Paula Guran - The Mammoth Book of Cthulhu

“And these bugs had eaten her husband?”

“Of course I didn’t believe it at first. But I was hurtin’ so bad from the way my no-good kids had done me. I dropped down and started chantin’ along with the rest of the morons. I took the talisman home and chanted for three days. Then I looked up. I used to have a picture of my son Ed in his graduation robe in a little frame on the mantel. It was gone! I looked around my house — it ain’t very big, so it didn’t take me very long. There was nothin’ belonging to Ed. There was still some of his brother Mark’s stuff, so I went back to chantin’, and guess what?”

“Mark’s stuff disappeared, too?”

“Well eventually. He called me on his cell phone. All I got is a landline. He called me and told me his house was full of roaches that were hissin’ at him. Could I come over and help him? I told him I could’ve — had he not stole my car. Said I’d ride over on the bus tomorrow. Told him he could’ve called his wife — ’cept she was smart enough to leave his ass. Hung up. Unplugged the phone. Chanted for three hours. Next day I took the bus to his neighborhood. Different family livin’ in his house. Looked like they been there for a spell. They had a swing hangin’ from the sycamore in the front.”

“Don’t you feel bad?”

“No. That’s the beauty of it. The bugs are just tryin’ to get here. They’re in some crazy war with flyin’ octopi or something in the future. When the Reverend Nadis first found them they were a hun’erd million light years away. Now they’re maybe a million.”

“Closer than that,” said Matthew.

“You’ve received Word?” asked the old man with a look of holy awe, his backwoods craziness suddenly set aside.

“No,” said Matthew, “I don’t know why I said that.”

“They can come through inattention, through synchronicities through certain shapes, as well as the shape waves of the mantra. Their name is not really Xuthltan. That just has the right vibrations. You need to meet The Reverend Nadis.”

Matthew felt the hairs on the back of his head stand up. He didn’t want to meet The Reverend Nadis. He looked over at the books for sale. Most were used paperbacks on the paranormal — The Truth About Mummies, The Truth About Werewolves, UFOS in Colonial America, etc. There were a few antique hardbound books with hard-to-read titles in German and French. Money. Money could buy time. Little church like this must need money.

“I would like a couple of the Xuthltan talismans. And let me make a little contribution toward the church.”

Matthew took a twenty out of his worn black wallet. Kathleen had given it to him four years ago for Christmas. He never bought wallets for himself, he hoped that she would notice it was time to get him another.

“You don’t have to give us anything. We may look like nothing now, but the time will come when this little church in this little strip mall will be the only thing standing.”

Matthew could picture what the man was saying. This stupid strip mall on a gray featureless plain surrounded by the bugs. They must have great intelligence to have worked this all out. Somewhere there would be vast insect cities, haunted hives where they fought another incomprehensible race. And they used pure human selfishness as a weapon in their war. Matthew stood there, shocked at the vision — it as though he was really seeing it. He could almost hear their hissing song.

“It gets through to you, doesn’t it?” said the old man, his eyes now full of intelligence, his hick accent still gone. Matthew wondered if this were The Reverend Nadis. The old man went on, “I see you have a wedding ring, that means you’ll be wanting two of the calling cards. Here you go.”

The plastic felt slimy in his hands. Almost as if the tokens were alive. He felt — or imagined he felt — the rock twitch in his pocket.

“How long? How long have you known about them?” asked Matthew.

“Now that, sir, is difficult to explain. Working with them plays hell on your time sense. Your mind gets more and more hollow the longer you know them. On the one hand you remember them. But on the other hand you have a great hollowness in your mind. Things echo in hollow spaces, you know.”

Matthew turned to leave.

“Come ag’in!” The old man’s voice had gone all hillbilly stupid again.

Matthew said, “I won’t. I’ll throw your plastic prayer stones away, and I’ll forget this place.”

“Don’t matter,” the old man said. “Just you comin’ starts another cycle in motion. Don’t you even want to show me the rock in your pocket, boy?” He laughed a little.

Matthew turned his back and stepped out of the shop.

“Praise Xuthltan!”

On the way back to his house Matthew edited and re-edited the story he would tell Kathleen again and again. He stopped at McDonald’s and had a large chocolate shake. He would tell her about the talisman’s supposed ability to make people disappear. He would portray the old man as a crazy hick. Overdo the accent when he told his wife — make him sound East Texas, bayou country. He wouldn’t mention the vision, and of course nothing about the bugs. The whole thing should be a dead end. He thought about throwing away the talismans, but found he didn’t want to handle them. He needed to see Kathleen laugh at them. She was so sensible. She was a science teacher for god’s sake. Then after she had destroyed their magic with a good laugh, he could drop them in his document shredder. It was strong enough for credit cards, and these were not much thicker.

By the time he drove home he was all smiles and sheepishness. It had been such a waste of time.

“So he really chanted his sons away?” Kathleen asked.

“He was a crazy old man in a closed-down storefront. He was probably homeless. You should’ve seen the junk they had for sale.”

“But you bought two of the cards?”

“I offered him twenty bucks for them. I figured the guy needed to eat.”

“And he turned your money down?”

“I told you he was crazy.”

She looked at the cards, shrugged, laid them on the kitchen counter.

She spent longer than usual on her computer that night. He felt sure she was chatting with Randall. He took a long bath, listening for the sound of her going to bed. When he left the tub about midnight, the plastic cards were gone, and she had taken the rock out of his pants pocket.

A day passed, and then a week, and eventually the memory of the strange bugs and the stranger church were obscured by bills and problems at work. WDS lost two technicians, so everyone had to pull an occasional extra shift. Matthew drew Sunday morning. He crept out of the house at 6.45 a.m. and drove into Doublesign. He took great pride in not waking Kathleen, although she got two months off in the summer plus Christmas, fall and spring breaks. He stopped at the Sac-n-Pac store and bought his Diet Dr Pepper and multivitamin packet and let himself in at work. The mainframe was up, the satellite systems were (mainly) up; he checked the night log and the emails. He put coffee on and raided a banana from the boss’s fruit bowl. He’d begun file maintenance, when he heard something in the server room. Probably rats. (Rats had given Arjay a huge fright a couple of months ago.) He ignored the sound. Then he heard someone say something. He jumped out of his chair. Should he dial 911 or confront? Probably kids from the Discipline Alternative Program.

He moved to the back and threw open the white painted door. The servers were warm, happy and alone. He stepped in and walked up to them.

Something fell from the ceiling behind him.

He turned.

It was one of the bugs, even larger than before. Two feet long, still the same but bigger sharp legs on each side and pinchers in front. It was bigger now, he knew — somehow — because it had eaten its way closer in time. Two more were crawling along the walls, their blue human-like eyes focused on him. One spoke — not a hiss this time — with his wife’s voice, “Xuthltan!” Matthew could see the three rows of glasslike serrated teeth clearly reflecting the yellow, green, and red lights of the servers.