow man kept firm hold of her. She supposed, in a far distant corner of her mind, that he hoped to intrigue her. These goods, if they could be called such, were like none Aphelion had seen; wouldn’t the universe marvel that Abeni had found such wonders? Wouldn’t they herald Aphelion Station as the new dawn, the beginning of an entirely new life?

Abeni wrenched herself free. She stumbled to the decking, hands smacking the metal before her shoulder could. She sucked in a breath and startled when she felt a hand touch her shoulder. She rolled toward the wall, expecting the shadow man, but it was a different man who stood there, the merchant Esmail, whom she slowly recognized. Abeni took his hand and pulled herself up.

“Little Mother, are you well?”