The Dark Rites of Cthulhu (17 page)

After that day, he had seen the dogs eating human bodies on a regular basis. They fought over them, savagely. They dragged them off whole, like a leopard with a broken-necked antelope, or in dismembered pieces. The tethers that bound the near-headless humans to the overhead colossi snapped free and trailed across the ground.

Watching the starving dogs go mad with desperation, knowing how unnatural it was that they had been driven to feed off their very masters, made March’s heart ache. As for all those dead humans themselves…well, their extinction was a fate they had earned, through their actions and their inaction and their unworthiness. And if his own future self lay in one of those streets out there, his own head turned to mush, cables of black web running up from it to connect him to one of those Outsiders in the sky, that had manifested to reclaim this world – for he had later come to admit to himself that that was what those leviathans were: the beings that the rarest of the books in his collection had foretold – well, then that was okay, too. He didn’t count himself all that much better than the rest of his breed. To his way of thinking, his own dog, Snow, was superior to him. And if Snow were out there hungry and afraid, then he’d want her to feed from his corpse rather than starve to death.

Today, March turned away from the scrying window and removed his sunglasses. Not much had changed out there over the past two years but for the slow dimming of the light that had heralded the appearance of the Outsiders. He felt a familiar itch, a deep grumbling hunger like that which had started him on this quest for knowledge back when he had still been married.

The need to know…to see…even more.

He had been too long content with his success in opening this window, doing nothing more radical than changing his street view from time to time. But now, finally, he had determined that he had to make more dramatic adjustments to his formula if he hoped to understand the destiny of his race more clearly…and exactly when it was that the Outsiders would tear their way into this reality. Once again, he had to truly experiment.

Then one day, more through that sense of intuition he possessed than through his exhausting reexamination of his book collection, he struck upon the answer. It was so simple he hadn’t even considered it until now. What had really inspired him, ultimately, was a dream he had had the night before, in which he had been standing on the deck of a ghost ship at sea, the Mary Celeste perhaps, the only human aboard but with Snow faithfully by his side. He had taken up an incongruously modern pair of binoculars so as to scan the gray, stormy horizon for land. His view through the lenses had been blurry, so he had had to turn the diopter adjustment ring to sharpen his focus.

Yes! An adjustment ring!

First, with white correction fluid he painted over the ten words of power that accompanied each of the ten points on the formula’s central decagon. The moment he painted over the first word, for the first time in two years the window was gone, leaving only an area of blank paper. He didn’t panic, however, or bemoan his decision. As soon as the white fluid had dried he wrote the same ten words of power…but this time he advanced their position by one degree, clockwise, as if adjusting the focus of a lens.

The window opened again, and this time he had his dark glasses on from the start just in case he got kicked back to the beginning again, and that blasting column of light.

But no…his instincts had been correct. The lens gave him the same view of the city as last time, but from a point further, deeper, into the future.

He no longer needed the sunglasses, and removed them. The sky revealed in the spaces between the blob-like masses of the Outsiders was now a subdued, almost twilight violet. Faint rags of mist wisped between the buildings, and grass had grown up lush, if gray, through cracks in the pavement. Sizable trees had even sprouted, their roots displacing cement slabs, leaves dull and waxy. Walls were choked thick with grayish vines. Many buildings had crumbled in on themselves, turning into ivy-choked rubble. The city looked like a vast graveyard, overgrown, its long-dead occupants without surviving mourners.

He expected to see bones scattered in the streets. Surely no intact skeletons, but at least stray rib cages or femurs, for instance. No skulls, of course, though the occasional lower jaw was conceivable. Still, there was nothing. Had it all turned to dust?

He unwound one end of a string, shifted it to another nail
an eighth of an inch over. It was like changing the channel on a television, with only a brief interruption of fluttering light/darkness between. As a result, he was given the view of a different street in the same demolished city.

Not only did he discover bones, this time, but he was introduced to the descendants of the city’s orphaned canines, as well.

At first it was just the bones. They lay in the very middle of the street, heaped up in a neat cairn. He might have believed that dogs would leave them that way after having gnawed the last shreds from them and cracked them for their marrow -- just as a dog will bury a bone for future use -- maybe even as some new territorial behavior, but what then about the flowers?

The pile of bones was surrounded by a ring of plucked flowers of a type March couldn’t name, with white petals. This was without question no accidental drift of uprooted flowers blown here by a windstorm. The circle was nearly as perfect as those he himself had inked on paper to design this magic lens.

So, there had been survivors of the apocalypse, after all! He was almost disappointed, but still anxious to see them…what they looked like, how they lived.

In the next moment, he did. And he gazed through his window with his jaw hanging slack.

A large dog, so thin it was emaciated – rather like an albino greyhound, but rougher in outline, more feral-looking, with striking pink eyes like a rabbit’s – came loping out from between two tall mounds that had once been buildings. In its jaws it carried a human pelvis. Its intention was clear: it was going to add this prize to the cairn in the center of the street.

But as the dog neared the cairn, it rose up onto its hind legs. It walked upright the last few steps. With its front legs, which March now realized had something more like human fingers than the toes of a dog’s paw, the animal removed the pelvis from its jaws and added it to the very top of the pile.

“Dear God,” March said aloud.

Behind him, he heard the tinkle of Snow’s dog tags as she lifted her head at the sound of his voice.

He placed a kitchen chair close in front of the window. Outside the actual windows of his apartment, night had fallen, galaxies of windows alight as if each building in the city had begun to burn up from the inside.

He saw other dogs come and go, as fleet and furtive as white ghosts in the unending violet twilight. Some galloped along on all fours. Some tiptoed past on two legs. No more bones were added to the monument to their dead, beloved masters while March watched, but one dog – and they were all of the same, strange new breed – did come forward to push the ring of flowers into a neater arrangement after the breeze had made its rim untidy. She bunted the blossoms with her nose and also patted them with her white-furred hands.

Was this, March wondered, a mutation caused by some emanation, conscious or accidental, generated by the Outsiders? Or could it even be that, having lived among human beings for so many generations, in their absence the dogs had begun to adopt human characteristics and behaviors as a matter of natural evolution? Even, in imitating humans, to replace them in some kind of tribute?

After a while March saw no more dogs in the street. He became conscious that his rump was sore from the hard wooden chair, and he realized he had neglected Snow for too long. He took her outside on her leash. She released a small pond of urine only a few steps from the old factory’s front stoop. As he stood over her, March caught himself glancing up and down the dark street nervously…as if he expected that at any moment, some crouched figure as gaunt as a bundle of birch branches would come tiptoeing out from around a corner, its vivid pink eyes fixed on him hungrily.

When he was back inside he shuddered, bolted the door, unhitched Snow from her leash, and set about microwaving himself a poor excuse for a Thai dinner. While he waited for it to cook, he walked over to his computer idly and glanced at the local news.

He spotted the headline immediately: “Second Ghoulish Murder.”

The body of a sixty-four-year-old homeless man had been found at the back of Hope Cemetery. He had been horribly savaged. A police spokesman was not confirming that these two murders were the work of a single perpetrator. They did not want to use the term serial killer at this time.

It wasn’t the first time there had been murders in this city, March reflected. It was a big enough city, and the more people you lumped together, the more harm they did each other. It was just the law of Nature. Shadowy predators had always accompanied what passed for civilization, and always would. But somehow these two killings resonated with him on a deep level, unsettling him in a way he couldn’t articulate to himself.

Naturally, the next thing to do was to white-out the words of power again, then draw them in anew, rotated one more degree to the right. He did this the following morning, after first making sure Snow had had her walk and her food and water bowls filled. He expected to be seated in front of the two-dimensional crystal ball he had created a long while.

He didn’t know what increment of time had passed -- any more than he could judge the time that had transpired between now and the first view, and the first view and the second – but it was obvious that it was a great many more years (if one were still to portion time into a man-made notion such as years).

Buildings had lost more of their orderly shape, become more like natural formations of the Earth; he might not even have recognized them as having been buildings if he hadn’t gazed on this scene from his apartment building’s perspective previously. More trees had risen, almost forming a grove. Their leaves, and the grass and underbrush and rampant creeping ivy, still had that grayish poisoned look, but somehow the vegetation flourished. It wasn’t so much that Nature was reclaiming the city, but that a new Nature had come about.

Yet all of this was secondary to his interest, because there was a new development that made him lean forward on his chair and murmur, “What the hell is this?”

In the center of the street where the evolving dogs had erected a monument to their masters – and he had decided it must only be one monument of many dispersed across the city, if not dispersed across the globe – the cairn of bones was gone, replaced by something which he couldn’t identify. It appeared to be a two-dimensional black disk maybe six feet across, floating a foot or so off the split pavement, angled slightly away from March so he could see it wasn’t a sphere. Its surface was flat black, featureless, but the edge of the circle appeared to be rimmed in a fringe of wavering cilia like that of a paramecium. In addition, maybe a dozen strands varying in thickness – from thread-thin to cables as thick as a wrist, perhaps – streamed upwards from various points in the disk’s outer rim. Just like the strands that had once connected the decimated heads of human corpses to the Outsiders overhead, these various cords ran up into the sky to disappear in the distance, but March had no doubt they connected with the immense bodies still hovering above the Earth.

The sky showing in the gaps between the Outsiders was still that violet hue of early evening, and against its subtle glow he could see that after centuries or millennia of immobility the silhouetted outlines
of the Outsiders appeared to be pulsing, throbbing amorphously. He noticed that long whip-like flagella had been extruded by the Outsiders here and there, lazily wavering as if the entities swam in place in the Earth’s atmosphere.

He returned his focus to the hovering disk the Outsiders had apparently manifested. Just as in the case of the cairn of bones, March strongly suspected this wasn’t the only such tethered disk that had appeared in this city, or upon the face of the Earth. Were those god-like entities at last, moving with the unhurried pace of the immortal, endeavoring to transform this reality into an environment that better suited their needs or desires?

A low rumbling behind March caused him to spin around on his chair’s wooden seat to look back at his living space, jolted like a man abruptly awakened from a dream. For a disoriented half-second he didn’t recognize his own surroundings, as if someone had bricked him alive in this box while his spirit had been elsewhere. Then he saw Snow. The white greyhound stood just behind him, her gaze fixed hypnotically on the lens as his had been. Her upper lip was quivering. At first he had had the odd notion that she was growling at him, but she had obviously sensed something in the scrying window. Up until this moment, over the past two years that it had remained open, she had never even appeared to acknowledge the window’s existence.

March faced his lens again to try to ascertain what it was that had caused his pet to take note of it after all this time. The appearance of the levitating black disk? The undulating bodies of the Outsiders?

New movement, and March flinched as a figure entered the scene from the right, like an actor stepping out from behind a curtain onto a stage. It was one of the dogs, but that much further evolved from the last time he had watched them. It bore no vestige of a tail, and walked more erect than the tiptoeing creatures he had seen before, its upright posture no longer seeming tentative or unnatural. Though still lean, its musculature appeared more like that of a human than a dog. It was still covered in short bristly white hair, its snout still elongated and canine, its eyes still an almost luminous pink, but the creature’s overall aspect conveyed a palpable intelligence.