Cthulhurotica

Mae Empson BETWEEN A ROCK AND AN ELDER GODDESS

Finding the woman in the cave, just as his analysis predicted, forced Dennis Papadakis to face the fact that impossible things walked among humankind, whether or not “walked” was even the right word.

She was reclined in a natural pool, with only her upper half visible to him, as naked and as shapely as the masthead of a ship.

“You came,” she said simply, and the whisper echoed in his head, rather than reflecting any projection of sound from her perfectly formed lips.

He took a step towards her, and then another.

He knew what she was. And still, he’d come.

So began the Orphic poem from the Derveni Papyrus. Dennis knew the scrolls found in the Derveni necropolis, and their record of the elder gods beginning with black-winged Night who birthed the Sky-Aether, and all the other star-spawn. And he’d read that there was one great Deep One above even black-winged Night, and that was Primordial Boundless Chaos — also called Apeiron or Azathoth. From Apeiron, gods and planets were endlessly created and destroyed, to the tune of Rhea or Zangreus’ Phrygian flute and drum.

Dennis’s father and the other scholars had whispered about these things during the 44 years in which the Derveni scrolls had been studied and translated, cloaked in secrecy, before their release last year in 2006. But, even after the Derveni Papyrus had been translated, shared to the public, and safely housed in the Archaeological Museum of Thessaloniki, there remained another door to open, another scroll, a final initiation.

Dennis knew the real secret.

The discovery of the Derveni Papyrus in 1962 had triggered a wave of expeditions through the most ancient necropoli, better funded and better equipped than in decades, fueled by the renewed belief that there were still treasures to be found. One such group thought to go to Pantalica, to the ancient necropolis so old that it pre-dated the ancient Greek colony at Syracuse on Sicily by five hundred years. In 1969, they found there an even older scroll, and transported it also to Thessaloniki where it could be analyzed in entire secrecy behind the veil of scholarly hubbub over the Derveni Papyrus.

What would be called the Pantalica Papyrus was even more secretly translated, and Dennis’s father was among the translators. Dennis was attending Thessaloniki, working on postgraduate studies in History and Archaeology, specializing in Ancient History.

The age of the Pantalica papyrus, the fact that it was prose, and the specific references to Apeiron, pointed immediately to Anaximander, the pre-Socratic philosopher, as its author. Kernels of it echoed, anticipated, and explained Anaximander’s beliefs so well that it could not easily be dismissed. And there was a reference to the author’s Thracian bride obtained in Appollonia. Had Anaximander not led the Milesian colony to Appollonia, to Thrace, to the shores of the Black Sea?

Anaximander was the philosopher who was well known to have posited in the 6th century BC that the earth was one of many worlds created from Apeiron, and that its entire surface had once been covered in water, with plants and animals birthed from mud and water. He claimed that men were not present at this early stage, but that mankind had descended from fish. From fish! Over two thousand years before Darwin. He asserted that there had to have been an embryonic transitional stage — with egg-born generations of men mouth-brooded by fish — before mankind could come out into the open air and lose our scales. A hero of rational thought. The first scientist and evolutionist.

When Dennis first read the Pantalica papyrus, among his father’s papers, he thought it must be a hoax or allegory. It was on par with suddenly finding a lost love letter between Pythagoras and Medusa, or, rather between Pythagoras and a mythical talking triangle eager to reveal its geometric secrets. Absurd.

Anaximander was supposed to be the first scientist. The man who first drew a map of the world. The man who first conceived of a mechanical model of the entire universe. Anaximander was a hero of deductive reason, of the triumph of the rational over the supernatural.

Or so they had thought.

From the papyrus, Dennis could see that the Thracian wife must have infected Anaximander with her Orphism. It was she, in the text, who offered the dedications to Apeiron and black-winged Night, and who played the wild flute that heralded the Boundless Chaos that is Apeiron.

It was she who had introduced Anaximander, and now Dennis, to Circe.

The author of the scroll wrote, and this certainly was no secret, that Circe was the daughter of Helios, sky-spawn, and one of the daughters of Oceanus, depth-spawn. Likewise, the author proclaimed that Circe commanded the gift of uplift and decay, of evolution and devolution. She could regress men to pigs and wolves and half-fish. She made of them living sculptures proclaiming what men had been and what they now were, both naturally (half-fish) and allegorically (pigs). She was not ashamed of her star-spawn heritage. Why should anyone else be? Let it be writ upon their faces and bodies.

When one of her creations was criticized and rejected — poor Glaucus whom she had regressed to fin and scaly tail from the waist down, she was incensed like an artist who had received an unfavorable review. What blinded this nymph Priscilla that she recoiled in horror from handsome half-fished Glaucus?

The next time Priscilla descended into her pool to bathe, Circe poisoned the water with primordial Apeironian ooze, collected from the deepest abyss where Oceanus slept dreaming and oozing from his tentacled orifices.

The nymph’s lower body changed beneath the water line, regressing and transforming. She became Scylla, a monster.

Circe had planned to laugh at Scylla’s suffering. She hated the slight against Glaucus, against her own flesh-craftsmanship.

Only, there was something enticing about Scylla as she tried to run from herself, from the twelve tentacles, from the six hairy mouths where she had only had one woman’s hairy mouth, and each attached to her waist by a sinuous neck so that it could twist and turn to gnash its teeth at her, and bark like a dog, hairy as a wolf.

“A fine story, wife,” Anaximander responded, the translation recorded, when she had concluded her description. “A tale for the fireside, and echoing Homer.”

“It is no story,” she challenged, this woman from Thrace who has no name at this point in the papyrus.

“Then what does it mean?” he asked, assuming it was some kind of allegory, a myth-garmented truth.

“It does not mean. It is. It was. It will be again.”

“I’m sure the person that taught you the story framed it that way.”

“You would challenge Circe’s own account?” she asked, fierce-tongued.

Anaximander was in no mood to argue this further. She was so young. So foolish. Perhaps he had been foolish to marry a woman in her teens when he was almost fifty-five, a very old man. “If Circe told me herself, I’d consider it, but I’d believe it when I saw Scylla wriggling and writhing in all her glory.”

“Few enough men have wished for that.”

“If such a creature existed, I would want to see her. It would be fascinating. She would be a kind of chthonic missing link. Remarkable.”

Something changed in his wife’s expression. She looked quite pleased. “We could sail to Syracuse, and then travel north to the place where she waits.”

Anaximander’s wife had a large gold-ornamented chest, which she had brought with her to his house at the time of their marriage. She always kept it locked. She kept it in a room in their villa which she also kept locked. Sometimes she sequestered herself behind that door, and he could hear flute music and drum through the open window, as he read in the courtyard below. He assumed it contained her Thracian instruments.

Now, she insisted that they take it with them to Syracuse. But first, while he arranged things and their sea passage, she let him know that she would be gone for several days, visiting her family.

Anaximander was glad to not be invited. He had never met her family, and expected they were quite decadently Thracian since she had been so reluctant to introduce him to them.

But, it struck him that her departure would be a chance to investigate the locked chest in the locked room. It had bothered him particularly in the first few months of their marriage, but he had not thought about it for over a year, gradually settling into their routines. This mention of her need to take it to Syracuse had re-ignited his curiosity.

He purchased locks that were similar enough to substitute, so that he could hide this act of invasion, and entered the forbidden room.

Surely this was simply a cautionary tale, Dennis told himself. It was a warning to not be taken in by the Orphic cult, to leave closed those doors which are not meant to be opened. That Anaximander had chosen to tell it in such biographical terms was intriguing and probably of interest to some literary scholar, but did not necessarily detract from his other scientific thinking nor cast aspersion on the source of his more radical ideas.

There was a strange fetid odor in the room, almost brackish. It had simply been shut up too long, Anaximander told himself, momentarily forgetting the open window.

He considered how angry she would be. But was he not indulging her with this foolish trip to Syracuse? Surely, she would indulge him in this.

He crossed to the chest and forced the lock.

As he lifted the lid, a thick scent of musty brackish wrongness assaulted his senses. Was something dead rotting inside? What had she done?

There was something pink folded on top — a kind of strange almost flesh-like cloth. He lifted it out and shook it open.

It was the skin of a woman, complete but for holes at the eye sockets, hair still attached. He was holding it in front of him by its shoulders. He saw hair like his wife’s hair, curly and brown, and a scar like his wife’s on the left arm. He dropped it, and let it fall back into the chest, noticing for the first time that there were other objects below, other folded skins, sickly dark gray and green, with glimpses of feather and of scale and of fur.

He slammed the trunk, and sunk to a sitting position in front of it. He thought “witch” and “skin-thief”, and “not her, not my wife.” And, “gods protect me.” She would come back. She would know what he had done.

A shriek sounded behind him, and he turned. A hawk perched in predatory agitation, framed by the window, and its eyes were his wife’s eyes.

“Circe?” he asked.

The hawk flew to him, perched on his shoulder, and rubbed its head against the hair above his ear.

He flinched, expecting some attack, but it did not come.

She flew to the chest, lifted its lid with a talon, and slipped inside. A moment later, his wife climbed out of the chest. “I can change others, but not myself. I had to find another way. It is an old craft.”

“Will you change me? I should not have looked into that which you had locked and hid.” In his mind, he saw pigs and wolves, and he was afraid.

She looked at him and let the silence stretch. “Mander, if you will keep me company for the time you have left, I will whisper the secrets of the universe to you, the crazed babbling of flute-accompanied Azathoth, how Helios watches — a Cyclopean eye in a body of stars, how sleeping Oceanus dreams — the tentacled oozing leviathan, and how if both their eyes opened at once, the world itself would cease to be. I can show you things you would indeed find remarkable.”

He nodded mutely, afraid to contradict her, and, despite the last surrendering protest of his reason, absolutely curious and as absolutely smitten with her as he had been from the first day he saw her. “Shall we still go to Syracuse?” he asked after a moment. “Shall I see Scylla?”

Circe smiled, and she answered directly into his mind, no longer exerting the effort to twitch the skin and its mouth muscles in accompanying pantomime. “That foolish nymph slit her own throat centuries ago in her blind rage, but I saved her skin. I can be Scylla for you right now if you’d like. The possibilities, with so many nether mouths, are an adventure that might consume several days of exploration.”

He lifted the lid of the chest himself, and looked at her with an eager smile. “I do like to explore. But, remember I am an old man, wife. Be gentle with me.”

They were not seen for several days.

When they sailed for Syracuse, they looked out over the side of the ship at the dark surface of the water, his arm protectively encircling her, and he tried to imagine the strange shapes that slithered and slept and oozed beneath its depths. He shivered a bit, and was glad that the ship was as large as it was, and as well fortified against storm and rock as it could be.

She felt him shiver. “You have nothing to fear from the others while you are with me,” she whispered.

“Because they are… our family?”

“And because they can no longer abide the sound of barking dogs. The racket is fearsome carried under water. I have warned them off before, Scylla-skinned, and the lesson is now well learned.”

“What is there yet to see, in Syracuse and beyond?” he asked, realizing that the ship had little to fear from Scylla while she stood tucked beneath his arm. “Is there still a whirlpool, a Charbydis, to fear, in the Strait of Messina? Do we have a reason to sail through the strait and beyond?”

“There is still Charbydis, and as to what she is, I’ll let you see for yourself. But, as to what lies beyond the strait, if you remember your Homer, you will recall that my own isle lies beyond, Aeaea. There I have a house and cave, my eternal home, where I retire between the lifetimes that I choose to live skin-stolen. I’d like you to see it. I’d like to remember us there, wrapped in each other’s arms and other appendages, as I wait there in the centuries to come, immortal and alone.”

And this was what captured Dennis’s imagination, as he set aside the translation and its mad tale of the witch and the old Ionian philosopher-scientist. How many lives had she lived since, and in what skins? How long had she waited, alone?

Most scholars agreed that Aeaea was no longer an isle, but a peninsula off the Italian coast, in the salt marshes, in a place now called Mount Circeo on Cape Circaeum, bearing her name. Surely others had searched these spaces, and the caves there and on the nearby island of Ponza. But, he felt compelled to search as well.

Dennis left behind his scholarship, his father, the comforts of the city and its technologies, and all that he had been taught about skepticism and reason. He tattooed the back of his hand with the Orphic egg (a silver egg wrapped in a serpentine tentacle) in the hopes that it formed some kind of mark of initiation.

Eventually he found a cave that others had overlooked, or, perhaps more likely, he was permitted to see that which had been veiled to others. He found the grotto, and the beautiful woman reclining within.

As he approached, seeing only her top half, he did not know if this was her Thracian skin, or her Scylla skin, or some other skin. Beneath the water line, she could be hairy mouths and tentacles.

But he still went to her.

“You came,” she said.

“Are you Circe?” he asked.

She nodded, still half submerged, and reached up with one hand to caress his face as he knelt beside the pool. “You found my story.”

“Not I, but others. I read the translation.”

“I have written that story every two hundred years or so, different versions, each a faithful account of my adventures with the men of each age who have come to bear me company, and hid the papyrus, the papers, in necropoli and other old places. Perhaps one day in the far future, they will read of you and I, and it will inspire another young man to seek me out.”

“You are a fisher of scholars,” he said with a laugh.

“I cast my net,” she acknowledged with an ageless smile.

“You’ve caught me,” he said. “I am yours.”

“Are you ready to join me in this pool, knowing what I might be, beneath this water?”

He nodded, and began to unbutton his shirt, eager to find out.

One hairy mouth slipped out of the water and rubbed its furry head against his leg, where he knelt. He petted it, slick and soft, and traced its moist lips with one finger. She sighed in pleasure, and the sound purred and pulsed from all of her mouths at once, above and below the water. As she wrapped him in her arms, in her tentacles, in her nether mouths, he heard his own heart beating like a mad drum and her moaning cries echoed through the cave like the thin monotonous piping of a Phrygian flute.