Paula Guran - The Mammoth Book of Cthulhu

When his vision cleared, he saw Will gripping the statue with splayed hands, tense as a cable but motionless, until his head tipped slowly, ecstatically, back and he made a reedy sound that seemed to come from a much older man. His bladder let go in a spreading dark stain.

Though sunk in the earth and surrounded by walls, the statue had brought its own climate. Clarence felt it deeper than skin, a gust of particles and waves, the solar wind from a black sun. Outside was August, but down here was a numbing gust of absolute zero, the point where every molecule froze, everything but thought, and the invitation beckoned: Come . . . join with it . . . step outside the boundaries of time. It only burns for a little while.

His instinct, still, was to intercede, the way he’d always done. It was what big brothers did, pulling their little brothers out of traffic when they stepped off the curb, and out of the deep water when they fell in over their head. Maybe he could do it without harm, and Will was not yet a conduit for whatever was coming through that timeless chunk of shrapnel from the cataclysm that birthed the worst among gods.

And maybe he couldn’t. But it had always been expected of him to try.

Then Paulette was at his side, clutching his wrist, levering his arm down again. He’d never have dreamed he could let her do it so easily. He knew she was going to join Will before she seemed to realize it herself. As their eyes met, and from a place beyond words she urged him to let his brother go, he saw the conflict play itself out, then the resolution: that she preferred the vast unknown to a life she didn’t want to go back to, as long as she didn’t have to do it alone.

For all he knew, Will had even been counting on it.

They stayed down in the cellar a long time, long after Clarence had made it up the steps. He sat with his back to the hole some twenty paces away and shivered in the August sun. He didn’t want to look. He didn’t want to listen. Yet he didn’t want to drive away without knowing what, exactly, he would be driving away from. If there was a chance, the slightest chance, he still had a brother he recognized.

And when their shadows fell across him, long and distorted, he had time to wonder if he hadn’t made the last mistake of his life.

It didn’t seem particularly lucky that there would be time for many more.

“I don’t think I’ll be going home for a while,” Will said. “You probably guessed that already.”

He knew their names. Will. Paulette. He knew their faces. He knew their clothes and the sound of their voices and the smell of them after a long, hot day. He just didn’t know who they were. To see them now was like looking with one eye off-center. The halves of the image didn’t quite line up.

“What am I supposed to tell Mom?” he asked.

“You can tell her whatever it takes. I haven’t lived at home home for years. How different will it be?”

“Except for the part where you call every day.”

“I could still check in from time to time.” He looked down at the dirt with a murky little smile, as if it had whispered a joke. “It won’t matter that long, anyway.”

This from a son who could barely be coaxed into admitting his mother had two years, at best, to live.

Then Will held out the camera, the well-traveled Leica that had led them here, full circle after half a century. Its last shot from earlier, around front — Clarence didn’t know if he could ever bring himself to get it developed. Until Will took him by surprise, so he would have no choice.

“Go on, shoot one more. Both of us,” he said. “Show Mom I’m okay. Show her that we’re happy.”

Clarence steadied himself and shot it, the camera alien in his hand, like someone else’s heart. It had passed to him, but it wasn’t his. It would never be his. Behind them, these imposters in familiar skins, the hovel sat as it always had, slumping into itself year by year, as patient as decay, and the land stretched empty for miles.

“Here,” Clarence said. “You’re staying . . . here.”

To Paulette, nothing seemed more natural. “It’s got everything we need.”

And that was that. They turned their backs on him, returning to the cellar, and the last he saw of Young Will was his arm, reaching up from below to swing the rotting wooden door closed again. As Clarence remembered the other day, not without shame, telling Will that he and Paulette didn’t match.

They would. One day, they would.

On the drive back to the motel, solitary and endless, the pain worse than if a piece of him had been amputated and burned before his eyes, he passed the same dead barns and farmhouse ruins but saw them differently now. Had that really been him, last week, talking of breaking one down for the wood?

It was inconceivable now. No telling what such a place might hold. They only looked dead from the road.

Maybe she just walked away.

To go where? Where do you go from here?

She had her pick, didn’t she? There were so many, all waiting like carcasses for the flies to come and settle and breed.

His eyes started to play tricks, imagining he caught a glimpse of her in this one, that one, and the next. Peering out at him from between fungus-eaten boards, and then there were worse tricks to come, as he divined it wasn’t just her. No, she had a companion, a man the likes of which they didn’t make anymore. A changed man who wouldn’t even know his own grandson if he watched him drive by.

Because there were so many more lasting things worth knowing.

The phone calls started three weeks later.

But the first came at nearly four o’clock in the morning, so Clarence missed it, and it went to voicemail.

I was right. He’s out here. Somewhere. I can feel him. I can feel him passing by in the night. It’s happened twice. Sure as god made little green apples. But I don’t think he wants to be found. Maybe it’s because I’m not worthy of finding him yet. You think so? Hello? Are you there?

After that, Clarence got a new phone for everyday use, and let the earlier one go straight to voice mail. Permanently. He wanted the connection. He just couldn’t hold up his side of the conversation.

If you were dreaming the dreams of a mountain under the sea, how could you tell anyone what they were so it would all make sense? That’s what this is like.

He went to Boston, where he shut down as much of Will’s life as he could, and took over the phone bill, so the conduit would remain open. How Will was keeping a charge in the phone was anyone’s guess.

We’re getting closer. I can feel him. He’s a mighty thing. I wonder if he’ll be proud or angry. Paulette says hello. I think that’s what she meant.

The months passed, and the calls came in when they came, infrequent and random, no pattern to it, other than the way every time he thought Will had finally stopped, surely by now he’d stopped, another message was waiting a day or two later.

I was wrong. This isn’t what I thought it was going to be. I just don’t know if it’s better or worse. It’s . . . it’s the knowing that changes you. Like a download of information wakes up something that was always inside. I never could buy it that what they call junk DNA is just junk. Are you even there anymore? Why don’t you ever answer?

And it was Will’s voice — he would recognize it anywhere — yet something was different about it each time. It was more than how each call sounded a bit farther away, fighting past a little more static and noise than the previous time. It was in the resonance of his throat, and the tones it produced.

Mom’s gone. Isn’t she. I don’t know how I know that, I just do. Don’t be sorry for her. She’s lucky. She’s beyond what’s coming. You should be too. I shouldn’t be telling you this. You should kill yourself, though. Rochelle first, then yourself. You should be okay then. I know you, you won’t want to do it because she’s pregnant, but you’ll be glad you did. That day will come. If you can’t trust your baby brother, who can you trust?