Paula Guran: The Mammoth Book of Cthulhu

So many cylinders later, he has stopped asking.

Behind him, the door opens. Weird shadows stretch across the floor; yellow light catches in Aitch’s bottle, blinding. Bright semi-circles precede two identical women, tall and black as wicks. They totter in tight-buttoned boots, lanterns balanced on dull pewter salvers. Stovepipe hats erect on slicked heads. Ankle-length skirts binding legs close, blouses buttoned to the jaw. Aitch squints and blinks, following their progression. At a little table beside the narrow cot he rarely sleeps in, they stop and set down their trays.

“What a treat we have for you,” says the one on the left. Seventy? Seventy-one? Aitch has lost count, as he does every night at this point. Perhaps she’s cylinder seventy-two?

“A real treat,” agrees maybe-seventy-three. She retrieves a canteen from the bedside, pulls the cork, then thunks it down on Aitch’s lid. A few seconds later, a long straw scrapes through a puncture overhead; the Aunt pushes it, scratching his temple and cheek, down to his mouth. He drinks greedily, though the tea is weak and tastes of mud.

“Can I come out now?” Aitch asks, already knowing the answer. It hasn’t been long enough, they’ll say, only a few days. “Please?”

“Be good.”

“A few minor aches now for an eternity of joy.”

Through the holes, the women slip eight, nine, ten tiny pellets (eighty-one? eighty-two? eighty-four?) and wait for Aitch to consume them. The things bloat almost instantly. Yesterday, it was bloodworm capsules. The day before, it was kelp and compressed carrot. Other times, squid meal. Chaff and shrimp. The Aunts’ idea of delicious.

Despite himself, Aitch submerges as far as he can and begins to eat the sodden pills. Mid-chew, he presses his face to the glass. Distorts his features. Bugs his eyes. Squashes his nose until snot oozes. Scrunches his brow. Splays hands beside his cheeks and stretches his tongue until it hurts. Gobbets tumble from his mouth, plopping into the brine. If he is hideous, he thinks, the Aunts will no doubt see beauty. Maybe he’ll even earn a laugh, or a smile.

The Aunts watch and wait, and do not laugh.

They never tell him he’s special, the way he’s sure, he remembers , Mother and Father did. They never give him red wine in etched crystal goblets. They never bundle him into handsome four-in-hands, never let jolly horses clip-clop him along to the mayor’s very own private soirées . They never dress him in long satin robes, robes that match theirs, robes that shimmer like precious gems under starlight. They never sing nor dance around him on the shoreline. They never tell him tales, drunk on midnight and comets, of frolicking in a May Eve sea.

Now that Mother and Father are many months and many train rides away, Aitch recalls them through the green-tinted glass of his container. Features warped, wide-set eyes with no lids, pinprick nostrils, drooped and toothless mouths . . . Not quite what they had been, what they are. But he still feels the gentle trace of Mother’s fingertip along his caul scars. The feathered breeze of her breath as she kissed the stripes and ridges along his hairline, the raised dots beside his ears. The salmon-sharp tang of her skin.

We won’t be long after you , Father had said, obviously using the Aunts’ definition of soon .

What skies were above when you were born, Mother had said, voice thick with pride. Such old constellations! Such perfect alignments.

Draping the lucky talisman over his head, she’d promised he wouldn’t drown.

You are so special, she’d said, then sent him away. You are so special, Aitch.

No, he thinks, chill water splashing as he shakes, realigning his thoughts. No , she didn’t call him by letter. That’s his guardians’ method of address. Aitch. The initial a reflection of distance, a refusal of intimacy. No names, they’d said. They were the Aunts; he was barely a fragment of himself, a snippet of prayer uttered in syllables, sputters and remote stops. Nonsense jumbled together, he thinks. Nonsense kept apart.

Aitch had been complete with Mother and Father. He had made sense.

He’s sure he remembers what that was like.

Underwater, Aitch’s heart beats loud, a deep thrum-thrumming to accompany the chanting.

Satisfied that he’d eaten, the Aunts had withdrawn measuring tapes from their skirt pockets, held them up against the tank. Muttering, they’d made notes, given instructions, the routine now stale as the stench of his fish breath. Stretch , stretch child, extend that spine ; Aitch had straightened until crown scraped lid, cropped blond hair poking through perforations. Lower those shoulders. Expose that neck. Show us those hands. Turn — painfully — this way and that .

Once they’d finished, pencils and implements and lamps and stern heels retreated. Within minutes, the air in Aitch’s quarters thickens with a familiar hypnotic drone. Unintelligible words repeat from above and, it seems, from below. The endless chorus building, echoing, spinning out of the lighthouse while he weeps, cramped and shivering. Marinating in dark noise.

He begins to nod. Skull clunks against glass; he wilts forward, then clunks back again. Cold leaches, lulls. Dreams beckon him down, down, further down. Ancient fishhook voices snag Aitch’s untethered, innermost self and jerk it from his fragile, prune-skinned shell. They haul so quickly he can’t resist the vertiginous whoosh . Bubbles scream past his ears; he plummets into a realm of coral-toothed beasts, razor-edged fins, pearl-eyed hunters that track by vibration, by liquid scent. Powerless, he is zipped around streets paved with sailors’ bones. Weed-strewn buildings, barnacled castles, fossilized carcasses. Down, down into caverns crawling with neon cilia, through steam-spewing pipes, along an eel-path, a sculpin-trench, a giant isopod ravine. Further down, the canyon gaping before him, night after night, seemingly boundless, and yet pressure builds as he draws closer, lung-crushing, bone-breaking pressure, he can’t swim, he can’t move, he is confined in infinite space, he is suppressed, held under, release me , suffocating, he needs to break free . . .

The bottle rattles as Aitch jolts awake. Pulse choking, whole body trembling. Runny nose dangerously close to the brine.

I won’t drown, he thinks, necklace seized in fist, head cocked. The chant is still tumbling from verse to verse, the Aunts’ voices fervent but steady. Lately, they’ve kept him jarred for longer and longer, until he is grey and blue, the pinkie between his legs completely retracted. Not a peachy little boy anymore, not a good boy. A salamander. A jelly-limbed axolotl. A creature designed to crawl.

He waits, listens.

The song’s crescendo is hours off yet.

Plenty of time, Aitch thinks, feeling numbly overhead for the hole he’s worked at for months, the one widened with leather-sheathed determination. There . He grins, shoves his baby finger up, wriggles it through to the first knuckle, hooks, and pushes .

Metal screeches against glass as, slowly, the jar’s lid turns.

He’s learned not to climb too soon after flopping onto the floor.

It takes some maneuvering, just sliding out, placing the lid silently; then the monumental effort of getting up. Bending at the waist. Trying not to slip, water sluicing down his arms, his naked gooseflesh. Waiting for the blood to rush, the spots in his vision to clear. The pins and needles in his rump, legs, and feet to stop stabbing. The burning ache in his joints to ease. A puddle dries around him as Aitch stretches tip to toe, luxuriating in the sensation of being long .