Paula Guran - The Mammoth Book of Cthulhu

And then we are moving into darkness — past the eleventh chamber where I faltered, past the twelfth chamber and the thirteenth chamber. I never asked Nan how far the way was. I never asked Nan what must come next. I don’t think I’m brave enough for this but I must be brave enough because there is no one else to do this for her, no one but Caro, Caro passing into car . . .

From the darkness comes a new kind of light as if the walls themselves have begun to shine very softly. They are all studded with silvery white blooms that remind me very much of the flowers I’ve seen in the village in springtime, all clustered together in little beds. Or perhaps these things look like teeth. Or snow. There are long shining spindles that hang suspended and I must be careful when I step underneath them. Some have broken away. Their edges look very sharp. When I look at them I can see myself carrying Nan reflected a thousand times, perhaps ten thousand times, but each image I see isn’t me exactly.

I touch my eyes. They begin to water and burn dreadfully. My hands are almost white, the silk sheet is almost white.

This is what death looks like, I think, and it is a very frightening thought: but I’ve never seen anything as white as this!

Around and around, through chamber after chamber, the walls shrink around me until I feel as if I could reach out on either side and touch them. At the same time they begin to feel larger and larger as if there were some method by which I can detect the dimensions of the room which relies upon neither my eyes nor my fingers. It is strange to think I’m perhaps not so very far from my own bedroom. I’m within the place I’ve always lived. It shouldn’t be frightening for all around me are the places I’ve walked all my life. But they aren’t this place, are they? This place stands in the center of all that. The air stings my eyes, it tastes like the ocean air but much sharper.

Now there is shadow, and with it, the sense of something deliberately obscured.

I feel very giddy. It is impossible to continue further.

But I remember what Nan said to me when I was afraid of going to the village the first time. She took my hands in hers, but they were warm then, very warm, and she said: “Listen, Caroline, no one there will hurt you, no one will touch you, I promise and I promise.”

“But they hate us so much!”

“Oh, no, darling, no, no — it isn’t hatred! It can’t ever be hatred, it goes beyond hatred or fear or even love what they feel for us. It is only that there is a voice that whispers to them in their dreams and it makes them all so terribly afraid. But they shan’t hurt you, they won’t, I will never, ever let them touch you.”

“But what does the voice whisper, Nan? What makes them so afraid?”

“It whispers morieris , dearest, which, as you shall learn, means all things must die. Caro, carnis . Everything dies except for salt.”

And I think perhaps it’s comforting, what Nan said, and I say to myself: “Don’t be afraid, Caroline, no one there will hurt you, no one will touch you!”

I even use my own true name just as Nan wanted me to.

But it doesn’t make me braver. For now there’s a noise I can hear or I’ve been hearing it for some time now, I can’t tell exactly. Perhaps it is only the sound of the ocean reflected inward, the deep and heavy huff of the waves. It sounds very much like breathing. But as I strain my ears, a second noise becomes clearer to me: a sharp tap-tap-tapping sound that I don’t like one bit, for it becomes louder and louder, maddeningly loud, so that I must press my hands against my ears lest I begin to shriek!

A hot blast of air gusts through the chamber, but from where it comes I could not say only that it’s as if I’m in my dream and this is Mother’s breath, warm against my skin and sweet smelling.

“Mother,” I cry out. “Oh, Mother!”

But I can’t see her! It is as if the air around me has begun to heave and writhe. But it isn’t the air, it is clouds of white dust, sharp and stinging — the walls billow, but it isn’t the walls, it is clothes of all different colors, blues and oranges and purples and yellows and green and they are all fluttering around me as if I’ve become lost within a flock of birds!

Then the wind dies away and all the clothes come to settle once more only they don’t lie properly as they did before. I can see now, I can see what lies beneath them. Nan never lied to me! For here they are, just as she promised, the ones from the village — all our visitors! There are so many of them! Some I recognize like Tom’s mother with her hair as golden as wheat but there are so many of them and I think to myself that I could not possibly have seen so many for they go on and on and on into the darkness. Those closest to me are just as they were in life, all pale and pretty with white, white cheeks — but those further are as strangers to me. Their flesh has withered and hardened into a yellow-veined shell — like saxa , which is stone — and all I can see are their jagged teeth set in the widened, black circle of their mouths.

And one by one by one it is as if I can see lights coming on within.

They are tiny at first, the barest glow, but they become brighter and brighter, each of them smaller than my smallest finger, set in a gilded carapace like a Roman soldier! And they are moving, oh, they are moving! In and out they go, scuttling on a thousand tiny legs, through the mouth, through the empty holes of the eyes and the nose, over the fingernails and the ribs.

How enchanting these creatures are, how absolutely beautiful!

There is a part of me that has become very happy. I know I should be frightened but these little things with their tap-tap-tapping don’t frighten me one bit. How is it that I’ve not thought through this particular part of the conundrum? A person is not only a person, a person can also be a house. Caro in carno . Just like me. And all the villagers have become like houses, row upon row of tiny houses: each with their own towers and colonnades, their own hushed streets and marvelous gardens. It seems perfectly obvious to me now! The soul is merely a single occupant, and when the soul has fled, of course, something else shall come to lodge itself within them.

They are very small and even if there are so many of them all wiggling around I know that I could crush them if I wanted to, I could press my fingers down upon them until they bled. But I shan’t do that, shall I? I shan’t, even though I could. They are so little, just like babies! And they are mine, aren’t they? I am Mother to them — and it shall be my voice that whispers, “ Morieris ” to them in the night. But they needn’t be afraid, for perhaps death is not so terrible a thing, perhaps it is only an inward movement, the casting away of the veil of dreams.

And so I take Nan gently in my arms and I bury my fingers in the smooth red silk of her covering. When I lay her upon the salt shelf I’m careful to wrap the cloth around her frail body. I loved her very much. But the world isn’t an apple. It isn’t sweet and perfectly formed — or if it was once long ago then it has fallen away into rot. It is a shell, a husk, an infinite spiral — caro in carno , all of it moving inward, passing over, ever slumbering, ever waking.

But I shall be Caro in carno no longer. I’ve heard the voice which whispers, you will die, and I’m not afraid; for to me it whispers sweetly, come to me, beautiful child, and I shall cradle you as you sleep, I shall watch over your dreaming and you shall at last be safe .

I’ve gone to the village for the last time now. It is true that I’ve come to love the stone houses with their pretty wooden roofs, their straight flowerbeds, the people all milling about, tending to the day’s business. There is a simple charm to the world they inhabit, how their years are governed by the planting season and the reaping season and yet it is amazing how little they know of the true mechanisms of the earth! But that is unfair of me for they are hardly scholars and perhaps only the barest gleanings of nature’s operations are enough for survival if one requires little enough.