The Madness of Cthulhu Anthology (Volume One): 1 (21 page)

That such a cleansing was possible would never have occurred to Blythe. Maybe she was a descendant of the Sky People.

She didn’t waste much time wondering about that. She just did her job analyzing, annotating, and archiving the data given her. Interacting only as much as she had to with human or Droyan, she’d been starting to relax. At moments she’d thought she might almost be feeling at home.

Then the music had invaded her. Off guard in this music-free place, she hadn’t heard it coming. One morning on a mapping trek through the labyrinthine passages underneath the cliffs, staying well behind the others so their vapid chatter wouldn’t interfere with her instruments, she’d become aware of sounds she could only label as music—complicated, rhythmic, irritating. It had seemed to be exuding from the interior surfaces of the tunnel, the rocks and water, the cracks and stalactites and stalagmites.

No one else had reacted. Finally Blythe had been forced to inquire if anyone else was hearing it. No one was.

Surely she was the most inhospitable of hosts, so it seemed to her there must be some intentionality about it, some purpose, if only to be cruel. The itching response had soon developed, and her need to root it out. By now, she found herself in a bizarre sort of mortal danger from it.

Maheen was still watching the decoder. “Things are looking calmer.”

“Yeah. Time to go.” Blythe moved against the restraints again, less frantically but with no less determination.

“Are you certain, Blythe? Sometimes there has been recurrence—”

She was by no means certain, but she said she was.

“I must examine—” Palpating Blythe’s scalp, scanning her skin under the disheveled uniform, Maheen apparently found no new wounds. Blythe hadn’t thought she’d hurt herself this time, but sometimes she wasn’t aware of it until later. Maheen’s fingers paused at the deepest gouge on Blythe’s throat, which burned to the touch but had begun to heal. Blythe forced herself not to jerk away or slap Mheen’s hand aside. Neither of them commented on it.

Blythe left the lab while Maheen was still recording and Hry was still scratching in his frivolous way. As she stepped outside, where late-afternoon shadows curtained the landscape and the cliffs towered in the low light, it was easy to understand how this place had stayed secret for so long, even to imagine that it was not now being contaminated by the outside world of which she herself was a scout.

Shaky, hungry, exhausted, head and throat hurting, Blythe headed back to her quarters through the rapid mountain twilight.

She detected no music inside her now, and no itch, but she knew she was moving through poison. The music was coming from the site itself. She could feel it crawling down from the night sky, founting up from the river. Maybe it had lain dormant these five or ten thousand years, waiting for her. Just thinking about it made the itch stir.

She clenched her fists and pressed her arms over them. She lost the familiar path and didn’t know where she was for a while. The trail roughened and sharply descended. Her feet scrabbled and her balance was uncertain. The density of the ambient energy increased as something solid rose on either side of her—rock, rock embedded with music. Without stopping she stepped sideways and leaned so that her shoulder and flank scraped along the rough wall, assuaging the itch nearest the surface but exacerbating its more profound layers. Then she stumbled into an open space and recognized it as the rock field where insubstantial legend suggested the Sky People had burned and buried and sacrificed. She was digging at her throat.

In the long dark mountain-bound space between sunset and moonrise, she didn’t know Hry was there until the humming was interrupted by “What is that?” and then resumed. Her throat was bleeding. Hry was humming. Hry was making music.

“Music!” The itch spurted blood but didn’t ease.

Hry approximated the word “music” and hummed.

“Stop!” Hry knew the word but maybe didn’t associate it with the sound he was creating or channeling, or maybe his pleasure was more compelling than her pain. He didn’t stop. Something like a chant was exuding from him now, between his bulbous lips or through his pores. The itch was beyond her reach. She had to reach it. She drove her fingers into the wound in her neck. Then Hry’s music dimmed.

Later Maheen told her, “You nicked the carotid artery. I would not have thought it possible to do that to oneself.”

Though the sounds Blythe made in an attempt to ask about extent of damage and prognosis only approximated language, Maheen answered, “We have done our best with the tools we have and are cautiously hopeful, if you do not injure yourself again. You must stop this, Blythe. It has gone too far.”

“Itch,” Blythe rasped. “Itch. Itch!”

Maheen leaned close to whisper, “Did you tell him about music? He knows about music.”

Blythe tried to say, “He already knew.”

During her recuperation, Hry was a frequent visitor to the clinic. He might have been helping to take care of her. In and out of consciousness, she was at the mercy of the music that came with him, humming and tapping and whistling and jangling and dancing. No one else seemed aware of it. She itched. She’d wake up to find herself scratching, or restrained. She’d order him out and he would leave, but then he’d be back in a cloud of music. “Keep him away from me!”

Now the music had gone too far, the itch too wide and wild and deep. Even her wails sounded like music. Even her breathing itched, and her thoughts. It hardly seemed possible that the images riffing through the room from her decoder screen could be generated by a human brain.

“Let it go, Blythe.” Maheen came every day to download the data. Blythe wondered who was analyzing and recording, what would be lost and forgotten. “Let them give you something to ease you. You have done enough.”

Instead, she disconnected herself from the tubes, meters, and decoder and stumbled out into the midday. Her feet two-stepped and waltzed. Her throat buzzed with unorganized song. Her hands scratched, damp at her scalp, clumps of hair like a trail of eighth-notes.

The whole place might have been a cave. The cliffs narrowed bright sky and ground, focused and guided the invasion. The whole place might have been music. Even her moans and curses were musical, even the sounds inside her head from her frantic scratching at her skull. The whole place might have been itch.

Hry was beside her, touching her in the silent Droyan greeting. Denying her human instinct to fight or flee, she kept moving to the agonizing and useless scat of both hands digging at pocked planes of her scalp.

Hry’s soprano fluted, “What
is
that?”

“Music,” she cried. “Music, music.” Naming it called it out. Her fingertips were sticky and her hair matted. She bowed and pirouetted. “Music music music.”

The name of it didn’t seem to be what Hry was after. His alto crooned, “Music,” but then, “What is
that
?”

“Itch!”

He scratched himself in syncopation and echoed, “Itch,” but then in booming growling bass repeated, “
What
is that? What is
that
?” as her fingers broke through a layer and then another near her right temple where there was a gap in the bone.

Hry was pressing against her, veering her onto rougher ground. Blythe knew this was not aggression. In this hermetic culture, where aggression would have been disastrous, spoken language had evolved nearly as free of words for force as for music, body language persuasive and suggestive rather than hostile. All she would have had to do was pause, or angle in another direction, and he’d probably have acquiesced or gone on his way. But what was the point?

They were all but underground. Her feet were wet with oozing music. The substance on her fingers didn’t feel or smell like blood, and in the indirect moonlight it didn’t look red. The hole in her scalp seemed to be deeper than thin scalp. She tried to reach the itch inside.

Horns played, strings, plinking instruments; Blythe had never been able to tell one from another. Drums. Voices made noise and other voices made noise. Were Droyans down here, singing and playing music? Some sort of secret society? She saw no one, no identifiable source except the hidden place itself inside the hidden place. More and more music stored for millennia deeper and deeper underground.

Itch.

Hry burst into exuberant, worshipful music.

Blythe drove her fingers into her brain.

“L
AST NIGHT,
I
HEARD IT. I HEARD A SHARP SCREAM—AND THEN
the moaning sound that the engineers reported when the
Guinevere
was at the shipyard!”

The young woman speaking leaned forward across the cocktail table where she sat in the lounge of the historic mystery ship. Her name was Devon Adair; she was American, and simply beautiful. Finn McCormick had barely had a chance to talk with her as yet—this was just their second night aboard the ship. Her eyes were as blue as a summer sky in Montana, and her hair was nearly jet black. At about five-seven, she was slim yet shapely, filled with energy and had a smile for anyone she met.

“Yes!” the man sitting opposite from her in the ship’s promenade lounge said, leaning forward with excitement as well. He was Michael Corona, and, apparently, her longtime friend and associate. “I heard it, too. I was half asleep and I thought I was imagining things. But I heard it—oh, the moaning! It was tragic—and so clear. Just wonderful.”

Tragically wonderful?
Finn thought.

Devon sat with her own group—the
Ghosties
—as Finn’s fellows referred to them.

And, oddly enough, the two small groups of passengers had arrived in the lounge to await the dinner hour at about the same time, after a day of roaming the ship—or the Promenade Deck, the only one allowed to them—individually, in pairs or smaller groups.

They had, however, gathered at separate tables.

There were no bartenders in the lounge. The only staff members aboard, other than those needed to manage the great ship on which they sailed, were two stewards and a kitchen staff of three. And their paths hadn’t crossed with any of the staff since lunchtime. They’d known this was the way it would be, of course. Matt Barringer, the attorney for the owners, had explained the entire set-up to all of them at his London offices. Discovered by British researchers, the ship been brought in to London where basic work had been done on her that would allow engineering experts to deem her seaworthy. There, she’d been checked from stem to stern to determine her condition, which had proven to be remarkably good. But after months of legal wrangling, it had been determined that she still belonged to the East-West Luxury Sail company, now called Sun-Moon Vacations.

The CEO of Sun-Moon Vacations was apparently something of a romantic—or something of a shrewd businessman—or both. Because of the strange circumstances of her disappearance, he had determined that the ship would sail the Atlantic with “researchers” aboard. The ship would find a permanent dock at the Port of Miami where, Finn was sure, the company planned to make a great deal of money on her, opening her as a hotel and a tourist attraction.

Thus the Ghosties and the scientists had been called in. According to Barringer, the attorney, the CEO and the board were interested in what each group had to say about the voyage across the Atlantic—even if it was entirely uneventful, which, he said, he rather suspected that it would be.

Maybe not. With the Ghosties on board, and the end result that the ship would be a tourist attraction, there was bound to be some drama.

“I heard the cries—I know I heard them,” Devon said with conviction. “And though we’ve set up some cameras and recorders on the ship, tonight, before I go to bed, I’m going to set up a recorder in my room. I didn’t
see
anything—I haven’t seen anything unusual as of yet. But I heard those sounds.”

She’d heard the squeaks and groans of the old ship passing through the North Atlantic at night
, Finn thought. But he didn’t rise to argue with anyone in her group.

There were four in Devon Adair’s group. Four Ghosties. They were Devon Adair, Michael Corona, Hampton Jones, and Brigitte Sloan. They were formally and legally—Finn understood that they were incorporated—known as the Mystic City Ghost Trackers. Finn had been told that Michael Corona, who started the group, was from Mystic, Connecticut.

Corona was thirtyish, tall, dark, and handsome. Brigitte Sloan was very pretty, too—
Top Model
pretty. Only Hampton Jones had a studious look about him. In fact, he could have been at the top of the pile when it came to looking like a nerd—which meant he should have been part of Finn’s group.

The members of Finn’s group were the scientists and intellectuals. Finn was an anthropologist; Marnie Silver, forty-three and dedicated, was a physicist; Anita Clare was a biologist; Granger Whitby, married, balding, and a close second to the character ‘Beeker’ from the Muppet crew, was a historian; and Suzie Brandt, pretty, fit, and sweet, was a marine biologist.

The new owners of the
Guinevere
wanted to cover a number of bases as they brought the great ship to her new dock, though Suzie really wondered why she’d been called. “What creatures I’ll discover while decks up on an ocean liner, I have no idea.” But the concept of being part of the historic voyage had been great—whether she’d be useful in any way or not.

While they’d made a big point of bringing on scientists, the owners really wanted the paranormal crew, Finn was convinced. No matter what Barringer had said, because of course, the owners
wanted
the ship to be haunted. The more haunted the ship, the better the tourist trade. Or so they believed.

“Sad, so sad, really,” Anita said. She was sitting near Finn and watching the Ghosties. “Because science has yet to understand a physical situation, they must make it paranormal.”

Anita reminded Finn of a fox terrier. She was slim and hyper. She might have been an attractive woman herself if she weren’t in perpetual motion. She had curly blond hair, bright eyes, and gold-rimmed specs that he often wondered if she really needed. She considered herself to be no-nonsense and practical in all things.