Paula Guran - The Mammoth Book of Cthulhu

He was afraid and clutched his cousin tight, embracing her. She’d been afraid of the dark, spiders, large dogs. She’d been afraid of so many things when they were children, and now it was he who was terrified.

There came the loud noise of water as it splashed down, the aqueous “wall” crumbling, stray droplets whipping their bodies until the cenote was still and quiet once again.

Eduardo swallowed and looked at the others, looked down at his cousin who was still holding him.

Zacarias was gone.

By the time they exited the cave it had begun to rain.

The night was cool with the refreshing rain, but even though the heat had dissipated he could not sleep. He opened the door to Imelda’s room a little after midnight. She was in bed, but her eyes were open. She did not seem surprised to see him there. He made his way slowly towards the bed, sitting at the edge of it and she sat up, her pale nightgown catching the light of the moon.

“Maybe it’s this place that makes us so,” he said. “Maybe if we went away we might be different.”

He tried to picture her in the city, wearing a colorful mini-skirt and high boots, with eyeliner and a martini in her hand. They could be normal. Lead normal lives. He could marry Natalia. Imelda could find some nice boy to care about.

But he thought of the dream he’d had, the horrid pale baby in his arms, and felt his mouth go dry.

“We wouldn’t.”

“How do you know?” he asked, exasperated. “You’ve never gone anywhere.”

If only she’d give him some reassurance, if only she’d tell him they could escape . . . oh, he’d believe her. He would. He wanted to believe it. If only.

“I can’t stay here,” he said. “It’s like a museum. It’s a relic.”

“Eduardo, I know the stories, I know the past,” she whispered, tossing the covers away and moving toward him upon the bed. “But you understand the present. They sent you to the city for that reason. I can help you and you can help me. Don’t you see? We can’t have a future without you.”

“What future?” he said. “That . . . this . . . is not a future.”

She held his face between her hands, forcing him to look at her.

“Do you remember, what grandmother told us? That under the sea there is a phosphorescent palace of many terraces, with gardens of pale corals. There swim those that will never die, in wonder and glory. Forever.”

Her fingers touched his brow.

He didn’t know if he wanted forever.

“If you won’t do it for the family, do it for me. Stay. I’ve been so lonely.”

She kissed his cheek, then the corner of his mouth, before he shook his head and retreated from the bed.

He could feel it, beneath his skin . . . the thread that marked them as the same, that bound them together. But he could not picture it. His life within these walls. His body, deep, deep, within the endless waters.

She pressed a palm against her mouth and her eyes were filled with tears. He didn’t want to make her cry.

“Don’t say goodbye when you leave,” she said.

Her voice cracked at the last word, water breaking against the rocks. He could not bear her grief and rushed out of the room without glancing back.

Eduardo takes a long shower in the morning and shaves slowly, pausing to stare at his face in the cloudy mirror. He packs, then unpacks, sits at the edge of his bed staring at the wallpaper with its blue and green scallops.

He dresses in one of his loud shirts with its bright patterns, and goes in search of Mario. The boy is in the kitchen, drinking his coffee. He looks up at Eduardo and nods his head in greeting.

This is some relative of his, some bastard Marin and Eduardo stares long and hard, trying to detect something else in his features. The covert shadow they both share. But he sees nothing amiss. Perhaps Mario does not carry their old taint, he will not go through the change like the pureblooded Marins do.

It might be the same for Eduardo. This affliction might skip him.

He’ll feel better as soon as he boards the train. Once the wheels are turning he’ll remember the city, his apartment, Natalia’s voice. And the memories will stir him forward, back to a land of concrete and stone where neither water nor salt hold court.

If he boards the train.

“Mario, I need you to prepare the car,” he says.

“Where are we going?”

“You’re going to He’la’, to post a couple of letters for me.”

He hands Mario the envelopes and goes outside the house, walking until he is at a good distance, able to observe the whole building. Birds cry in the trees, indifferent to his turmoil, as he slides his hands in his pockets and walks towards the cenote.

He knows she’s swimming there even before he glimpses her in the water. It’s easy to find her — as if he were looking for treasure upon a map, dashed lines clearly directing pirates to the prize.

He falters only for a moment when he reaches the edge of the cenote, like a man consulting a wind rose, but she raises her head then, sees him, and he takes a deep breath and ventures in.

She’s naked and he feels nervous once he reaches her, like a groom on his wedding night, and he supposes maybe that is the right emotion. This is their marriage.

He remembers the tiny, pale fish swimming in the underground pools of water and it scares him. Such depths and darkness.

He lets her fingers run across his skin and she kisses him, wrapping her arms around his neck. His mouth opens under hers.

In Mayan there is no word for “yes,” and he’s always thought it such a meaningless set of letters, so he spells his answer with his body.

The water is blue and perfect and cool. She pulls him down, into the depths of the cenote and he clasps her hand, follows her, holding his breath like they did when they were children, the jungle whispering secrets to the lovers.

“Much has been said about H. P. Lovecraft’s regrettable prejudices,” notes Michael Wehunt. “I’m not the first to find it rewarding to invert that intolerance by structuring a story around a protagonist with whom Lovecraft would have never engaged — in this case, a black female who learns to be strong in the face of long odds. What would a character with the life Ada has endured do in a cosmic horror scenario, when the stars are right and there is a Door? This story, for me, became all the more Lovecraftian through the very growth of Ada, using HPL’s influence in brighter ways, even in the darkness. Naturally, ‘The Music of Erich Zann’ informed this story, but here the music was to play a different role.”

Wehunt spends his time in the lost city of Atlanta. His fiction has appeared in such publications as Cemetery Dance , Shadows & Tall Trees , Unlikely Story , and Aickman’s Heirs , among others.

—We’ve come far.

—Through cracks.

—You could hum the last thread with ours.

—We’ve looked for you.

Whispering.

Ada has these thoughts, or they have her, as the window latch closes somewhere to her right. She turns to look but can’t see. Coming back to herself in darkness, she feels a crawling dread until she realizes the breath spreading hot across her face is her own, and tugs the sheet off. It puddles on the floor, a grayed moth-eaten black thing that’s not hers.

The door to Luke’s office is open before her. There’s a prickle along her arms, but from what she doesn’t know. The sense of a camera, a watcher, a moment it isn’t time to have. Or — something. Gone now.

She’s had some bad moments. He has to come back: this is what she remembers murmuring through the house over and over. She can hardly touch the bow to her viola since he left. The weeping of the strings in all this empty space is just too much.