Paula Guran - The Mammoth Book of Cthulhu

Ada looks up to the vestibule, sees the old woman staring down at her from the door, like some creature requiring permission to leave. The woman presses a blackened palm against the glass of the door. More than anything Ada wants a needle for this compass, she assumes it’s Luke — how couldn’t it be? — but what comes will have to come from this center in which she’s standing.

She feels the answer pulling at her from the woods. Halfway along the tree line she sees an open notch of deeper shadow. He’s watching her from behind the low-hanging branch of a red maple. She goes to him, her true north. He fades back into the trees and she stops, waits. The opening looks natural, as if the forest gave itself an entrance. A sundial stands to the right, long-weathered marble, in a place where it could rarely feel the sun and its purpose. She drags her fingers around every corner, across the carved letters.

“ Horas non numero nisi serenas ,” she reads, remembers. And in a voice that sounds cracked to her, like Gram’s voice, “I do not count the hours when they are dark.” As a girl Ada checked the sundial every morning in the back yard, where the dawn first peeked over the Smoky Mountains at her little world. The slow swing of the blade of shadow, the way it changed its shape to a fan, the way it fell into everything else when night came. Sometimes Gram would whisper those words and Ada would think to herself that time had gone someplace where it could never find its way back to her. She’d be stuck there, forever guarded.

Looking at the inscription now, she senses that Gram might have had the translation a touch wrong, but the sentiment feels true as ever. Has this sundial always been here, or is it another sign given by Luke? She turns back to the church, the windows now filled with watchers. Two shapes crouch on the roof peak, steeples regarding her. Back to the inscrutable trees and their velvet dark, she can’t step anywhere but inside charge.

A path opens before her. There’s the shush of water somewhere close, and before long she begins to hear movement in the trees on either side of her, the shuffle and crack of leaves.

“We’ve looked for you,” someone says from her right, and overlapping from the left is another voice, a lower register, “Many have come far for you.”

Staggering, words stepping on words all around her:

“We settled here for you—”

“The light of stairs—”

“Between stars—”

“Through cracks—”

“Planted our roots for you—”

“You’re glad you’ve found us—”

Ada walks faster, calling Luke’s name and getting the same nothing back she’s gotten for so long now. But the voices withdraw, or were never there.

A clearing spreads out in the near distance, one she saw lit with flashes not two hours ago on her computer screen. No figure stands in wait and now even the light of the incomplete moon is hidden from her. The obscured mountains give everything an extra weight. And the trees open around her, uncurtaining the hole in the ground, a low and devastating sweep of strings comes from it, two violins again, one cello again. It’s nothing and everything like music. It’s the most dreadful, pristine thing she’s ever heard. The earth falls asleep in its wake, an absence of sound.

She steps forward, one of her shoes gone missing somehow, and peers over the lip of the pit, ten, a dozen feet down. The mouth of it stretches twice as long across. Three figures sit inside, draped in ragged black sheets, placing their instruments aside. The ground is shifting around them, until she realizes the carpet of leaves is alive with moths. They’ve eaten holes in the sheets. Ada looks for the mannequin, trying to complete the picture, but doesn’t see it.

“And she comes,” one of them says, the tallest, and all three chuckle. It’s a woman’s voice, but also the sexless whisper from the film. There’s the lightest modulation. “We’ve looked for you.”

“Where’s my husband?” Ada says, feeling the air pull at the hairs on her arms, smelling its sharp tang of rain on hot asphalt.

The first draped figure — it’s Emma, she thinks, even taller now, and how did she make it through the woods ahead of her? — cocks its head, says, “Ada, your marriage cannot concern us, but I understand. I remember the sentiment. He is close, so don’t fear. He’s arranged for you to be with us, as bitter as his work has become. But he’s been kept safe, as a gift.”

“What do you want?” Ada asks, but she finds there are not many questions. None burns in her with a particular heat. She watches the moths rise in brief, spiraling clouds and settle again on the leaves around these — cultists, she supposes that’s the word — and catches herself squeezing the neck of her viola, wanting, almost, to play it. “Is your name Emma?”

“It is a name. Emma. And yet we have no name. This we’ve dug is a bowl, you can see,” she says, that flat voice holding the edges of a vibration. The head tilted toward the left shoulder. “This land is a bowl, rimmed by its mountains, and they are old mountains. We are a bowl. So are you , Ada, a bell that’s waited long to be struck. It’s that tone you will wrap with ours. Bowls are for filling. You’ve known this, but now you can hear it.”

“I don’t know any of this. Or any of you. I only saw your name written on something.”

“Bowls,” the one to her left says, in a deeper but more feminine range, “it’s a matter of greater acoustics.”

“Resonance,” the third whispers.

Ada breathes out. “A door.”

“Yes,” Emma says, “but not in a way that will open your Earth.” She sighs, and there’s a thread of static in it. “It’s a pretty thought, isn’t it, our beloveds dreaming long under these perfect mountains, rising up from the roots of them. But no, they’re coming from older doors, through cracks in spectrums you can’t imagine. Their light swallows itself, and us into their embrace. The light we’re all seeking, even the insects are drawn to it.” Her hands creep out from under the sheet and brush across the moths. Dust coats fingers that have too many knuckles. “The three of us were found, like you have been.”

“Was that you playing in the church?”

“By some measures, yes. By others, they are our personal acolytes, our skins. A wardrobe for when we want to look, shall we say, nice. You’ll have your own very soon. But what you heard them play is very little to do with us. We are mostly silence, as you heard in the footage we made for you. We, and only we, here, have found the right note. The rest is only artifice. No name wears us, but there is a symbol, like a rune, but it’s a notation more arcane. We’ve spent lifetimes learning it. Turning it to sound. We first sequenced its true threads in a machine, in 1968, but it seems to require the intricacies of a human wrist, a human fallacy, perhaps. And since then we’ve looked for the last thread. Before, only a man named Erich Zann had come close, but he bent his studies to a different resolve. We first heard the true thread, the seed of it, when you were a child crying yourself to sleep, still smelling of your parents’ blood. Such a pure frequency, we rejoiced. And when it was cultivated, we rejoiced. You, Ada, you could even hum it over ours.”

The other two figures speak a word, a monosyllabic incantation. Their voices are perfect mirror images of one another, coupling, and the sound crusts in Ada’s ears, wet and painful.

“The name of the beloveds,” Emma says. “The very fact you can hear it means, oh, Ada, such great things. You’ll find it interesting that if one could sand offall its burrs and tongues, it might translate, poorly, as ‘grandmothers.’ Over the river and through the woods.”