Paula Guran - The Mammoth Book of Cthulhu

Anyway, the business wasn’t always straight up. Some nights the dispatcher would call a bunch of us down to the warehouse and we’d unload a truck of bootleg liquor. The boss must have liked the fact that I didn’t nip bottles or run off at the mouth, because it wasn’t long before he made me a driver. In those days that was like catching the brass ring. For me, it didn’t matter. The way I saw it there was no brass ring. There was just one day, and the next, and the one after that.

But what mattered most were the days that had come before. That’s where my mind wandered, and returned. To a leaky migrant tent, where my brother’s cough echoed like the spinning tumblers of a locked safe. To a dead man’s house, and a broken mirror I stared into morning after morning. To a stolen Nash, where my brother and I found a map with our destination circled in red and a Winchester shotgun that could bring down a demon.

Those memories held plenty of questions, but answers were in short supply. If Russ had any, he didn’t share them with me before he died. And now that he was past sharing . . . well, I got to thinking that maybe it had always been that way with Russ.

Even so, I still saw my brother in my dreams. Just in flashes, like a choppy silent movie. Russ in uniform, digging trenches, a blood-stained spade in his big hands as he unearthed something buried centuries before . . . German flares blooming in the night sky . . . that green idol gleaming in soil that squirmed with gut-colored worms . . . a demon freed from the catacombs of an underground temple, stalking through mustard gas clouds . . . a German soldier’s corpse clenched between the monster’s teeth, two more dead men locked in its clawed hands . . .

Those dreams formed a story, but I had no idea if it were true. It hardly mattered. When I woke up in the morning my memories were waiting for me, and they didn’t add up nearly so easily. My mind was a haunted house. That black dog of a wind still blew outside its walls, and there was a broken mirror in every sink. A stolen car parked in the driveway would take me exactly where it wanted and nowhere else. But the truth was that I couldn’t leave that house. I walked its corridors until I knew every step, even the ones that only led to locked doors.

There were plenty of those, and I didn’t have to look very hard to find them. But I did look for answers in other places. We had a pile of maps at the trucking office, and I discovered that there wasn’t a town anywhere in California named New Anvik. I checked with the railroad, and there wasn’t a train station by that name, either. And that Massachusetts University, the one that had shipped the jade idol to a man in Auburn? A trip to the public library told me there wasn’t a university by that name anywhere in the world.

But none of that mattered. A week after my library visit, a package from that university showed up on my doorstep. And yes — it was addressed to me.

I brought the box inside my apartment, but I didn’t dare open it. I was supposed to pick up a load of hooch just north of San Francisco that night. Instead, I called in sick. Then I drove into the woods above Donner Lake and heaved the package off a rocky crag. On the way back to Reno I thought about buying a pistol and blowing a hole in my brain. If that box had been waiting on the front porch when I got home, I would have done it. But I never saw it again.

A few months passed. I tried to keep busy. I took every job the trucking company offered, especially the bootleg runs that paid top dollar. When that haunted house started calling, I’d try to distract myself with a stack of novels from the library. If that failed I’d hit the tables at one of the casinos downtown, and I’d keep my mind on the cards.

That’s how I ran into the nurse from the indigent ward, the one who’d helped me land that restaurant job. Emma was out with a couple girlfriends playing blackjack, and we started talking across the table. The cards were falling my way. After a while I cashed in my chips for a stack of greenbacks, and I took Emma and her friends out for steak and pre-war champagne at a joint on Douglas Alley that didn’t care about Prohibition.

It wasn’t the kind of thing I’d ever done. I’m not sure why I did it. But at the end of the night, Emma gave me her phone number. I said I’d call her, but a week passed and I couldn’t pick up the phone. I knew why, of course. The short version was that steak and champagne didn’t really change anything . . . and the longer version was all the stuff locked up in that haunted house.

But for the first time I thought that maybe I didn’t want to look for the key to that house anymore. Maybe what I needed to do was leave it alone. I didn’t know if my brother had ever felt that way, but then again I wasn’t Russ. What we’d shared we’d always share, alive or dead, just as we’d always be brothers. But maybe the time had come for me to stop being my dead brother’s keeper, and the keeper of his ghosts.

I was just about to dial Emma’s number when the company dispatcher called and offered me a midnight run to Grass Valley. It was a straight freight deal, no bootleg, but I needed the money after blowing that blackjack bankroll. And I needed time to think, too.

An hour later I was driving through the mountains. Snow was falling. It was quiet. Not like it is when hail or sleet pounds your windshield, and you get the feeling that the universe is firing ball bearings at you from the darkness. No. This was the opposite of that. It was as if nothing was falling through the night . . . as if nothing was filling everything up.

I liked that idea. As I drove west, it seemed as if that white nothing could wipe the whole world away. It felt like starting over . . . or maybe more than that. I pulled over and watched the snow drift down, sipping coffee from my thermos. Then I climbed down from the cab and followed a path that twisted through the pines.

It was cold, but there wasn’t a breath of wind. The snow fell through the narrow gap above the trail and between the trees, powdering the ground . . . the branches . . . everything. Even me. I wanted that white silence to stretch behind me and before me like a blank page. I stopped and felt it on my skin, breathed it into my lungs, held it there. And then I closed my eyes and imagined snow falling on the rooftop of that haunted house inside me.

The snow drifted before my mind’s eye — heavier, and heavier still — smothering the eaves, burying the whole place in silence . . . burying everything so very deep. And when I opened my eyes it stood before me, waiting there in a clearing. A house dusted in white, with an open door. The house was made of flesh and bone, and the bone gleamed brighter than any snow. The open doorway was a red patch, the door itself like a scarred slab of skin meant to cover an empty eye socket.

My brother stood in that red doorway, a shotgun in his hands. Russell’s face was smeared with blood, but he smiled when he saw me.

And then he howled.

Usman T. Malikfeels his story, “In the Ruins of Mohenjo-Daro,” is “steeped in Lovecraftian influences. Ancient cosmic warfare, blood libations, hints of a world misaligned and warped — even as it surrounds the characters in the story, and irrupts into their puny lives as they struggle to understand it, and through it, perhaps themselves . . . this all strikes me as the essence of Lovecraftian horror. I intentionally stayed away from any of the Cthulhu Mythos to avoid pastiche; there are plenty of myths and legends in Indo-Pakistan that I could explore and subvert.”

Malik is a Pakistani writer resident in Florida. He reads Sufi poetry, likes long walks, and occasionally strums naats on the guitar. His fiction has been nominated for the Nebula Award and won a Bram Stoker Award. His work has appeared in The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror , The Year’s Best YA Speculative Fiction , The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year , Year’s Best Weird Fiction , Tor.com , and The Apex Book of World SF among other venues.