Paula Guran - The Mammoth Book of Cthulhu

“I don’t know. Time travel maybe. Maybe some future person journeyed back to trilobite times and dropped his portable . . . Xuthltan . . . in the muck, probably when one of these little fuckers hissed at him.”

Her large brown eyes were shiny with excitement. This was suddenly the sexiest moment of their marriage in the last ten years. Matthew stepped forward, but Kathleen said, “Look!”

They were everywhere. Matthew could see at least twelve of the bugs all headed toward him and Kathleen. Suddenly they all started to whine like summer locusts. Each bug had a slightly different pitch and each seemed to be modulating its tone. As he grabbed Kathleen by the waist, he thought they might be talking. He had the presence of mind to shove the rock into his pocket.

The warm Texas sun ruled for the next three days. Floodwater receded. The middle-class neighborhood of Onion Creek dealt with property damage and insurance people; the poor neighborhood of Dove Springs dealt with homelessness and need. The closed streets were opened and Matthew found the strange insectile visitors on his route had vanished. No tiny claw marks in the drying mud. No sign they’d ever been there. All that was left were a few badly lit photos and memories of a night of fear and then lovemaking.

Kathleen pointed out that in an era of Photoshop, bad pictures didn’t mean squat.

But there was the rock.

Five years before, when Kathleen was getting her degree at the University of Texas, she had dated a man named Randall Wong. Randall, who worked in the Accelerator Mass Spectrometry Lab, was a careful and thoughtful lover — and was dating three other undergraduates. (These AMS lads were like catnip to the ladies.) All the girls dropped him but Kathleen, who remained his friend (at least on Facebook). He had said to her, jokingly, in an IM just days ago: “If you ever need any carbon-14 dating, just ask me.”

Now Kathleen wanted Radall to radiocarbon date the rock.

Matthew wasn’t too keen on the idea. In his heart he knew — or was at least 85 per cent sure that Kathleen and Randall had had a little affair last year when he’d worked in Dallas for six weeks. But she seemed so excited by the mystery . . . and seeing the bugs had led to them making love for the first time in five years. Besides, he still cherished the hope that “solving” the mystery would mean leaving his dead-end day job.

Dr. Randall Wong was (of course) quite surprised by the rock. It’s not that often you see plastic encased in siltstone. In fact, it was impossible. Still, it seemed genuine enough.

Kathleen told Randall she couldn’t tell him any details about the artifact, but hinted her uncle in the CIA needed to know and had instructed her to approach her friend on a hush-hush basis. (Kathleen did, actually, have an uncle employed by the Central Intelligence Agency. But as Uncle Fitz only did payroll, any top secret instructions would be unlikely. In fact, impossible.)

Randall didn’t like the results.

“Look don’t tell anyone the university lab had anything to do with this,” Dr. Wong told them after the test. “I could lose my job. This will bring every nutcase out of the woodwork for miles.”

Kathleen and Matthew had met him at the Kerbey Lane Café. They looked up from their pancakes and said, “Why?” almost at the same time.

“I’m not giving you the printouts. I’m not giving you anything. The plastic is from now, which shouldn’t be a surprise, but the stone matrix was . . . I mean will be . . . laid down about fifty thousand years in the future.”

Randall dropped the stone on the café table. Before they could speak, he said, “No. Just no. No, I don’t understand it. No, I don’t want the publicity. No. Stuff like this ends careers. Investigate if you want, you’re a high school science teacher — and you do whatever it is you do, Matthew. But for me? No.”

Randall walked out. He had not finished his waffle.

Matthew and Kathleen stared at each other.

Of course the next step was the Internet.

“Xuthltan” was the name of a government official in the Maldives, a word for an evil village in a short story by Texas writer Robert E. Howard, a character in a multi-player online game, and a church in a bad Austin neighborhood.

Austin it was then. The phone number from the website did not work, so Matthew decided to visit the next Saturday. He told his wife to stay home “in case there was any trouble.” Matthew didn’t know what sort of trouble you could have with people that had artifacts embedded in siltstone formed thousands of years from now; the Internet didn’t have any information on the subject.

The Church of Xuthltan was a storefront, part of a cheap-looking row of shops in East Austin. It shared its parking lot with a pawn store, a 7-Eleven, a store that sold knock-offs of famous perfumes, a tattoo parlor, a loan office, and a botánica. Some guys were working on a white car near the church’s door.

Matthew peered through the church’s grimy glass door. The light was off, but Matthew could see someone inside — an old white guy in faded blue jeans and a dirty white T-shirt. He had a long scruffy white beard and wore a blue baseball cap. He was watching a tiny television. Matthew knocked on the thick glass of the former-shop window. The old man looked up and gave him a wide grin, perhaps one of idiocy. The guy got up and started ambling to the door.

From outside, Matthew could see the church had four rows of rusty folding chairs facing a pulpit that had seen better days. Behind the pulpit stood what could be a marble baptismal font and a square folding table. A cash register stood on the table. There were bookshelves on two walls. The old guy turned on the overhead fluorescent lights and unlocked the door. He smelled like he had not bathed in a while, but there a cinnamon-y odor coming from the church itself.

“May Xuthltan eat your woes!” said the old man.

“Hello,” said Matthew.

“Come in,” said the old man, “The Grand Chronopastor is not here, just me. Are you here to buy a book? Light some incense, say a prayer? Or just shoot the shit?”

Matthew saw the pedestal he had guessed was a baptismal font was fake marble; its basin was full of gray plastic rectangles with the word “Xuthltan” printed on each in black letters. These were identical to the one embedded in the stone he was carrying in his left pants pocket. Matthew pointed at the basin as he walked in.

“What are those?”

“Prayer stones.” Said the old man. “they’re free if you are a member, and a buck (tax included) if you ain’t.”

“What do you pray to?” asked Matthew.

“Well I ain’t much of a theologian,” said the old man, “I’d say they was bugs. Hardy bugs of the future, I’d say. Makes more sense than praying to a dead Jewish carpenter, if’n you ask me.”

“Why’s that?” asked Matthew.

“Well what can a dead carpenter do fer you? Build something in the past? Heck that’s over two thousand years ago. Let’s say you wanted some bookshelves. You could pray ‘Dear Jesus, make me some bookshelves and hide them so I can find them!’ Well even if he did make them and hid them real good, you’d have to get on a jet and head off to the Holy Land and try and find them. And if you did find them, they’d be two thousand years old — and what kind of shape do you think they would be in then, I ask ye?”

Matthew wasn’t prepared for this line of reasoning. So he asked, “Uh, what can future bugs do?”

“What do reg’lar bugs do? Eat of course. They can eat up your problems if you chant on ’em.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, Praise Xuthltan! I had two no-good sons. Never took care of me. When they was out of jail, they would literally rob me out of house and home. Took my car. Took my tiny savings from the bank. Hell, they tried to steal the silver jar that held their mother’s ashes. I used to live over on Chicon Street. One day I walked past this place. Door was open on account of the AC not working. They was all prayin’ and chantin’ up a storm. Xuthltan! Xuthltan! Xuthltan! And rubbing these little doodads. Then one of them jumped up and said, ‘Praise Xuthltan! My husband’s gone!’ And she showed everybody her ring finger and there was no wedding band on it. I came in and asked just what the holy hell was going on.”