Paula Guran - The Mammoth Book of Cthulhu

Leonard couldn’t understand. He clearly enjoyed the sensation.

“What’s great about Europe is how old everything is.” He looked at her, but his eyes saw something more. “We don’t have that same sense of history here. You walk around a European city, you feel part of how ancient everything is. It’s all stood for so long you begin to wonder if it was there before there were people to see it. The old world is so close at hand, yet it’s so distant and unknowable. You walk by buildings with the most beautiful and ornate carvings — even those half in ruin — and they seem so impossible. Yet, there they stand, and have stood through riots, revolts, and marches; man has done so many things by uniting into a single force, both for good and evil. It’s amazing to be in touch with all of that.”

“I’ve always thought about going,” Alexandra lied, “but I’ve just never done it. Maybe one day.”

“We should totally go. I’d love to show you around. I think you’d really get a kick out of it.”

She smiled. Then the waitress arrived with their drinks.

“Are you sure this is right?”

They’d driven for an hour after leaving the restaurant, and in that time traffic had thinned and the dark orange sun had reached the horizon. The encroaching dusk only heightened her panicked anxiety.

“I don’t know,” she said. “We’re still in upstate New York, but I can’t figure out where. Nothing matches the map.” Worries swam in her head in frenzy, and she couldn’t stop herself from feeling she’d made horrendous mistake in her calculation, and her precious map was wrong. If that were true, she truly was adrift, and the feeling of the earth widening around her made her limbs stiffen, her breath wheeze. If Leonard feared the same, his face did not betray it, covered as it was by deepening shadows.

“Maybe it’s time to pull over for the night. We can’t be that far from the coast — maybe a few hours? Let’s stop at a motel and get a new start tomorrow when we have light.”

It took another twenty minutes to find a motel, and by that time the highway was so dark the motel’s glowing red sign shone brighter than the moon. Leonard pulled into the parking lot, and helped Alexandra out of the car. After traveling for so long, she felt unsteady, as though her body was still hurtling forward along the highway, and it took a few steps before she saw the world through human eyes again.

The man behind the counter couldn’t have been more than eighteen, his face spotted and blotched, his curly hair shaved near the temples. He was courteous, but he was bored and tired and went through the motions because he had to. Even when, for her peace of mind if nothing else, Alexandra asked him to show her where on the map the hotel was, he did so with a vague point, and wouldn’t be pressed to do more. He seemed more interested in whatever he’d been doing as they arrived, and when she looked over the reception desk partition while he entered Leonard’s name into the computer, she saw textbooks lying spine-flat beside the phone. The titles were upside down, but the pictures looked like star charts.

“So you do know something about maps. Are you studying astronomy?”

He didn’t bother looking away from the computer screen. He simply and unceremoniously slid his open notebook to cover the page. She looked at Leonard, who shrugged nervously but said nothing to the boy. Alexandra hated herself for backing down. She even thanked the boy when he gave them the key.

Later, in the motel room, she remained fuming at the small wooden desk, trying to retrace the route on her map. All the lines looked the same to her, all the roads feeding into the highway like rivulets. Leonard off-handedly dismissed her unhappiness.

“He was probably worried you were from head office or something, checking to make sure he was doing paid work and not school work.”

“I don’t know,” she said, looking from her map as he buttoned his shirt. “It didn’t feel like that’s what he was worried about.”

“Well, what else could it be?”

She didn’t know. And, she supposed Leonard was right. It didn’t matter. “All that matters is that we’re here, together,” he said. He ran his fingers through her hair and she put down her pen and looked at him. She touched the side of his warm face, felt the stubble scratch her fingers. He took her hand.

The room was small. The only other furniture was the uncomfortable queen-sized bed, and its springs creaked with each small movement. Leonard suggested they move the blankets onto the floor, where it was quieter, and it was lying there that he moved his hand under the front of her nightshirt and placed it on her bare breast. He then lifted himself onto his other arm and placed his mouth over hers.

He tasted of salt, but mixed with the sweetness of his saliva Alexandra didn’t mind. His tongue found hers, invading her mouth tentatively, and the flesh was rough and soft and made the hairs along the back of her neck stand. Her mind drifted for a moment, swaying as though in a dream, and she had to focus herself to remain in the present with Leonard and not recede into her crowded thoughts.

Leonard’s face twisted as he pushed into her, as though willing himself to occupy the same physical space, to join with her on a quantum level. Yet though she bit her lip and arched her back, and though she felt her flesh warm to the point of fire, she felt herself powerlessly being pulled away from him all the same, cast backward into her mind, a powerless witness to events unfolding. Leonard’s breath hitched, his brow knitted, he cried some unintelligible word, and she felt the warmth of him flooding into her, coursing through her body like an violent tide, reaching each extremity. Her fingers vibrated, her scalp raised. Leonard continued thrusting afterward, but she couldn’t tell for how long while lost in her muddled head. When he finally rolled off, out of breath, she had returned to the surface of her thoughts, and felt aching sadness, but she did her best to throttle it as he perched his head on his bent arm and brushed the hair from her face with the other. He said it was so he could see her better, but she saw nothing in the dark.

“Are you enjoying the trip so far?”

“I think so,” she said. “I like that we’re doing it together. I don’t think I could have done it alone.”

It wasn’t until she spoke the words that she realized how true they were. Her father’s leaving had done more to keep her tied down than anything else, and she had succumbed until she was no different than those giant shadows of slow-spinning blades she and Leonard seen fixed to the horizon, in motion yet unmoving. They were the reason she let Leonard take her away from where it was safe. If she didn’t try to rebel against the sickness she felt the farther from home she traveled, he would surely be the next person lost to her. So she followed him into the unknown, with only her thin overdrawn map as protection, and did her best to endure.

Leonard stroked her hair as the two lay in the dark of the motel room. He whispered to her encouragingly, trying to ease her terror, and she struggled to concentrate on what he said and not get lost in her own anxieties.

“I keep thinking about how much you’re going to love the ocean. You’ll absolutely freak when you see it — especially if we take a boat out to watch the whales. I went once before with a— well, she was a girl I knew. It was a few years ago. Anyway, going out on the ocean is a trip, pure and simple.” He paused, uncertain he should continue, giving her a chance to ask about who that other woman was. She wondered how many women he’d taken there, how many before her had there been. But Alexandra was succumbing to the warmth of his touch, and his droning voice. She didn’t want to disturb it by speaking.