Paula Guran - The Mammoth Book of Cthulhu

Grandmothers. Ada feels no surprise, only the old confused warmth. She hears the rustle of leaves, amplified in her pressurized ears, and Luke is here at last, just inside the trees, hiding behind his best camera. It’s pointed at her, and she remembers how long he saved up to buy it. Across his shoulder is a black sheet. She recognizes it as hers, somehow, he must have gotten it from her car. Even behind the camera he’s still handsome, though he’s all sagging skin and bones, he’s lost so much weight. His face is ravaged with beard stubble.

“I’m sorry, Ada.” He crosses to her, stands there first-date nervous. “I knew you weren’t strong enough to come here unless you thought I was in trouble. So they felt you’d respond to film as a way to prepare you.” He lowers the camera to smile at her.

“Strong enough? You chose all this over me,” she says, and the dam’s barely holding now, what’s behind it is surprising her. “You chose this over starting a family. This is the past year? Two years, how many years? This is you hitting me? This is what we were?” Shouting — has she ever shouted at anything? — and somewhere the last bird in the forest screams back and bursts into a ruffled flight.

“Please don’t — at first I couldn’t stand it, that they wanted you. I’m just the glorified cameraman, your — acolyte. I should have accepted it was about you. I should have made our life about you all along.” He’s crying, she hasn’t seen him cry since his father died. “But I’m trying to get it now, it’s only you. You have such an honor. And there can still be an us, tell them that.”

She’s never wanted anything but him, almost from the moment she first found the idea of what wanting could do. Through these trees sits the old place, but she only found him here, in this older place. Gram always said she would do great things, but it’s not Gram’s voice that’s speaking to her now. Gram’s voice never let her be. This isn’t a voice at all, it’s something more atavistic and naked, tipping its head back to where the moon appears in its frame of treetops, waiting for a god to finish it. This is strength, this is what strength is.

“I came here to help you,” she tells him. In the video, this is the part where she drapes the black sheet over herself like some widow’s veil, it’s when she goes to him. What is there to mourn, now? “I wanted to be strong for you, to be not like Ada for you. That was stupid. I’ll choose what you chose, but for my music. For me ,” she adds, and his eyes get wide, “not for you, and not for us .” She snatches her sheet from his shoulder, turns away from her name on his lips. She walks over to the hole and drops the sheet on the ground.

Below, the three figures pull theirs off in harmony, revealing thin, over-jointed bodies. Bleached white and hairless, heavily endowed, composed of blunt hominid angles. Their thin tongues are almost translucent. Emma’s farthest along in this anthropomorphosis, the shape of her skull in flower, the bones petaling out around the mouth. The black symbol curves up around the heave of her right breast. A beauty that could be appreciated, if given an age. Or by a grandmother, Ada thinks.

From behind comes the sound of Luke’s sobs, and another sound, like the interminable ending of a deep kiss, but she doesn’t turn. Her eyes crawl over Emma’s body, all the ripe firmness.

“You’ve grown these last days,” Emma says, “found your own mettle. We are proud. It gives our gift to you a different flavor, perhaps. Look,” and her elongated finger points.

Ada glances back now, reluctantly, to see her husband removing his skin, a costume two sizes too large. Under it there’s little blood, little muscle, fewer tendons than seems possible. He’s a weak serpent of a thing, young and gasping at the air, folding himself over his arm like a coat.

“He is your own acolyte,” Emma says. “A true one. He will be allowed to evolve into a lower form of us.”

“He is yours to wear,” the second says.

“When we visit here,” the third says.

“You always wanted him closer,” and Emma laughs.

Ada sees faces appear in the trees, at a discreet distance, most human and lit with expectance, a few sunken and bled white. Ada turns back to the hole. Now the cello is squeezed between Emma’s powerful, spindled thighs. The violins are seated under those strange chins. The three of them play, the three tones uncoil, neither major nor minor, cold nor warmth, and the ground absorbs a thick, silent thunder. The sky flashes a negative of itself, it’s filled with vast things, endless drifting strands and appendages. Arriving, converging, dwarfing the Appalachians in every direction. Immense limbs like cities, a pulsing architecture, reach down and reduce the Earth’s majesty. Ropes of sinew orbited by wan stars. The sky goes moonlit again and they’re gone. Ada feels it: that note, the one that has built in her.

The sky burns that non-white a second time, the filaments of gods hanging down from wherever their great eyes blink and gaze. She feels those eyes roll downward, each wet socket a galaxy, tipping toward her, her . Dark again, absence again, with them just behind it. They wait for the sky to stay on.

Ada lowers herself to all fours and climbs down into the hole. The finished quartet doesn’t commune. The three, waiting for her, begin threading their frequencies into a cord. She realizes she’s left the viola above her, the ghost of her mother still in its bones somewhere, and she smiles. She decides to sing instead. She cracks opens her mouth.

The late Michael SheaMichael Shea invented a character, “Cannyharme,” whose genesis lay in Lovecraft’s story “The Hound.” “The Hound” involves the exhumation of a ghoul who had lain buried five hundred years in a Dutch churchyard. An amulet — found in surprisingly good condition — is stolen from the skeletal remains as they hear the “baying of some gigantic hound” in the distance. The upper-class grave robbers return to England, but very bad things — accompanied by the hound’s baying — happen. It is decided the strange occurrences are connected to the amulet, and the narrator returns to Holland intending to return it to the tomb. The amulet is stolen, but he re-excavates the grave anyway, only to discover the skeleton “not clean and placid as we had seen it [before], but covered with caked blood and shreds of alien flesh and hair, and leering sentiently at me with phosphorescent sockets and sharp ensanguined fangs yawning twistedly in mockery of my inevitable doom. And when it gave from those grinning jaws a deep, sardonic bay as of some gigantic hound, and I saw that it held in its gory, filthy claw the lost and fateful amulet of green jade.”

In the short poetic tale here, you can gather much about the nature of Cannyharme, but the fact he is writing to Edgar Allan Poe, dead at least a century before this correspondence is supposedly penned, has another significance. Lovecraft saw Poe as his major influence, his “God of Fiction.” “The Hound” is an attempt to emulate Poe, but in retrospect, HPL felt his story was “a piece of junk.” Author Lin Carter later agreed, stating it was “slavishly Poe-esque in style” and “a minor little tale. Steven J. Mariconda, although acknowledging HPL’s debt to Poe, sees the story as “written in a zestful, almost baroque style which is very entertaining.”

Michael Shea first wrote sword-and-sorcery and supernatural/extraterrestrial horror, primarily in the novella form (collected in Polyphemus and The Autopsy and Other Tales ). In the last decade or so he added homages to H. P. Lovecraft to his novella work (as in collection Copping Squid .) His novel Nifft the Lean won a World Fantasy Award, as did novella “The Growlimb.” His most recent novels are dark, satirical thrillers The Extra and Assault on Sunrise . Shea passed away on 16 February 2014.