Paula Guran - The Mammoth Book of Cthulhu

The highway signs increased with the amount of traffic, forcing them to slow down, but it was clear they were closing in on the coast. Commuters clogged the lanes beneath a sun risen to near its height, and the heat in the car steadily increased. Leonard seemed unbothered, but Alexandra had to remove her jacket and cardigan in an effort to cool down. The spasms in her head multiplied.

“The earliest we can check into the hotel is three o’clock, so we might as well go to the ocean first. There a little town off the water called Bearskin Point that would be perfect. It’s where I caught the whale-watching boat, so we can find out when it runs as well.”

Alexandra’s headache knotted itself, but she kept her face calm. “Sure,” she said. It was all she could manage without betraying distress.

After a time, Leonard stopped asking questions as he navigated the merging highways to Bearskin Point. Alexandra looked down at her map through squinting eyes as the lines contorted and skewed. Each time she thought the car was off-course, a landmark passed suggesting the opposite. She asked Leonard how he knew where he was going.

“I don’t. I’m just following the signs.” But even with the throb in her head, she knew there were no such signs. The map had been important until then, the foundation on which she’d been able to survive for so long. But the ocean, too, called to her, its quiet voice growing, and she didn’t know which she could trust.

Leonard drove on with unerring confidence, at once quieter and more intense. Alexandra’s face was turned out the side window, watching passing cars drag boats away from closed summer homes, her face grimaced in pain. She had traveled too far from home, her tether stretched near its breaking point, and as Leonard drove faster that tether continued to stretch thinner still.

She asked herself why she didn’t speak up, why she suffered quietly. Racing thoughts screamed something was wrong, but they were buried deep in a tangle of pain, slipping away with every second the Chevrolet closed in on the vast ocean. She had spent so many years — too many years — cooped in her small dry town, never moving beyond its imaginary walls, a bird in a cage. It was only as she approached the Atlantic and felt the difference in the air, the openness in the contrasted sky, that she began to suspect there were bars.

She had never felt so untethered, and it was terrifying. And yet, for all her freedom, she felt anything but lost. Her map was clenched to her chest, a symbol of her clarity; her life was the map, laid out in an exact path, the end-point of its journey set. The inevitability was itself a structure to which she was bound and soothed, and she felt no more in control of it than a bottle in the surf.

The transition from highway to street was seamless, and from there to side road even more so. Leonard guided the car through turns and stop signs without once stepping on the brakes. The tires squealed with each jerk of the wheel, and the momentum reignited Alexandra’s disguised pains, but she bore through them. Despite the pull back to where she had come from, back to where her father had stroked her hair one last time before becoming lost for good, she was convinced that her freedom lay in seeing the ocean, that it was only that sight, witnessed until then solely in dreams, that would ultimately and finally find herself. Leonard had to be right. Once she was able to stand in the water and look eastward toward where the sun emerged, she would finally stop running away from the world, and stop being afraid of running toward something better. On facing that immensity, her longing pains would reach their end.

Bearskin Point appeared no different than any small town she had seen, but Alexandra’s head swam so that she no longer trusted her vision. Behind the white and grey façades, she saw a large shape loom, its wide wings stretched outward, but in an instant the shape dispersed, the clouds that comprised it pushed apart by warm winds.

Leonard drove the car slowly along the short road to Bearskin Point, passing small stores with local crafts and paintings displayed in the dark store front windows, the warped glass reflecting strange shapes and colors moving. No one walked the abandoned road, and Alexandra wondered if she and Leonard were the only travelers left in the world. A sharp pain punctuated the thought — a charge through her head that Alexandra was unable to contain. The smallest moan emerged.

“Not much farther,” Leonard said.

Bearskin Point was a small circular outcropping into the ocean. Despite her draw toward it, Alexandra traveled the remainder with eyes closed, struggling to contain her encroaching delirium. Her tether was stretched to a thin gossamer thread, and she felt every tug on it, every twang. With clenched, bloodless fingers around the car door handle, she felt beads of sweat slip down her neck, steam off her chest. That thread was so taught, so painful, that it blocked the vision from her eyes. Blind, her body felt it continuous motion, falling into the depths of nothing, fading from a spiraling world of teeming shadows.

“We’re here!”

Leonard’s voice jarred her awake. She opened her eyes, though initially wasn’t certain she had.

She stepped out of the car onto her shaking leg. Leonard rushed to help, but she remained upright, never prying her eyes from what was laid out before her. All pain and discomfort forgotten.

“It’s . . .” She couldn’t think of words to follow.

The surface of the water stretched outward, encompassing the horizon. There was nothing else; only a line that met the clouded sky. It seemed unreal, the dark contrast of elements separated by that thin sliver; it went on and on forever. And, yet, there was something else out there, something more, moving toward them. She could not see it, but it was coming. Something large.

“Leonard, can you—” she looked at the wasteland of rocks between her and the water. “Will you help me down to the beach? I don’t think I can do it alone.”

“Yes,” he said, and held out his hand.

They took the first step onto the rocks together, then one at a time as he led her down to the ocean’s edge. With each successive step, she looked at the water’s calm surface, knowing what was out there was ever closer.

“Careful you don’t get your foot trapped,” Leonard said. “These rocks can be dangerous.”

“Okay,” she said.

It took ten minutes to reach the edge of the water, and when Alexandra’s foot first sank into the wet sand she felt an electric jolt travel through her. The air smelled as it did after a thunderstorm, wet and cold, and the standing hairs sent shivers over her arms. All sound ceased; she simply existed, as much a part of that place as were the rocks and sand and air. As much as the water and everything moving under its surface. She was at one with everything as she had never been before. Not in her own home, not in the arms of her father, not beneath any lover or among any friends. She struggled for a word that described it all, but as soon as she had it, it was gone, swimming away.

She released Leonard’s hand and stepped forward, each foot leaving a fading print in the wet sand. She stepped to the lapping edge of the ocean and then continued onward — the water rising first to her ankle, then to her knee, then halfway up her thigh. She stood alone in the water, watching the endless horizon, waiting for what was to come.

It did not take long.

She doubled over, unable to keep upright as waves of excruciating pain traveled from the frigid water around her legs. Leonard stood behind her — somewhere on the land or perhaps holding her, she couldn’t be sure — and she tried to scream but no words emerged. Or, if they did, they were inaudible over the rushing sound of the surf churning beneath her. It was as though she were being lanced by a burning metal rod forced though her skull one inch at a time, burning hotter the further it traveled. Her head was thick with pressure, and behind her tightly squeezed lids stars refracted and filled her vision. There were shapes in the endless field, enormous masses that moved in the distance, eldritch things that watched from the depths of a betweenspace she only now saw was connected to the ocean, the primal force of the drowning earth. And behind them all she saw him on the horizon, elephantine arms reaching out to draw her in close. Alexandra forced her eyes open, unable to bear any more, and the tears rushed forward, falling into the water. There, in the waves, each transformed into a silvery-sleek creature that darted away. More tears fell, more creatures darted, as though a tear between worlds had opened behind her eyes, and through it fell children of another place, all of whom were streaming toward the great thing that approached from out in the distant depths, something no doubt older than the earth, than even those ancient things behind her watering eyes. They swam forward in the churning ocean and she didn’t know why, didn’t know what it all meant, didn’t know where Leonard was or how many times he’d been there before, or when she had been impregnated with the horror. So many questions, burning inside her cracking head, so many tears falling she could not stop, and she prayed the pain would end and that she could once more be blind to the foulness she was a portal for. But she knew it would not happen; she knew it was too late. Whatever was inside her, whatever emerged from the beyond, would not stop until she was consumed, transformed from flesh and blood back to the essential salts that had formed her, left to mix and dilute, returning home at last to find herself within the great ocean of tears beneath which some unfathomable future approached.