Paula Guran - The Mammoth Book of Cthulhu

A thousand times a day, he thought of cutting the connection. But never could.

I shouldn’t tell you this. When they come, they’ll look like meteors. But that won’t be what they are at all. When the sky changes color, it’ll be too late. Nothing will make any difference then. They’ll already have you. That’s when you’ll wish you’d listened to me. Don’t ask what color, I can’t really describe it. But out here, I’ve seen the kind of green the sky turns before a tornado. That’s a start.

We’re really getting close now. I wonder if Daisy will let me call her “Mother.”

And when it had gone nearly a year between calls, and so much had changed, and Clarence was a father now, with a father’s fears, he knew better than to think the calls were done. They would never be done. Even when they no longer conveyed any words he could understand.

Since coming home from Kansas for the last time, alone, he hadn’t listened to his grandfather’s tape any more, the longest in his life he’d let it idle. There was no more to learn from it. He would rather forget.

But there was no forgetting such a song. He knew it, still, the moment he heard it begin, coming through miles and static and time. He would always know it.

Yet now there was a difference. He could no longer hear the lamentation in it. Just the rage. It was a song of endings and rebirths, a song for green skies and streaks like blue-white fire among the clouds. A song he would never be fit to join and sing.

And, finally, it was coming from more than one throat.

He counted two the first time.

He counted four the next.

In the end, he counted a choir of multitudes.

Helen Marshallis a critically acclaimed Canadian author, editor, and medievalist. Her debut collection of short stories, Hair Side, Flesh Side won the 2013 British Fantasy Award for Best Newcomer. Her second collection, Gifts for the One Who Comes After , was shortlisted for the Bram Stoker, the Aurora, and the Shirley Jackson Awards. She lives in Oxford, England, where she spends her time staring at old books. Unwisely. When you look into a book, who knows what might be looking back . . .

“One of the finest books I have read in recent years is Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle ,” she notes. “Merricat Blackwood is a bizarrely engaging narrator with her love of her sister Constance, and Richard Plantagenet, and Amanita phalloides , the deathcap mushroom, and the mixture of naiveté, love, loyalty, and killer instinct that she shows in the novel has always resonated with me. When I was asked to write for this anthology, I had one of those wild, improbable titles that made me giggle to myself with enough manic glee that I knew I was onto something — We Have Always Lived in the Cthulhu . But what might have been nothing more than an amusing pastiche began to take on more and more depth as I explored alongside Caro and her grandmother the spiraling shell of an ancient ocean-dwelling creature and the terrible secret at the center of it. What has always fascinated me about Lovecraft’s stories is the madness that accompanies any sort of genuine knowledge — but the question I have always wondered is what happens afterward? How do we live in madness? How do we accommodate ourselves to knowing too much? Much like Jackson’s delightful black comedy, which finds something redemptive and oddly touching in the apparent insanity of the Blackwood family, this story seeks to provide some sort of answer — albeit a very strange one.”

My name is Caroline Eve Arkwright and I am thirteen years old. I prefer to be called Caro over Caroline and I don’t like the name Eve at all. I’ve insisted to Nan that I be called Caro because I’ve recently begun to learn my Latin declensions: caro , carnis , which means flesh , the body , and low passions . I don’t know much about low passions but I’m much more knowledgeable when it comes to flesh and the body . The body is the house in which the soul lives; and so I myself am like a house and I’m also the person living inside the house. This presents a conundrum, which I like very much. How can I be both a house and the occupant? Nan will not answer me. Nan has never enjoyed conundrums as much as I do.

Nan and I have always lived in the house and Nan tells me this is how it must always be. Our house isn’t like the houses in the village, Nan has told me, for it is caro , carnis as well. It is a big house. How shall I describe it? The walls are white, like the chalk cliff, but even more beautiful than that for they shine different colors in the light and are perfectly smooth. The floor is curved as well. From the outside the house appears as a giant hole opened in the cliff, but on the inside it has a series of chambers or cubicula , which spiral inward, each smaller than the last and curved as well. The house then is an orbis , which means ring, disk, coil — but most of all — world . I’ve spent many hours exploring the house but I’ve never gone beyond the eleventh chamber.

The village sits atop the cliff, not so close by, for the villagers are afraid of the ground giving way as it did once before. Their houses, which I’ve seen for myself, are neither orbes nor carnes but rather saxa , which is stones, and quadrata , which is squares. They have wooden roofs. They have windows in the attics with lights that come on and go off when I pass them. The people inside are caro or rather caro in saxo , but I am Caro in carno.

The way to the village is dangerous. The cliff is sheer and there are all sorts of other seashells and such visible there. None are as large as my house. The view of the ocean from the steps is very beautiful but if I’m not careful I could fall. Nan says this is what happened to Mother and Father, that they were not careful enough and so they fell. I don’t know if this is true but I’ve chosen to believe it. We must all choose to believe something, mustn’t we, even if it’s bad? Nan is too old to make the journey now and so I must make it alone. I try not to look down. Below me is mors, mortis which does not mean fall but death .

It’s my job to collect supplies from the village. Mostly this means onions and potatoes and flour and sometimes a pound of sugar and two pounds of coffee but these last are only for special occasions. I’ve been instructed to touch neither fish nor fowl, nothing that has lived and nothing that has died. I find these instructions somewhat confusing. Both the onions and the potatoes have lived, as I understand it, but Nan is firm that it’s not the same sort of living. She says this is an issue of vocabulary but I confess I’ve not pressed it further. Without onions and potatoes our cellar would be very bare! But it does seem to me that there ought to be a word that says more than mors, mortis to denote the different kinds of death such as death by falling or death by disease . This could be done of course with the addition of further words but it would be much more elegant if one word encompassed all these meanings. Perhaps there’s such a word in Greek or Egyptian or one of the many other languages I shall learn but I’ve not come across it yet.

In the village is a grocer who weighs the sugar and the coffee. In return I must give him a small pouch filled with salt that we scrape from the walls of the house. I’ve been told to watch him very carefully. Sometimes, Nan says, he likes to put his thumb on the scale. If he puts his thumb on the scale, then either I must make a second trip to the village before the appointed time or else we must make do without sugar or coffee. The grocer has a boy who counts out the onions and the potatoes but Nan says I must not look on him lest I fall into caro, carnis , that is low passions . Which is quite hard for he’s very handsome.