Cthulhurotica (26 page)

I always have to stop and look at the sky over the University, at the lenticular shape torn in reality that hangs above it, pulsing black and empty over silent causeways and high over Administration, First and Second Science, and the Art Wing donated sometime in the past century by the Pickman family. Over trees that never infloresce or sprout leaves anymore, lawns that remain grey and tangled and desolate. The whole area is like this, most of Arkham proper and Innsmouth are walled off and patrolled by the military. Even some of the surrounding rural areas have been evacuated. Arkham itself has been a ghost town for the five years since the accident in the basement labs, that I was once supposed to be a part of.

There is an eclipse every day, here, when the sun passes behind this rip, and night falls for a brief time, fifteen, twenty minutes at most. We have not so far been able to record what happens in this shade; sending a person failed spectacularly the last time, and it seems that even electronic equipment can’t really handle it.

I try to be back at the van when this happens, a brief respite from the containment suit and the proximity display, my load of sensory and recording equipment. There’s time for lunch, maybe, and some nervous joking with the military guys who drive the truck full of expensive equipment there and back to a safe distance. I know that my presence makes them a little uneasy, especially after the first attempt to ask me out, when I told Dennis or Daniel or whoever-politely, mind you-that I wasn’t interested in men. They also don’t know what to make of me because I initially volunteered for this though I am getting quite a bit of hazard pay.

I don’t talk to them too often. Just enough to not make it worse for everyone.

I’m a little bit of a pariah at the lab at the other end of this, too. I’m
The Student
, the one who’d actually lived in the town and whose parents worked at this school and sent her there, the one who made it out alive and relatively whole, the one who wasn’t driven mad by the things in this desolate space, or at least not permanently and disablingly so. My chaperones simply think I am mad or odd, but the scientists are afraid. I can’t fathom why, and stopped trying a while ago.

“How’s it going out there, Cait?”

“No aberrant readings, yet. EM fields are the same as usual, maybe a little high, air pressure a little bit lower, but it looks like the weather might be planning something interesting to make up for how quiet everything else is. Out for now, Andy.” I squint up at the sky around the tear, and try to judge where the sun might be, behind building clouds. Usually the direction of light is enough, but today it is ambient, scattered by a Fresnel lens of stratus clouds stretching between horizons. The timer on my suit’s display reads a little before noon, and my estimate gives me maybe an hour or two before an enormous shadow, cast by nothing, by a
hole
, sweeps across the town, and I shiver at this thought. One of the readouts in my periphery jumps, settles, jumps again, as if in sympathy.

I can only guess at what it means; it all goes back to the van, and from there it will go to a laboratory not unlike the one where this all began, to that group of men and women whose lives have been consumed by esoteric equations and the behaviours of particles that had, up until now, been theoretical. Had things gone as normal, had I finished grad school and continued to points beyond, I might have been one of those researchers.

Or, I might not be here at all, had it not been for my alarm clock finally giving up the ghost the morning my lab assistantship was to begin. Still, this? This beats the assistantship, beats grad school and being felt up by professors and endless papers and revisions and criticisms, even on the most boring of these excursions.

I’m in the building, now, where there is more cover both for me and whatever else might be around. The bottom corner of my display shows, like a radar scan, the walls around me, as well as anything that might be behind or between those walls, and me, the dot in the centre. Anything too close or too large, and I am simply to run. I did some time in high school track, as well as college, and the habit has not lapsed too much. If I need it, and can still radio for it, the men in the van will cover my approach. They are well-armed and frighteningly good shots. I trust them, though I know their job is more to keep things from spreading past containment limits than to protect me. But the only thing that moves today are a few insects, barely enough to even show up on the readout. I mutter to myself, “Even the terrifying shit that lives here doesn’t like getting caught in the rain.”

“What?”

“Nothing. Thinking out loud. Which direction would you like me to go, today? It seems to be especially quiet.”

“Hrm. Where were you pointing that the one gauge was spiking, Cait?”

“The courtyard, I think. One direction is as good as any, right now. There isn’t a thing to orient to, readings-wise.” My path continues that way, stepping carefully around spilled books and bags, even before Andy can give me assent in the form of a noncommittal grunt. At least there are no bodies, here. Once it was deemed safe, at least for tentative study, the first task had been to collect remains for autopsy and eventual return to their families.

I had still been in the institution when that happened, though better off than some of the others who’d ended up there. I had dreams, still, of what I had seen pulling into my first day of work two hours late, but it was nowhere near as bad as it had been. A vast improvement on weeks of not-precisely nightmares, fragments of memory parading before my unconscious mind, ripping me from sleep repeatedly, waking to sweat-stained sheets and a nameless need that disturbed me far more than simple fear ever could. For months, even after being deemed fit to rejoin society, I didn’t sleep without pharmaceutical help, a parade of pills in soft, presumably soothing, shades of blue. Not until I signed up for this.

The quiet days are difficult; several hours of wandering will yield nothing, and the labcoats will likely act as if it were my fault I found nothing but dust and the same atmospheric or particle readings as anywhere else on this planet. I know now that there is a little part of me that wants to find something in here, to face something that those scientists never will. I might finally see something that the men in the truck wouldn’t come in here to save me from, wouldn’t look at except if they had to, and then only down the scope of their sniper rifles.

No, not just a part of me.

I saw something, whatever began all of this five years ago, and I want to see it again, to
know
that I saw something, like an addict wants more of whatever is the flame to their moth, like a stalker wants even the merest glimpse of the object of their obsession. I
need
to see it again, to know that I did not go mad over nothing, to find something more than what I could see and touch, to try and know the unknowable.

Rain begins to patter on the windows along the hall, and on the roof. This section of the university is only one floor aboveground, and several beneath, and the sound echoes through the empty spaces, making it seem even more lonely and filled with ghosts. I check my clock, and it’s not even twelve-thirty. There is still at least a half-hour until the sun reaches zenith at this time of year, and it only takes a couple of minutes to get back to the van.

Do I really want to go back?

The question never voiced, never even asked of myself until now, not consciously. I cannot even admit to myself for a few minutes that it crossed my mind; the first person who had done this job stayed through the small night and had to be retrieved after the video feed went berserk and his audio became incoherent screaming and deafening static, a white noise of such power that it nearly ruined everything in the van that could perceive it. It was played for me like a macabre version of those training videos for entry level service jobs, presumably to try and dissuade me from signing all of the forms to take the position.

When they retrieved him, he had gone the same route as many of the people from the day the sky opened, hovering somewhere between catatonia and mania, and now lay in a long-term cell at Arkham. I visited once, a month into assuming this position, driven to do so out of a weird conjunction of curiosity and a sense of duty borne of being his replacement, only to watch him cower in a corner in a straightjacket, gibbering something about the stars having teeth. I was told he was restrained after the first week passed and he had not slept, not even on enough morphine to drop a heavyweight boxer. That he had tried to claw out his own eyes, and that no one had seen him sleep in the months since.

I still wonder what he saw, that I did not.

Hanging slightly open, the door leading to the courtyard lets in a soft pillar of light, a few motes of dust suspended in it and drifting slowly. More join them as I approach. Mine are not the only prints on the ground here, nor are all of them human. There are hints of something ostensibly clawed, doglike prints that disappear abruptly near the wall, and a swath of absolutely smooth, clean floor that suggests something enormous and sinuous, at least as big around as I am tall. I take pictures of both, swab the imprints and carefully place each sample in its own container, and point my scanning equipment at the area, focusing on those spots. I try to ignore the question still insistent, unanswered, the pull of it burning and coiling around my brain, instead filling my head with idle chatter about why one needle jumps and skips, while another is pinned in the negative, and still another hovers near the red, something possibly verging on harmful, before I move on again.

Once outside, I look up, and all pretension evaporates in the presence of the anomaly. It is almost directly above me, and seems much larger than it should, even allowing for my own shift in perspective. This is the closest I have been to the epicentre, the courtyard with its once cheerful benches and paths all almost directly above the restricted labs in the basement and subbasement. The paths I have taken around the buildings for weeks, months, maybe years, had all circled back to here, to this.

My breath catches involuntarily before I can let it out again, and I cannot tell if I am polarized towards it or away, terror as well as something more singing along taut nerves. Instinct tells me that I should be nowhere near this thing, should be as far away as humanly possible, but it is beautiful, too. Like a pool of ink, that kind of luminous dark, framed by endless-seeming rainclouds scudding past. Almost perfectly round from this angle, there is a sense of surface tension to it, like the darkness, the
nothing
in it is pressing on the sky and threatening to rupture. I am transfixed, breathless, I am a needle seeking a very strange compass, a crystal glass resonant to this, and I have no idea how long I stand there.

I did not know how long I was out that first time, either. But I remember it now. I remember all of it, not just the teasing, shadowed fragments that dreams leave behind. I had just shut the car door, trying to balance the coffee that would be my only breakfast because I was running so late, and my notebooks, and locking the car door, when everything fell out from beneath me, A tearing and grinding sound, thick, like fabric being ripped away, filled all of my senses. It was louder than anything I had ever experienced, only not just
loud
. I could feel it on my skin, through the frame of me, taste the wrongness in the air as I watched the otherwise perfect spring sky above stretch and warp.

I couldn’t move then, either.

It had gone from a pulling, to a stain, to a hole opening like a lens, in that kind of smooth irising motion. I had squinted, against instinct and all better judgement, looking at something indistinct that rose like smoke to meet it, but thicker. It was the shadow being thrown by whatever was opening, but it was also solid, or approaching such. It coiled and writhed upwards, spreading, growing more opaque as it did so, and opened like a hunting sea creature. Within that-

“Cait! You need to get out of there. The umbra is approaching. It’s diffused by the clouds, but we don’t know if that matters, yet.” Andy’s voice breaks the spell for a moment, the signal growing rougher. I am still frozen to the spot, rabbit-in-headlights, girl too far gone in remembering.

When the seething mass opened, unfolded like a terrible flower, I remember falling over, scraping my palms and then my knees, as my mind was assaulted by too many streams of input to process at once. It was coiling tendrils and blackness that crawled like flame and a human figure, but of a substance like volcanic glass. It had no face, and its face was smooth, was nothing but teeth like a viperfish, and it was as flawlessly, inhumanly beautiful as an Egyptian sculpture of some ancient king. It was male and female and monstrous and breathtaking. It had risen until it was framed by the hole, the
gate,
like a reverse halo. Beyond, alien stars, a nebula or a galaxy perhaps, lined with rows and rows of teeth larger than any star, maybe even than entire solar systems.

And it had
turned to look at me
.

“Cait, can you hear me?”

I do not know why it had left me alive and sane, or mostly so. But I had not lied about not being interested in men. I wasn’t interested in women anymore, either, or anything descended from ape. The very thought seems pedestrian, even like lying to myself, blinding myself to the wider reality I had seen, to try to return to my old life. I want to love this madness, to lie down with monsters like Lilith did, and come out of the experience transfigured, more than myself, than human. To ride this beast, wrapped tight in its unearthly substance, and fuck reality itself.

I step out of the containment suit, and then my clothes and shoes, and I leave them in a neat pile inside the door so everything will remain intact for whoever takes my place, ignoring the cries I can still hear from the helmet’s radio. The rain is cold on my bare skin, and sharpens my senses as it runs down my back, drips off my fingers. Everything is thrown into sharp detail.