Oliver

  We live on a placid island of ignorance

  in the midst of black seas of the infinity,

  and it was not meant that we should voyage far.

  He stared out the empty window until the thing in his hands twitched. He reluctantly pulled the top corner of the stained handkerchief back and looked at it. It was smaller than the other one, the head no bigger than a walnut, the wing-arms the size of a finger joint, the tentacles below perhaps three inches in length. Its skin had those same midnight-sky star speckles. It hadn’t hurt nearly as bad to cough it out as it had to push one from his nostril.

  You should have told her. He’d tried, he really had, but it had been so lovely just to talk to her that somehow the words ‘I have an alien in my brain’ stuck in his throat, and then she’d kissed him, and then this stupid thing decided to make its appearance, and… Oh my god, she kissed me. He closed his eyes and relived the glorious moment. He’d remember it to his dying day.

  And then his head had started hurting almost like it was punishing him for his moment of happiness, and then… What am I supposed to do with this thing?

  “Step on it,” he told himself quietly. “Put it down the toilet. Easy.”

  DO NOT.

  He froze. Can you hear me? Are you reading my mind?

  Nothing.

  “Is this going to keep happening?”

  Nothing. Had he imagined it?

  The floorboards in the hallway creaked, and his father opened the door. He closed his hands over the tiny monster, wishing he’d heard him early enough to hide the thing, but even more grateful he hadn’t crept up while Amrita was still in the room.

  “Are you well, son? I heard you coughing.”

  “I’m okay,” Oliver said, trying to sound casual.

  “I heard talking, too.” His father looked at the open window. “Who were you speaking with?”

  Oliver opened his hands. Just as he’d hoped, his father immediately forgot about the open window and fell to his knees.

  “Vulgtmah Yog-Sothoth ng nng l’ h’ nyth’drn. C’ mgah’n’ghft ymg’ gotha, throdog ehye,” he crooned, bowing his head to the floor. It was right where Amrita had slopped a bunch of fish-tank water onto the carpet, but he didn’t seem to notice the wet spot. Oliver shifted in his seat, uncomfortable. His father had always been the calm one, inhumanly steady and boring. He didn’t like the gleam of fervor he saw behind his glasses now.

  The little creature flopped out of his hands and onto the floor. Both Olly and his father made little sounds of shock and reached for it too late. For all his fear and disgust, Olly felt as if he’d just dropped a baby. The thing bounced on the fraying carpet and immediately started moving, apparently no worse for wear. It moved just like the one beneath the library had: thumping down one clawed elbow with a folded wing and then the other, followed by a hypnotic spasm of the tentacles from the rear that pushed its bulk forward. Thump thump swisssh.

  His father, still on his knees, put a trembling hand palm up on the floor as it approached him. He was muttering in that guttural tongue under his breath, a look of awed worship on his face. He thinks it rejected him that night when Mom died. He wants to be the one it picks. Is it going to crawl up his nose?

  The little black monster paused just beyond his outstretched fingers, its wings flaring and settling back against its head almost like antennae tasting the air. Then it turned and went around him. Walter Mason deflated, closing his eyes and nodding as if he’d known it all along.

  FOLLOW.

  Oliver blinked and shook his head. The voice filled his brain like soup on a winter’s day. The little creature had paused in the open doorway and turned back, its head lifted up on its wing arms. It had no eyes that he could see, but it was looking at him. Waiting for him.

  Bemused, he stood up. “We’re supposed to follow it,” he said.

  His father wiped his eyes. “Of course. Anything.”

  The thing threw itself down the stairs as soon as they moved in its direction, but as before, seemed to take no hurt from the fall. Either it had no bones at all, or it was simply tough as nails. They hurried down after it and found it slapping its tiny tentacles at the front door.

  Oliver felt a disbelieving giggle well up in his throat. “It wants to go for a walk.”

  His father, all unflappable stoicism once again, took their jackets from the coat rack and settled his flat cap over his baldness. “It’s not a puppy, son. Whatever it wants, we help and follow.”

  And so they found themselves on the front sidewalk at eleven o’clock at night, bundled against the fall chill, trailing slowly after a creature that moved at perhaps two miles an hour. Oliver glanced over at his dad, but he had his eyes fastened firmly on the being, whispering in his guttural god-language under his breath. Olly wished it were Amrita with him instead. She’d joke about putting a leash on it.

  You’ve got to tell her about this. She deserves to know – she’s mixed up in it all too. It was insane to think that two opposing cults had been growing like mold under the surface of Olmstead for generations. It was even more insane to realize both actually believed in impossible things that turned out to be real. Most insane of all was that somehow, he and Amrita had ended up at the forefront of it all.

  A car drove past, and Oliver edged forward on the sidewalk to shield the tiny monster from view. He didn’t like the thing, exactly, but he felt protective of it.

  “This doesn’t feel safe,” he said. “What if somebody sees it?”

  “Most people don’t wander around this late. If we do happen across someone, they’ll either leave us alone or be too frightened to interfere. Olmstead folk know better than to stick their noses where they shouldn’t.”

  “What if it’s one of those people like Ms. Gilman?”

  His father nodded gravely. “That would cause problems. They’d likely attack the Little One on sight.”

  “And what are we supposed to do about that?”

  “Be calm, son. I would kill anyone who tried to harm it.”

  He snorted. “Come on, Dad.”

  Expressionless, his father pulled a snub-nosed revolver from his jacket pocket and showed it to him.

  Olly gaped. “When did you get that?”

  “I’ve had it for ages. This day was bound to come eventually.”

  “Dad, I’ve never even seen you kill a spider. You couldn’t shoot somebody. You wouldn’t!”

  “I am a peaceful man, you know that. But perhaps there is more to your tired old father than you think.”

  Oliver shook his head, bewildered. Nothing made sense anymore. All he knew was that the longer they meandered behind the little squid monster out in front of God and everybody, the more nervous he felt.

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  “This is silly,” he said, reaching down and carefully scooping the squirming space-black thing into one hand. It was warm and jellylike as it pulsed and writhed against him. The feeling was oddly comforting.

  “We shouldn’t interfere, son.”

  “Dad, at this rate it’ll be morning and we’ll have gone three blocks. Let’s go back and get the car.”

  “It has to lead us.”

  “I can feel it pulling in my hand. It wants to go that way,” he said, pointing south. “So let’s go that way, and if it starts yanking in another direction, I’ll tell you to turn.”

  “Yes. Very good. You’re wiser than I give you credit for.”

  In short order they were zipping down Carter Ave toward downtown. Oliver sat in the passenger seat and regarded the impossible creature in his hand. It had its little bat wings wrapped around his thumb and pinky as it strained ever southward, and its tentacles twined lazily in the grooves of his palm. He decided to call it the Kraken.

  “This is nuts, Dad.”

  “I imagine it feels that way. It’s not easy to have the scales pulled from your eyes all at once.”

  “I keep thinking it’s a dream, or a trick, or something.”

  “The world you have known is a dream, son. Everyone will wake soon enough, and we’ll all be better off for it.”

  “It started pulling to the left just a second ago.”

  He turned onto Main Street without question. “I know this is odd and unpleasant for you, Oliver, but I want you to know how glad I am to be doing this with you. I’ve waited so long.”

  “Thanks, Dad.”

  They drove past the wreckage of the YMCA, yellow police tape cordoning off the rubble. Oliver stared at it as they passed, his stomach churning. How many people died in there? It can’t have just been Ms. Gilman. That thing brought the entire building down.

  “It was some octopus kind of thing,” he said, gesturing back to the destruction. “I saw it.”

  His father looked at him sharply but didn’t stop the car. “You were there?”

  “Yes.”

  “I heard the neighbors saying something bad had happened this afternoon, and I wondered. Describe it.”

  “Uh… it wasn’t really an octopus. It didn’t have a head; just a big lump in the middle with tentacles like twenty feet long. Red eyes all over. Super loud. Mouth in the center.”

  He hissed in disapproval. “A shoggoth. One of Cthulhu’s messengers. Did you see who woke it?”

  Olly clamped his lips shut and shook his head.

  “A shame. It’d be best to prevent them waking any others. It must have killed quite a few people, or else it’d still be raging through the town. Even as it is, it’ll likely emerge to seek new prey within the next few days.”

  Olly blanched. “It will kill more people?”

  “It’s what they do, son. It’s what their master wants: the utter destruction of humanity. Cthulhu ruled this world long before humans rose to power, and even in his sleep of aeons he is jealous of his territory.”

  “I can’t believe this.”

  “It will be all right, son. The one I serve sent your little friend to save us. He wants to protect us from the Great Devourer.”

  “Turn left again.”

  “My master Yog-Sothoth created Cthulhu billions of years ago, in a place so distant we don’t even have numbers to represent it. The Eldest sent him out into the universe to conquer and create. Eventually, though, Cthulhu came to resent the greater power of Yog-Sothoth and warred against him. Countless worlds were destroyed, and at last the servants of the Eldest One tracked the fallen Cthulhu to his lair here on earth and sank his great city into the sea, putting him into a sleep so deep it might as well be death. Even in this state, though, his mind reaches out, and the earliest humans saw him in dreams. They worshipped him, not knowing that he desires only fire and death.”

  Oliver tried to wrap his brain around the story. “So this Eldest thing—”

  “Yog-Sothoth.”

  “Right. He kept watch in case this Cthulhu dude came back?”

  “No, son. We might as well be ants to the Elder Gods. But I studied the ancient texts and learned the incantations my friends thought blasphemous and evil. Once I knew the true shape of the world, how could I not? I learned how to call the attention of the Eldest One and sent my message across space and time. Even a giant may notice an ant if it’s waving a big red sign.”

  “How did you learn all this?”

  “Decades of study on every continent of this earth. We were quite the travelers, your mother and I.”

  “I can’t imagine you traveling.”

  “Some days, I have a hard time myself.”

  The Kraken jerked in Olly’s hand, tentacles wrapping tightly around his thumb as it strained suddenly to the right. “Stop here, Dad. I think we’re close.”

  They got out of the car. They had stopped in front of the rusted wrought iron gates of the Olmstead cemetery. The stone wall encircling the spacious graveyard was crumbling and pitted, and the gates themselves were warped and bent by age and possibly vandals long dead. The Kraken was pulling straight toward the entrance.

  “Great. Guess we’re going inside.” He set the Kraken down, and it surged forward into the darkness.

  His father ducked through a gap between the twisted gates despite the rusted chain and padlock holding them closed. Oliver was close on his heels. He felt naked without his backpack. The Maglite would have been very useful.

  His father pulled a pen flashlight from his breast pocket and shone it on the scurrying Kraken, and Olly felt an odd surge of pride. His be-prepared mindset hadn’t come from nowhere.

  The Olmstead Cemetery was as big as a city block, and unlike most other things in town, it had been well-planned. The first grave lots had all been sold in the southeast corner back when the site had first been dedicated in 1867, and the spaces had filled up in orderly fashion from back to front. The Olmstead Examiner newspaper he’d looked at on microfiche in the library had some old lurid stories of crimes that had been done here in the early days of the city, perhaps even a murder, but no one came here anymore. The last lots had been used decades before, and a new, much lovelier cemetery was slowly filling up on the other side of town.

  All the gravestones near the entrance were low cement markers with death dates in the 1990s, but the Kraken passed them by without pausing, wiggling its way deeper into the graveyard where the headstones were older, larger, and stranger. The light from his father’s hand fell on a tall obelisk, and Oliver saw the name OBED MASON – gone but not gone. The dates were too worn to make out.

  “My grandfather,” his father said quietly. “He gave me my first hints of all this.” They didn’t stop to pay their respects; the Kraken was still on the move.

  Soon all the grave markers were tall, elaborate works of stone and marble worn smooth by wind and rain. They were approaching the very oldest part of the cemetery. Near the back wall reared a dark edifice nearly twenty feet in height, all Greek columns and carved cornices. It was a mausoleum, and Oliver’s personal monster was making a beeline for it.

  “It’s the tomb of Zebediah Whateley,” his father said. “I shouldn’t be surprised. He was the first of us.”

  The wooden door of the tomb was ajar, and the Kraken thump-thump-swished its way inside. Oliver and his father both followed. Inside was a musty, dank stone room with a full-on sarcophagus against the far wall, its lid carved into the shape of a man sleeping with his arms crossed over his chest. He had a pointed goatee and a stone cane at his side. In the middle of the space, a little off to the right side, was a free-standing monument that reached from floor to ceiling. It was pyramidal in shape and was carved with words and figures. The shapes were now familiar to Oliver’s eye – football-shaped heads with bat wings and tentacle feet. The script, though, was like none he’d ever seen.

  “I should have brought my translation journals,” his father said reverently, running his hands over the script. “I worked on this sort of thing for years in Mesopotamia.”

  “Mesopotamia? Like, in Iraq?”

  “Oh, yes. I found some incredible cuneiform tablets in a Babylonian ziggurat that ended up being essential in my efforts to contact Yog-Sothoth.”

  The Kraken was climbing the steep pyramid as if its life depended on it. It reached a cutout near the top and stopped. It seemed almost expectant to Oliver.

  “Look here, son.” His father walked around to one side and shone his light on the obelisk. “This word means hand… something something, I really wish I had my notebooks. And this means blood. Fascinating.”

  Oliver looked where his father was pointing. The script was illegible, all slanted lines and squiggles, but there, amid the writing, was a creature like the Kraken, but grander somehow. Its wings were outstretched, and it had wide, wise eyes on its fluted ovoid head. Its tentacles were long and wrapped themselves around stars and moons. This was what the Kraken might be one day. It was the grandaddy of all Krakens. A hand-shaped indentation adorned its head beneath the eyes. On impulse, Olly stretched out his hand.

  “It fits perfectly,” he said.

  “Of course it does,” his father said. “Let me see your hand for a moment.”

  Still entranced by the carvings, Oliver pulled his hand away and held it out to his father, not noticing the glint of steel in his father’s hand until the barest instant before he felt it stab into his palm.

  “Dad!” he cried, yanking his hand away. Blood was welling from a deep jab in the center of his palm. “What the hell?”

  He didn’t even apologize. “Put your hand back on the stone, son. The hand in blood. Do it.”

  “You can’t just stab me!”

  “Do it, Oliver.”

  Annoyed and unsettled, Oliver slapped his hand back into the indentation that fit it so perfectly. His palm stung against the stone.

  “Okay, Dad, I’m now bleeding on the dead guy’s monument. Happy?”

  His father looked up toward the zenith of the stone pyramid. “Oh yes, son. I am.”

  Oliver followed his gaze and saw the Kraken in its bowl-shaped resting place right below the peak. It was stretched out upright to full length, a good five inches, standing tall on its tentacles, its wings flared, the points of light under its skin glimmering.

  “What’s it doing?” he whispered, forgetting the pain in his hand.

  A high-pitched keening emitted from somewhere within the Kraken, an inhuman whine that reached inside Oliver’s head and scrambled his thoughts.

  “It’s calling to its brothers,” his father said.

  The black-slicked cloth on the arm of Oliver’s jacket twisted and bucked, tearing itself free from the garment, leaving a hole as long as his hand behind. He clutched at the fabric, but it wormed out of his grasp, falling to the floor. There it bunched and flexed, shaping itself into a crude simulacrum of the Kraken, its black body shot through with the tan fibers of his jacket. It began to climb up the monument.

  “Every black nosebleed you’ve had is part of the offspring of the Eldest One,” his father said, watching in fascination. “It’s gathering its forces.”

  Oliver looked out the door and thought maybe he could see another black thing worming its way across the cemetery. He imagined every tissue he’d ever filled with black fluid gathering itself out trash cans and dumps all over the city, all animated by some force that made it rise up and come here. He could almost feel them coming.

  “It begins,” his father said.

  IT BEGINS.