Paula Guran - The Mammoth Book of Cthulhu

As Noor watched, Tabinda lowered her head, sniffed the bricks stained with Noor’s menstrual blood, and began to lap at them.

Noor turned and scuttled up the rest of the stairs. Pain chewed her ribs and back and hips, but she leapt blindly, not caring if she broke every bone in her body. Tabinda’s smell behind her was acrid and meaty. It rushed at Noor. Noor vaulted across the last step and sprang toward the iron door.

Outside, the fog was a solid wall. Noor slammed through it, running — blind and barefoot — using the brooding stupa as her only directional marker. Chips of glass and sharp pebbles stung her soles. Branches and what felt like bird bones crunched. Something bellowed behind her. A loud animal grunt, then a pause. Noor clapped a hand over her mouth and kept running. She was wet and cold and trembling. Where was the fucking chopper? The night sky was silent. Her shalwar was soaked. She expected to crash face first into a wall any moment now. Instead, the sounds of the creature faded behind her. Was it licking her blood trail at every step?

Noor fled, weeping. The sharp bites of the alley became hard ground. The fog thinned, showing her the school bus sprawled in the lot like a dead animal. She bounded toward it before remembering she didn’t have the keys.

Noor wanted to scream, to slap her breasts, and fall down, crying. She fought the impulse. Behind her the city was wailing. An earsplitting surreal ululation that bounced from wall to wall, door to door, and razored through her head. Lights bobbed in the corner of her eye. She sped past the vehicle, heading toward the road winding out of the ruins, spraying up dirt behind her.

The fog thickened again. Icy air knifed in and out of her lungs. When the sounds of the ruins died, she slowed to a trot. She was shaking all over and crying. Hot tears on frosted cheeks. Her feet were slippery with blood and stung in a hundred places. She had no idea where she was and the moon was dead somewhere. She was plodding through squelching mud now. Another step and her foot sank ankle deep. The wind whistled and picked up. Something rattled. She flinched from the sound. Pattering of feet or clomping of hooves? Terror washed over her. She yanked her foot out, lunged, and landed in gelid water. Something slithered over her foot. A shower of water plumed over her when she struggled upright, tripped, and nearly fell again.

A misshapen root wide as her arm. She was at the riverbank. Had she once thought its smell rotten? It was mossy and sweet. The Sind River gurgled and babbled. Malformed cypress knees poking out of the fog like tombstones. Ghost acacia and lilacs swayed above her, their cocooned branches rustling. Glinting eyes speckled the webs. They undulated and disappeared as she splashed through the tree line. The fog curtain was so dense now she could wrap it around herself and disappear forever.

A figure bobbed ahead in the trees. A flash of light that ignited the mist briefly and was gone. Noor’s eyes widened. Her heart lurched and began to thunder in her temples. Part of her wanted to turn and bolt, but what if it was the army come to find them? With utmost care she lifted the cuffs of her shalwar and tiptoed through the water. Curls of dark moss like a woman’s hair floated between her legs which gleamed with congealed blood. The cypress knees were more numerous here. They protruded in various geometric shapes.

One was almost like a little stool.

Her sight rippled, but not before she saw the figure crouching in the foliage. It was very tall and angular and seemed to perch on or by a poplar trunk. It wore something around its head, which could have been a headdress or a shawl.

Hamid! The bus driver. It had to be him. Dear God, let it be him. Noor choked back a sob and sloshed through mist and river water toward the silent figure riding the trees.

Silvia Moreno-Garciawrote “Legacy of Salt” around the time she was reading a lot of philosophy of biology materials and also a Darwin biography as part of her Master’s degree studies. “Some of the scientific issues I was exploring collided with this story. I have always found ‘The Shadow Over Innsmouth’ to be quite fascinating since it seems to dip its toes into the notion of repulsion/attraction. Is it such a bad thing to swim eternally in underwater palaces? I kind of like the idea. The Yucatán peninsula is definitely nothing like New England but the numerous markers for archeological sites somewhat reminded me of the notion of the past creeping upon the present, which occurs in some of Lovecraft’s fiction.” The story also features a family — as with the Marshes of Innsmouth — who has an odd heritage.

Moreno-Garcia is the author of Signal to Noise , a novel about music, magic, and Mexico City. Her first collection, This Strange Way of Dying was a finalist for The Sunburst Award for Excellence in Canadian Literature of the Fantastic. Her stories have also been collected in Love & Other Poisons . She has edited the anthologies She Walks in Shadows , Dead North, and Fractured: Tales of the Canadian Post-Apocalypse .

The journey to He’la’ was uneventful. He arrived on time, the noon heat greeting him like an old lover. The train platform was filled with vendors hawking their wares. Eduardo ignored them and looked for their chauffeur, but it was a young fellow he did not know who greeted him. The driver had a bit of the Marin look — the hooded eyes, fleshy lips — and Eduardo wondered if he was one of the family’s by-blows. It would not be uncommon.

He slid into the car. The Lincoln Phaeton had been a beauty when his uncle had it imported from the States, but that was more than forty years ago, in 1923. Time had chipped its paint, dented it a bit, and now it looked more an oddity than a sensation.

It took an hour to drive from He’la’ to the hacienda and with each minute the terrain grew more rugged, the towns smaller, until only old Mayan ruins greeted him from the side of the road, an ancient stone frog, associated with the rain god Chaac, staring blindly at Eduardo as they plunged down a hill. A few minutes later they reached the gates of the white hacienda. Before the Revolution it had produced henequen, but now the machine house lay quiet.

It looked the same since Eduardo had left, when he was twelve, to study at a boy’s school in Mexico City. He could glimpse the dirt road that led behind the house, towards the small cenote of perfect blue waters where he swam as a child. There were several waterholes near their home — they dotted all of the peninsula.

A little girl in a faded pink dress sat in front of the house. He wondered if she was a servant or one of his younger cousins, but she scrambled inside before he could introduce himself.

“They told me to bring you to the Blue Room as soon as you arrived,” the driver said.

“Very well,” he replied, though he had been hoping he could shower and change his clothes before meeting the family.

He followed the driver to the main living room — which still had its blue velvet curtains and heavy wooden furniture, the portrait of grandfather Ludovico with his thick moustache dominating the room. Beneath the portrait was the old armchair that uncle Zacarias preferred. But uncle Zacarias was not in his usual place, smoking his pipe. Instead it was a young woman in a dress of antique lace who rose to meet him.

He did not recognize her, though she was a Marin. She had the heavy-lidded eyes fringed with thick lashes and long black hair that curled past her shoulders. Her neck was long and elegant and her hands, as she extended one towards him in greeting, were delicately formed. Despite her anachronistic dress and hairdo she was very beautiful.