The Mall of Cthulhu (26 page)

Ted felt his stomach clenching, felt the bile rising, and knew he was not going to be able to hold it for very long. Cayenne and Laura looked similarly green. "Cthulhu!" Ted shouted, and projectile vomited. He saw puke shooting out of Laura's and Cayenne's mouths at the same time, and the noise was splitting his head wide open, or that's how it felt, and he looked back and saw Cthulhu rising up over, under, between, and around the structures of R'lyeh, and he knew he was going to die, the noise and the stench, the wrongness of the place had just increased to mind-destroying levels, and his brain was going to liquefy in his skull and leak out his ears and that would be the end of him, he was sure of it, and it seemed to be happening already.

He looked back at Laura and Cayenne, hoping he could say something before they all died, hoping he could tell them something about how much he loved them both, how they had made his twenty-nine years on earth and four score and twenty or whatever in R'lyeh worth living, how—and then he saw the rift.

Laura was pointing, and Ted saw it—a doorway-sized rift. Hands clasped tight, the three of them jumped headlong into the rift.

A microsecond later, Ted was face-down on flagstones again, still puking. But it was quiet, at least. Ted figured that it was because his eardrums had been destroyed.

But then sounds started to leak in. A waterfall? A honking car horn? A female voice yelling, "Holy shit, holy shit, you really did it! That's completely impossible!"

Ted looked up briefly and saw Laura and Cayenne, and there was some tall lady standing over them. He had enough time to smile at Laura and Cayenne. "Thank you!" he shouted at Laura. "Thank you!"

Cayenne was grinning and saying, "We did it! We did it!" and Laura was laughing—a deep, hearty laugh that was a happier sound than anything he'd heard out of her mouth in a long time.

The lady was still screaming, and Ted started to laugh. "I love you!" he shouted at Laura and Cayenne and Cincinnati and the screaming lady. "I love you!"

And suddenly, Ted's head felt far too heavy to hold up. He set it gently onto the cool flagstones, and, for the first time in at least a century, he slept.

Laura stood on the front porch. It felt good to be outside in the warm spring sunshine after five days inside the Westin. The doctor told them their eardrums would heal in a couple of weeks, though they might have permanent hearing loss of between five and twenty percent. Laura had actually been glad for her near-total deafness as Marrs read her the riot act about her irresponsibility, how she had put over three hundred thousand residents of Cincinnati, not to mention hundreds of thousands more in the metro area, at risk, blah blah blah. He had gone on at length about how, in the good old days, when he had the resources, he would have simply had her taken out, but now he didn't have the wherewithal to dispose of her body, and anyway she was obviously a talented agent, and he still needed her, so she was lucky, but she still had a job.

Elaine had flown back to Boston. Laura had her phone number. She had no idea if the fact that Elaine had witnessed something so bizarre would make them bonded forever or just make Elaine want to avoid her forever. Ted told her she couldn't call until they got back to Boston. Easy for him to say—he had Cayenne waiting back at the Westin, probably sitting next to Marrs with a new laptop, searching cyberspace for supernatural fires for them to put out.

She looked over at Ted, standing beside her on the porch, and felt a surge of affection. He looked completely ridiculous, but happier and healthier than she could remember seeing him in ten years. He was wearing steel-toed boots and criss-crossed ammunition belts holding rows of wooden stakes and vials of holy water.

She really hadn't expected him to take Marrs up on his employment offer. She thought he'd say he'd done his part, he was done for life, and now he was going to settle down and live the boring, normal life he'd always pined for. But when she talked it over with him, she found that, deep down, he wasn't all that interested in a normal life. "I know too much for that," he'd said. "I couldn't . . . now that I know this stuff is out there, I can't just go get a house in the suburbs and sit on my hands and let somebody else take care of it. I mean, I really couldn't stand that."

So, after thinking it over for a day, Ted had told Marrs that fighting supernatural threats to homeland security was the only thing he'd ever really been good at, except for making lattes, and that, based on his experience, both careers were fairly equal in terms of the danger he would be exposed to, so he'd like to keep saving the world.

Back on the porch, Ted was nervously flicking the Zippo, with the engraved portrait of Elvis on the side, in his left hand and looking at Laura, waiting for the okay. Laura felt the stakes strapped to her sides, unstoppered the sport bottle of holy water in her left hand, and felt the reassuring weight of the gigantic silver cross on her chest.

"On three," she said to Ted, probably too loudly.

"Does that mean on three, or one, two, three, Cthulhu?" Ted asked, smiling.

Laura smiled. "One, two, three, Cthulhu," she said.

"Got it," Ted said.

Laura felt the adrenaline tide come in. Her heart pounded, and she felt like a coiled spring. "One . . . two . . . three . . . "

"Cthulhu!" Ted yelled. He raised his steel-toed boot and kicked hard. The door of the Omega house cracked and splintered, and Laura and Ted ran inside.

Seamus Cooper's work in a major coffee/lifestyle chain leaves him plenty of time to pursue his occult research and occasional forays into fiction. Lacking both the charisma and the multiple wives necessary to be the charismatic founder of a polygamist cult, Seamus lives alone. His home in Providence, Rhode Island is a stone's throw from the H.P. Lovecraft house, provided the stone is thrown by someone (or something) possessed of superhuman strength.

Prologue

1993

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Nine
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Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
Nineteen
Twenty
Twenty-One
Epilogue
About the Author