Paula Guran - The Mammoth Book of Cthulhu

But how . . . ? Nayda said something about smallpox. This is what she meant: here, in isolation, the virus changed . . . mutated . . . and infected the alpaca . . .

Maras wrenches his arm free, and she cracks it against the ground — it breaks. He howls in pain as she reaches into her pants and removes the jar of stew. His lips burble froth. “No, not that, no!” he shrieks.

What does Maras get out of it, the fighting? she wonders, as she twists open the jar and tilts it over his mouth.

“This is what you’ve been doing to me all this time, isn’t it? Pump me full of alpaca, and I’ll become another fighting freak, right? When I’m done fighting, when I’m broken, you’ll put me on the shelf with all these other poor people. Well, it’s stew time for you , Maras, and when you are a neckless monster, I’ll withdraw the stew, and then I’ll put you on the shelf.”

He shakes his head. No no no no no no . . .

A blob of stew falls between his lips. He chokes, but he must swallow. And now another blob falls.

It was here in the Sacred Cave that Manqu Inca died eight years after defeating the Spanish who spread smallpox throughout Peru. Manqu Inca knew that mutated viruses flourished in the alpaca of Wakapathtay, that the viruses infected the Inca after they ate the meat, and that the Sacred Cave held many of his people — transformed and on the shelf, but still alive. Manqu Inca wanted to die among these people, the strangest victims of the Spanish conquest.

“Do the alpaca grazing in Wakapathtay possess something in their meat that gives strength to these pots?” she asks.

Maras shakes his head. No no no no no no . . .

She twists her body and sits on his unbroken arm. Her free hand claps the bottom of the jar, and half the stew plops onto his face. She smears it into his wide, wide mouth.

His head slams from one side to the other. The gold ear plugs rattle, and tomatoes drip from the gold condor wings in his nose.

She rips strips from his alpaca tunic, the color of bloody sun. She ties his wrists behind his back and his ankles behind his body. He’s face down on the clay-red rock.

She places a huge pot next to Maras’s head. His lidless eyes weep. He knows what she’s going to do.

The pot is from the time of the people who built the temple Collud, ancestors of Chicya’s ancestors, and has a spider’s head, a feline’s mouth, and a bird’s beak. It is the spider god, who fills its webs with decapitated human heads.

She dumps stew on the spider god to revive him, then thrusts the last alpaca chunk into Maras’ mouth. She will return and force more meat into Maras. He will be a freak. And then she’ll go away from here, far away, and Maras will become pottery with a broken arm –

Unless the spider god takes care of him first.

She imagines the humiliation and torture endured by the spider god time and time again fighting for Maras.

“What did you get out of it?” she demands. “Money? Power? The people thought you provided the true Inca way. They ate your special Wakapathtay stew, thinking it medicine that kept them from turning into monsters. A terrible thought hits her. “They paid you to watch those fights, didn’t they? They paid you in hopes you would protect them from becoming freaks. Just like Narya, who cooked your guinea pig so the Inca gods, through you, wouldn’t turn her into a monstrosity.”

He sputters. She knows that she’s right. Money. Greed. Lies. Extortion. The human way.

“You’re so common,” she spits.

“And you,” he manages, “what are you that’s so special?”

She knew the answer as soon as she entered the Sacred Cave. It was in the old, old air. Now, she sucks in a deep breath, and heat races through her limbs and into her brain.

“I’m an ancient,” she says. “I’m the Inca before there was an Inca. I’m beyond known time. I’m . . .” she pauses. “I’m the Old One.” Her words are in the ancient Quechua language but with their original pronunciations. “ Q’ulsi pertaggen cantatro’f’l Cthulhu fh’thagn. Q’ulsi perhagen n’cree’b’f’w’l.”

“You’re nothing! You’re an orphan!” he snarls.

“No,” she says quietly. “I’m not an orphan. I’m not a qzwck’l’zhadst . You see, I never had parents. People found me as a baby. Who were my parents, Maras? Do you know? Does anyone know?”

He’s beyond answering. Behind his eyes lurks madness.

She has him on the edge.

“You see, Maras, I never fit in. I never cared about being alive. Death was nothing to me. I’ve been biding my time, waiting for the right moment. I never understood until now.”

A thread slinks from the bottom of the spider god’s abdomen. Maras shrinks back, eyes bulging.

Let him think she’s brought the spider god back to life. Let him think it’s going to devour him or spin him, dead, into a web. What does she care?

These creatures are irrelevant. Maras, Cisco and Luis, Bachue and Cava, Narya, the villagers—

All of them, irrelevant .

No more fighting. No more alpaca stew. They will all turn to pots.

They’re all going on the shelf. Forever.

Her way is the only way. Inca before there was Inca . . . Old One . The sky will hold nothing but tarnished clouds. The world will groan. The Sacred Cave will be hers. The Others will come, and together, they’ll spend eternity here.

With “Umbilicus” Damien Angelica Walters“wanted to subvert the traditional mythos by writing a Lovecraftian story based on the maiden, mother, and crone archetype instead of an entity like Cthulhu. I asked myself: What if Cthulhu wasn’t the only deity who slumbered beneath the waves? What would happen if another, older, deity woke, determined to take her rightful place? What might she unleash upon the world?”

Her work has appeared in various anthologies and magazines, including The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror , Year’s Best Weird Fiction , Cassilda’s Song , Nightmare , Black Static , and Apex . Sing Me Your Scars, a collection of short fiction, was released in 2015 from Apex Publications, and Paper Tigers , a novel, in 2016 from Dark House Press.

Tess places the last of Emily’s clothes in a box, seals it with a strip of packing tape, and brushes her hands on her shorts. Stripped of the profusion of books and games and art supplies, Emily’s room is a ghost.

The box goes into a corner in the living room with the other things earmarked for donation. In her own bedroom, she stands before the wall papered with newspaper clippings, notes, torn pages from old books, and turns away just as quickly, pinching the bridge of her nose between her thumb and index finger.

The small air-conditioning unit in the window growls like a cat that swallowed a dozen angry hornets; a similar sound sticks in her throat. Everyone has to say goodbye eventually, her mother said once from a hospital bed, three weeks before her heart failed for the last time.

With her mouth set in a thin line, Tess begins to remove the thumb tacks, letting the paper seesaw to the floor, catching glimpses of the pictures — a school photo with an awkward smile, her own face caught in grief’s contortion, a stretch of beach — and the words — depression in children , somnambulism , unexplained juvenile behavior — and the headlines — Suicide? . . . Not Sleepwalking, Her Mother Says . . . Body Not Found, Presumed Dead . . . Presumed Dead . . . Presumed Dead . . .