Cthulhu's Reign

THE WALKER IN THE CEMETERY Ian Watson

When our tourist bus arrived at the side gateway to the necropolis of Staglieno on our tour around Genoa, a couple of cheery garbage men were loading floral tributes into a crusher truck. The afternoon was bright and breezy. Twenty meters’ length of the high perimeter wall and the pavement were stacked with huge arrangements of roses, irises, lilies, and tropical blooms interspersed with palm fronds and other foliage, undoubtedly several thousand euros’ worth of beauty. Into the crusher those were all going, either crammed into a big wheeled green bin first or, if too large, bourne on their wooden frames in the arms of the garbage collectors. Bird of paradise flowers passed by me, as did giant blooms in the shape of large lacquered red hearts from which protruded what looked like long thin white penises with green foreskins.

And all of the flowers and foliage were fresh and perfect, at least until the crusher compacted them.

Questions flew. Our guide, Gabriella, said that the tributes were from just this one day. Owing to cremations, there was no space to let that glory of blooms remain on display.

“But cannot they go to brighten a hospital or an old people’s home?” asked a German woman indignantly. English was the language of this tour.

Her husband said, “Suppose you’re in hospital, or very old, do you wish to see flowers of the dead?” His grey hair cropped very short, he had a noble bearing; I thought of a Prussian general of olden days.

He turned to me sharply, as if to say, Am I not correct, madam?

Startled, I said nothing.

And so we entered a gallery of that amazing cemetery which was to become for us a huge prison and abattoir of mystifying horrors.

Like any good guide, Gabriella began discoursing as we gazed along the first of the lengthy gloomy arched galleries, statues on plinths inside niches, ornate plaques crowded between the niches, the regular slabs underfoot covering the dead sealed away beneath.

“. perhaps our cemetery here in Genoa is the most astonishing in Europe. The revolutionary Enlightenment no longer wished to use churches and churchyards to bury the dead. The posh old families, some rich ever since Genoa contended with Venice for mastery of the Mediterranean. New nineteenth-century bourgeois wealth demanded sculptural realism like three-dimensional photographs in stone. At first a classical romanticism, then symbolism, and ultimately art deco. Angels of consolation becoming disturbingly erotic and sensual. Death becoming an uneasy ambiguous mystery — ”

“Excuse me,” said a tall skinny Dutchman, “why the different colors of the candles?”

We were beside a memorial to a nun, whose photograph taken long ago was surrounded by dozens of little imitation candles jostling on ledges, with lavish fresh bouquets to either side; she was still adored. The pseudo-candles, squat tubes with a protected bulb shining dimly atop each in the shaded daylight, were like feeding bottles with plastic teats for babies or maybe squeezy bottles of skin cream. Some were blue, others red, though all bore an oval image of the Pope gesturing a blessing.

“Some,” said Gabriella, “shine for a week, others for a month.”

Ah, different sorts of battery.

We would need those pathetic little lights later.

A profusion of galleries was here, and a huge population of marble statues seeming particularly lifelike because of darker dust upon them. As Gabriella escorted us, talking now and then, I came upon a bald- headed, long-bearded monk, his hood resting on the back of his neck, who had turned away — permanently — to consult a little book. He was yet another statue, as if petrified while alive. Trickles of white stains seemed caused by windblown rain that had reached him; but what took my attention most regarding the masses of more sheltered statues was how the dark grey dust of a century and a half had added a velvety shading to all the pleats and folds of drapery, intensifying the naturalism. Too vast a task, presumably, to keep so many hundreds, or thousands, of statues clean. I licked my finger and rubbed a sculpted leg. The moisture made a little dark mark, yet my fingertip came away clean, not coated in grime.

“The dust becomes united with the stone,” said Gabriella, noticing. “That adds chiaroscuro.”

Indeed. Some of the realism was astonishing. The sheer details of stockings or of a baby’s bonnet, for instance! Families or individuals in perfectly rendered clothing of the nineteenth-century middle class stood or knelt by memorials, grieving or consoling or gazing. Stone doors stood ajar, as though the soul of the departed had only just disappeared through them.

And then the sensuality of female curves, and drapery, and petrified flesh! A beautiful young woman nude to the waist swooned in the arms of a robed Death, his veiled skull apparent; yet at the same time this couple might well have been dancing a tango.

Emerging into sunlight, we took in a fieldful of more orthodox modern gravestones and flowers, lined with many tall slim cypresses and junipers, beyond which a great stairway ascended to a domed Pantheon flanked by monumental colonnades. Behind and to the sides, a wooded hill arose, from which hundreds of white mausoleums reached up like temples or the spires and towers of cathedrals.

Yet by now we’d used up the time alloted for our glimpse of the necropolis of Staglieno. Shepherded by Gabriella, the twenty-odd of us trooped back along a gallery towards the gateway.

Just then the tombstone-slabs, which composed the floor of the gallery, trembled. The gallery itself shuddered, and daylight dimmed. Dust didn’t exactly stir into the air, yet visibility lessened considerably as though the air itself had become grey.

Gabriella called out, “I think that’s an earthquake tremor, but don’t worry.” She was a busy, practical woman, mid-forties. “Genoa is actually on a fault line. However, a big quake offshore in 1887 didn’t do much harm to this cemetery even though many buildings in the city were badly damaged.” Was our guide being totally honest? “So you’re in a safe place. Probably there’ll be no more tremors. I’ve lived here all my life.”

So we proceeded onward.

Could clouds have suddenly darkened the sun at the very same moment as the tremor? No doubt that was a coincidence, yet I almost felt as if — so to speak — reality had shaken somewhat. Strangely, we seemed to walk for ages, as though we were treading the same slabs over and over again, although we weren’t, for I looked down in puzzlement at the progress of my feet.

From the office inside the gateway, a couple of middle-aged men in shirtsleeves emerged. The cemetery’s superintendent and a subordinate, a caretaker maybe? Jabbering at one another, they stared up at what we could see, now we were in the open, was a dull pearly sheen masking the sky, as if a peculiar bank of mist had descended over the cemetery — and I was surprised to see the very same just outside the gateway, as if that was an exit to nowhere and nothing rather than to parked cars and a tour bus.

“Signora Vigo!” Of course the superintendent would know all the tour guides by name. Urgently he gestured Gabriella to come — along with the rest of us, who crowded as best we could, in the wake of the two men and Gabriella, into an office where a largish TV set was showing silently in flickery black-and-white what I took to be an old Japanese monster movie.

An enormous tentacle- headed thing with a scaly body and what looked like stumpy, spiky wings was standing up in the sea near an ocean liner. The creature was a grotesque blend of octopus, humanoid, and dragon, and dwarfed the boat, which seemed the size of a toy. Waves from the monster’s motion through the water caused the vessel to tilt alarmingly, though it righted itself. What giant bathtub had this epic been filmed in?

I couldn’t understand any of the rapid- fire Italian, perhaps Genovese dialect, being exchanged between the two men and Gabriella, who looked ashen. Abruptly the movie changed its scene to a view of New York, where another of those monsters stomped in the Hudson River as if that was merely a shallow gutter. The malign creature towered above the skyscrapers of Manhattan, which it began to wreck, flailing elephant-trunks of arms before turning and heading seawards, as if toward its proper home, capsizing merchant ships and ferries like scraps of flottsam.

To my astonishment the channel was CNN, an English-language banner running along the bottom of the screen. An old monster movie showing on CNN? And in flickery black and white? With no sound? I realized that the TV hadn’t been showing CNN when we crowded into the office; spontaneously the TV had jumped channels. And now I caught up with the words as they scrolled sideways.

GIANT SEA MONSTERS ATTACK SHIPS WORLDWIDE.

The channel hopped again. Paris, obviously; Arc de Triomphe in the distance. Creatures exactly the same in appearance as the enormous “sea monsters” — yet now more like two storeys high rather than two thousand — were proceeding with a rolling gait along the Champs Élysées destroying cars either by collision or by treading upon them. All silently. I glimpsed two of the tentacled dripping behemoths themselves colliding and fusing of a sudden into one — while further along the avenue I could swear that a single creature became two identical creatures. Suddenly the TV went blank.

The people in our group were babbling, and the three Italians were voicing off wildly, until the German man drew himself up and bellowed, “Silence!” Our uproar diminished to a few whispers. The German glanced at me and nodded approvingly since I hadn’t been contributing to the noise. Then he tapped his watch significantly.

“Here in Genova it is 2:30 in the afternoon. In New York it should be 7:30 in the morning, maybe 8:30, I am not sure exactly. But I am sure I saw an oval shape of light to the west, way beyond the New Jersey heights. Presumably that was the sun, although looking distorted. Unless it was the fireball from a nuclear weapon. But assume it was the sun. Right now it should not be evening in New York. Did any of you feel something strange about time after the shock while we walked here?”

I raised my hand, and he beckoned me to him, while Gabriella was apparently translating for the benefit of her two fellow citizens.

I said, “I felt as if I was walking over the same space many times. I even watched my feet to make sure they were moving forward.”

“And you are?” he asked.

“My name’s Sally Hughes. I work at CERN in Geneva. The big particle accelerator.”

“So you are a physicist!”

“No, I’m an administrative assistant in the Director-General Unit, Relations with the Host States Service. That means I deal with the various French and Swiss authorities, update regulations about the site we’re on, that sort of thing.”

Less than three per cent of the people at CERN were actual physicists. The site employed masses of engineers, electricians, low temperature specialists, just for instance. How else could CERN have functioned?

“But you are English?”

“My mother is Belgian. I went to school in Liège for a few years.”

“So you’re a bureaucrat, not a physicist.”

“I’m fairly familiar with what we’re doing scientifically at CERN. As are most of the staff.”

“Is anyone here a scientist?” demanded the German, but everyone shook their heads.

“Miss Hughes, was any important experiment at CERN scheduled for today?”

“All the experiments are important, and they happen constantly. But it can take a bit of time to interpret results.”

“Your physicists are trying to recreate the earliest primitive state of the universe, is that not so?”

“That’s an important part of it.”

The superintendent pulled out his mobile and jabbed, but then he frowned at its screen; whereupon he resorted to a fixed line phone on the desk, before gesturing helplessly, non-plussed. Quickly I discovered that my own mobile had no signal. Nor did those of others in our party. We were cut off.

“Did you observe,” our German asked me, “that the enormous krakens in the sea and the smaller but still sizable creatures in Paris had exactly the same appearance? As if the latter were identical to the former, merely on a smaller scale?”

I nodded. “I think I saw two of them join into one, and another suddenly divide into two.”

Ruefully: “I missed that. This suggests to me that both sizes are iterations of the same thing. Assuming that we were indeed watching reality, not a hoax.”

“Iterations?”

“The repetitions of a process, for instance in a computer program, or in fractal geometry such as the Mandelbrot set where the same figure is generated at ever diminishing scales. Or the pattern of a Blumenkohl, a cauliflower. Chaos theory gave rise to this.”

“You ain’t kidding about chaos!” cried a buxom American woman. “That was chaos from hell itself we saw in New York. Hell has broken through into the world! This is the end time right now. That’s the very Antichrist, as prophesied.”

“Verily it is,” called out her presumed husband.

“Be calm, madam, sir,” said our German. “We must analyse. That is why we have brains.”

“You seem to be a scientist,” I said to him quickly, in case the Americans might take offense.

“I am Thomas Henkel, a historical novelist of some reputation, but I have wide-ranging interests, particularly in the history of science present and past, including Chinese, which I taught myself. This is my spouse Angela.” Ann-gay-la.

“I’ll see if our bus is waiting for us,” announced Gabriella, perhaps clinging to a lifeline of routine.

“Excellent idea,” said Henkel, and we all filed out quickly in her wake.

The gateway, and that shimmery mist pressing upon the entrance. Gabriella strode towards and into the mist, promptly disappearing; just a moment later she was returning, and gaping at us all.

“I did not turn round!” she cried out. “Mother of God, I did not turn round. I walked straight. I swear that.”

“Come back here,” Henkel said in a consoling, though authoritative tone. “We must all stay together now.” He alone was standing still, tall on a step, while the rest of us milled about. “Listen to me, while you, Gabriella, translate for your countrymen. If this is no hoax, such as we saw on the television before it failed, and if we are not somehow miraculously protected by nothing external being able to enter here, analogous to Signora Vigo being unable to leave — an assumption that we dare not make! — and if those krakens multiply and iterate themselves at progressively smaller scales, being all essentially reflections of the same entity, then we might encounter one or more within these very walls, of a scale more in accordance with our own size. For which reason, we must all arm ourselves with whatever suitable maintenance tools the Superintendent can make available immediately.”

This certainly made sense, as did the wisdom of acting in an organised manner as regards morale, which might have been Henkel’s major motive. Major or general, I thought. Well, someone needed to take charge.

“Miss Hughes,” he called out to me, “I need an aide, or rather an adjutant.” So Henkel was indeed thinking of himself as a sort of high- ranking officer. “I believe your job qualifies you. We shall see to introductions and assess our skills just as soon as we are all armed.”

From a storeroom near the entrance we were soon equipped, like some band of medieval peasants cajoled to war, with spades, various forks, a scythe, a couple of sickles, shears that could stab, hammers. I myself took a fork and Henkel a spade that could deliver a flat blow as well as jabbing or slicing; and now our impromptu general could get on with formal introductions, to the extent that we hadn’t already spent a whole morning together informally. Dutifully I listed the names and occupations in a notebook taken from the office.

Our ages ranged from a guesstimated 65 for our general down to 15 or 16 for the American girl Alice who kept chewing at her lip, looking scared, scythe in hand. Fortunately there were no small children among us.

“Here is our defensible base,” announced Thomas Henkel, gesturing at the office and other structures beside the gate. “Next we must consider water and food and toilet facilities.”

An enquiry by Gabriella quickly elicited from Rudolfo that only some bread and sausage and cheese was in the office, although of course the building contained a toilet. Gianni went back inside, and emerged to declare that a tap was producing water at about half the usual pressure.

“At least there’s water,” said Gabriella.

“Not to be wasted in a toilet,” said Henkel. “We shall resort to latrines in the grounds, behind trees or bushes. We have ample digging tools.”

The two Scottish students had wandered, whispering, to the near end of the innermost gallery of slabs and statues.

“Something’s coming!” the Scots lad called out. “Jesus Christ!”

Most of us rushed to witness. What had come into sight at the far end of the sepulchral gallery had nothing to do with anything divine according to human understanding and everything to do with what we’d glimpsed on TV. Two and a half meters high, tentacle-faced, it was a human-scale iteration of one of those monstrous creatures from out of a nightmare, or from the warped mind of some special-effects genius on drugs, or from somewhere utterly other.

As the thing proceeded towards us, we gripped our various gardening implements, in my case with trembling hands. A hissing invaded my awareness, similar to static on a radio or a breeze through holes in ancient stones on some windswept mountain: thoooo-loooo, thoooo-loooo, a mesmeric sound that seemed to be rustling within my mind rather than coming from outside to my ears.

The creature’s great warty body was gherkin-green. Under the swollen, thick-veined dome of that pulpy head brooded baleful red eyes. Suckery tentacles or feelers dangled, writhing, from those inhuman, inhumane-seeming features. Webbed frills jutted where ears might be — or was I seeing some sort of fin, even a vestigial wing? The body seemed covered with rubbery warty scales. Two principal muscular tentacles appeared to serve as arms, branching at their tips, and branching again into clusters of anemone-like fingers. Huge triangular feet, that left a glistening snaily trail behind them, bore savagely hooked claws. thoooo-loooo, thoooo-loooo

A vile odor assaulted us, like the glutinous stench of some coral newly torn out of the sea, although more intense, a penetrating smell of primitive biological slime that oughtn’t to be released into the air but should stay masked underwater, a concentration of the reek of seaweed-coated rocks at low tide. thoooo-loooo, thoooo-loooo

Abruptly the romantic novelist screamed, setting off likewise the Dutch art student. This broke a kind of paralyzing horrid enchantment, as felt in dreams where you can’t flee, or can but feebly and very slowly, from what menaces you. We retreated so as not to see what was coming — except for the Australian wine merchant, Bruce, and the burly Hungarian who must have felt that he was defending his bride. Those two stood their ground, armed with a fork and a spade.

What happened next was abominable.

As if the creature had speeded up, or even shifted instantaneously, all of a sudden it was upon the two jabbing men, its arm-tentacles wrenching their weapons from their grip with evidently great strength, to be hurled aside. A clawed foot casually tore open the Australian’s clothing and abdomen. A tentacle snaked into the bloody wound to jerk free the tubing of his intestines, hauling his bowels out and out, two meters, three. Bruce Ballantyne may have died of shock before his body hit the flooring, since it didn’t flop about like a beached fish. At the same time, the other tentacle gripped the Hungarian’s neck — and impossibly hoisted his head aloft atop his spinal column coming right up from out of his shoulders. No natural force could have done that to a man! Could the creature manipulate matter by thought, by malign imagination, as well as physically? Head and spine were discarded even as Jack the son howled, “Dad!” and the newlywed Zsuzsa shrieked.

My list, drawn up only a few minutes earlier, began to seem futile except as a probable In Memoriam. Yet the creature didn’t proceed to hurl itself upon the rest of us as we variously cowered back or made a show of defending ourselves. It regarded us, almost as though the two hideous deaths constituted a demonstration of power.

thoooo-loooo, thoooo-loooo

The American evangelist and his wife sank to their knees, praying loudly, “O merciful God. ” And the creature’s feelers began to move as though conducting an orchestra, almost as if it understood it was sardonically accepting obeisance and encouraging more.

“Kneel and pray for salvation!” Pastor Jimmy Garrett urged us before resuming his chant. Although Rudolpho and Gianni probably didn’t understand what the American said, the two Italians collapsed to their knees, crossing themselves repeatedly.

“Pray to that?” bellowed our general. “For that’s what it looks as though you are doing, sir! Come, we must retreat in an orderly manner! You,” pointing at the Swedish bank manager who had an avuncular look, “see to the Australian boy. And you,” indicating his wife, “guide the shocked widow. Signora Vigo, you take us all to some safer and higher place. From the look of it, the kraken may have difficulty climbing. Quickly now, but do not run in case instinct impels it to give chase.”

Instinct? Or was that creature intelligent, maybe far more intelligent than ourselves, and cruelly so, so that we were to it as a rabbit or a rat is to a human being.?

Presently we’d cut across the huge open area of more modern and simpler graves, most with fresh flowers in vases, hoping that the closely-set white marble gravestones might obstruct the bulky thoooo-loooo creature (I still heard its whisper). And we were ascending that broad flight of steps we’d seen earlier — Selma Strandberg hugging and pulling bereaved Zsuzsa — towards that scallop-tiled pantheon from which colonnades stretched away, behind which, and beyond, groves of cypress and juniper and other trees rose steeply and extended afar, innumerable tall mausoleums poking up amidst the foliage like miniature churches topped with small domes, stone lanterns, finials, crosses, so many ornate habitations of the dead. Could we take refuge in one of those; achieve sanctuary?

Shady pathways wound upward through the groves. As a child, how enchanted I would have been to explore this place, thinking of it as a secret garden. But now.!

At the top of the flight we paused to regain our breath.

Thomas Henkel, unwinded by our journey, surveyed where we had come from. He was a field marshal, if the grave-crowded expanse beneath us were a field. He should have worn a monocle and pointed with a swagger-cane.

“Straight over there!”

Where a broad, tree- lined pathway led from the triple rank of galleries abutting the threefold principal arched gateway stood the thing that Henkel chose to call a kraken, gazing at us from afar and directly opposite. A shiver ran down my spine, for in that moment, despite the distance, the creature seemed to fix on me, like the pin that fastens a butterfly in a display case.

Just then — could it possibly be by the agency of that beast? — a giant oval lens opened in the pearly mist that cloaked the cemetery. From this elevation we could see right over the high perimeter wall. Far beyond the roofed gateway where the creature lingered, beyond where I knew the city’s wide shallow river curved, part stony, part vegetated, I saw part of the raised riverside roadway and many of the apartment blocks, their concrete faded yellow or faded rose.

“Traffic!” Yes, others saw the same. Shimmering, cars and trucks and buses were driving along the highway, undisturbed by any trampling behemoth. No police vehicles nor ambulances were racing, emergency lights flashing. Nor trucks of armed soldiers. Normality, so it seemed. A vision of this part of the city as we’d seen it just an hour or two before.

Or as it was right now, yet in some other reality.? The lens closed up, having taunted us.

“We’re no longer part of that reality!” I said to Henkel.

“We shall talk of this later,” he told me.

Zsuzsa was still sobbing inconsolably. The Australian adolescent was trying to behave like a man, although I saw him quiver. We needed protection.

I pointed at what appeared to be the topmost ten meters or so of a Gothic cathedral amidst trees, the railed area around it apparently choked with bushes.

“Could we take shelter in that spire, for instance?”

“Most of the mausoleums are locked,” observed Gabriella.

“A spade can break a lock.”

“Forget all those pseudo-buildings,” said Henkel. “Anywhere with only one entrance is a trap. We’d be fish in a barrel.”

Of course he was right. The yearning to be inside protective walls had made me stupid. My orderly world, my past, was melting away like wax. What twisted shape would result?

Henkel conferred with Gabriella sotto voce, and we set off, presently to arrive at a tall gap where a wall several meters high, inset with caskets, confronted an equally high blank wall, coarsely plastered with concrete except where the covering had cracked off, exposing bare mortared stones. This narrowest of alleys extended for maybe forty meters, and only one body’s width, terribly claustrophobic — what if something appear at the far end when you were halfway along? To relieve slightly the intense gloom, quite a few lanterns, each containing a battery-powered Pope candle, hung from caskets at various heights. Our field marshal ordained that we should each take one of the feeble lanterns with us, along with our gardening weapons — maybe, if lucky, we might later take the monster by surprise.

And so we came, passing by grieving statues, to a most unusual part of this singular cemetery. Although we were still quite high above ground level, we entered a labyrinth of several balustraded levels linked by stairways, walled with more caskets. On a dismal midway level Henkel decided that we should settle ourselves upon the paving stones.

“We shall take turns to be lookouts at the up-stairway and at the down-stairway. I think the kraken may find those stairways a hindrance. If it does come from one direction, we shall escape the other way.”

To sleep eventually on the hard stone floor in our fairly lightweight clothing? After no food or drink? Meanwhile, doing nothing but wait?

“Signora Vigo,” asked Henkel, “are there water taps nearby in the area outside, to fill flower vases?”

Seeming uncertain — does a tour guide pay much attention to taps? — Gabriella asked Rudolfo, whose response was obviously positive.

“Ask him to go, Signora Vigo, to show where. Jack Ballantine, would you go with two or three others to bring water back?” Yes, give the shocked lad something to do; already he was nodding yes.

“But what do we carry the water in.?”

“Why, in vases which you empty and rinse out. Mijnheer Ruyslinck, will you go too? And Mr. Goldman, to keep watch?”

“No,” said his wife Betsy.

“I’ll be all right, honey.”

“But the other Italian guy knows the cemetery.”

“Precisely for that reason,” said our field marshal, “he must remain with us as a source of information in the temporary absence of his superior.”

Just in case Rudolfo met his death vilely outside.

As soon as this little expedition departed, to loud prayers from Jimmy Garrett, Henkel came and sat by me.

“So,” he asked softly, “you think there may now be two separate realities? In one reality our world has been invaded by these multiple iterations of krakens, on various scales? And in the other reality, another world carries on as normal?”

“It was you who mentioned recreating the primitive earliest state of the universe. before physical laws became fixed. A sort of no-time when a different sort of universe could have burst forth and inflated instead.”

“And maybe that universe did come into a parallel existence, remaining faintly linked to our own universe by early. I think the correct word is entanglement.”

“By and large I know what that means, but I’m only a bureaucrat, as you pointed out.”

“Never mind, at least you know something! Maybe as much as I know. If our physicists have recreated that earliest stage of the cosmos in miniature, does this permit a kind of bridge between two possible cosmoses? Or rather a hole, which can be forced open by a powerful and evil intelligence?”

“How do I know!”

“Miss Hughes, surely it’s better to think rationally along such lines than to imagine that hell has invaded us, especially as that creature corresponds to no religion that I know of.”

“At least we won’t die deluded.”

“We mightn’t die. If those krakens are all linked, and are aspects, avatars, of the same entity, we might come across a tinier iteration of the beast and stamp on it!”

Was our field marshal himself deluded, or was this for the sake of morale?

“If they’re all aspects of the same, what did you say, evil intelligence, that must be one very highly developed intelligence.”

“Compared with which we are stupid? Maybe so, maybe not. But maybe we are very stupid to bombard the consituents of matter into a state which hasn’t existed since the dawn of creation, alien to the universe we know today. Stupid to meddle with the fundamental basis of reality. Maybe that’s how the rift happened, when something broke through — something which may even have been able to touch our world in the past by entanglement, though not as sustainedly as now. Supposing that at the beginning the cosmos divided, one of the twins pursuing our own everyday course, the other cursed twin torn away from its mirror image into a ghastly dimension or between-dimension where vile intelligences arose hungry for the substance of our world. How the invaders are reveling now.”

I thought that Henkel too was reveling somewhat in rhetoric, but I had to ask, “What about the normality we saw through that lens? Which cosmos is that in?”

“I think that was an illusion, a lure to attract us back to the gate, as if we are sheep. The kraken is experimenting with us.”

“If the creature can create illusions. and you saw how impossibly it pulled the spine out of. ” I couldn’t continue.

Thomas Henkel patted me on the shoulder. “There now, be brave. As you have been until now. If the kraken possesses such powers, which seem to us paranormal, well, it isn’t exerting them all the time.”

He stood up, and addressed our huddled company, declaring his theory that we might come across a much smaller kraken and be able to destroy it, thus striking a maybe mortal blow at the larger one which menaced us in the cemetery.

Personally I thought that, if what we’d witnessed on TV was authentic, then nuclear weapons would have destroyed at least several of the greater monsters. Unless of course the monsters could neutralise missiles.

At least our group seemed somewhat comforted by Henkel’s idea.

I’d often wondered in what way I would die one day. That’s the big question which most people avoid asking themselves, not least because there’s no answer until it happens, and even then you mightn’t know the answer, supposing your mind has degenerated prior to death, as my mother’s did. Whereas the truck that skidded and mowed down my dad from behind might have obliterated him before he could even realize. So somehow — due to family history — I thought that I wouldn’t know about death when I died. I would simply cease, the way I once ceased due to anesthetic when I needed a kidney stone broken up by laser. Did I hope simply to cease or alternatively to know the very threshold of death? Had the creature come to teach me?

“There’s still no mobile phone signal,” said Wim Ruyslinck’s girlfriend.

“Did you just try to call Mijnheer Ruyslinck?” demanded Henkel.

“Yes, but his phone’s set to vibrate, not ring. I wouldn’t draw attention to him like that.”

“Wise. However, we should conserve batteries, in case there’s any future use for them. Everyone should switch off their phones. I’ll keep mine switched on in case there is any change. When my charge runs out, I’ll appoint someone else.”

“Runs out?” queried Betsy Goldman, who was plump. “When’s that? In a week or a fortnight? What do we eat till then?”

“The human body doesn’t normally die of hunger for forty or fifty days provided it can drink. Fasting is normal for many people in the world, often involuntarily.”

“You mean I’m starting from a good baseline?” Betsy laughed, perhaps a shade hysterically, but others chuckled or grinned, the first hint of good spirits.

“Very good!” Henkel said approvingly.

Fortunately, her husband and Rudolfo, Jack Ballantyne, and the Dutchman all returned safely soon enough, bearing vases brimming with water.

That, comparatively, was the good time, the time when there was still some hope, even if meager.

We’re allowed our sanctuary, here in this dusty shadowy minor labyrinth of stairways and galleries where the warped oval sun only reaches through a grimy round skylight or so at the top. A place resembling a library, except that instead of books on shelves there are almost identical caskets containing the dead, blessed to have died when they did.

Maybe the creature cannot easily mount or descend the stairs, though I doubt it. So far at least, Cthulhu hasn’t done so. There comes a click in our minds, and the drawn-out whisper inside us, of thoooo-loooo, thoooo-loooo: that might be its name, or maybe a call of power akin to an abracadabra.

Yet the stairs don’t stop Cthulhu from taking us one by one to play with. And then to discard, vilely and agonisingly used. Maybe beyond any agonies caused by human torturers, since I believe its tendrils can reach into our brains to push the buttons of pain. For we must eat. And Cthulhu feeds its pets.

After half a week of hunger for us, our water-bearers of the day sighted a small heap of dead fish and fruits on a path they used. Was that bait? Iain McKinnon darted ahead bravely to scoop the food into his empty vase, and survived. He returned for the rest of the rations, and survived.

On the following day, a pile of raw meat and vegetables was further away. Subsequently, some cheeses and salamis were outside the house-size version of the Pantheon of Rome. Presently we needed to hunt through statued galleries of the cemetery to find wherever our food might be. On all expeditions, near or far, we carried forks — the gardening, not the dining, kind — to defend ourselves and each other, however feebly.

A week passed before, half way along a gallery, Iain Mackinnon trod on a patch of the strongest of glues of the same colour as the flagstones. He couldn’t wrench his sneakers free. As he stopped to untie the trainers, so that Katie Drummond and Paul Goldman and Jack Ballantyne could then try to jump him out of that stickiness, k-thoooo-loooo, thoooo-loooo, towering Cthulhu came. The tines and blades of the gardening tools jerked down to clang against the flagstones as if a powerful magnetic field dragged them. It was, said Paul afterwards, like some bizarre salute to a potentate, the lowering — then the necessary letting go — of swords. Katie could only scream and wave her arms at the advancing entity. Neither she nor Paul nor Jack were going to throw themselves bodily at that monster. One of its feet seemed to suck the glue back into itself as its arm-tentacles immobilized and lifted the Scots student who bellowed, then tried vainly to bite at face-tentacles. as he was rushed away. The forks and spade were no longer fastened to the flagstones. Snatching them up, for what use those might be, the trio did give chase led by Katie, but when they rounded a corner the next gallery was empty except for mournful statues. Thus they related when they returned to our labyrinth — carrying the day’s food, yes; Katie having to be commanded and cajoled by Paul Goldman, for what else could they do, what else?

That night we all heard the thin, piercing screams, for what seemed hours, dying away, starting again. Henkel had to restrain Katie. Of course no one slept. The next day the hideous mess that had been Iain Mackinnon lay on the space outside the Pantheon. He almost seemed to have been turned inside-out by an insane vivisection.

It was. slippery to bury him in a copse as close nearby as we could. Pastor Jimmy Garrett managed to say words and quote parts of the Bible that weren’t excessively evangelistic; and I noticed that his hair, now lank and stringy where it had been lovingly tended and conditioned before, was falling out after these weeks. So hair doesn’t always just go dramatically white overnight with shock.

Katie begged our field marshal to strangle her; she promised not to struggle. Then she begged the taciturn German translator, Hans-Ulrich. Of course nobody would strangle her. In due course, might suicide by assistance become easier to contemplate?

No one went to fetch food for four days. Eventually hunger pangs prevailed. The instinct for survival is so strong. Katie didn’t try to smash her head against the hard stone that was all around us, even though we had no sedatives, only some painkillers and stomach settlers in a couple of the women’s shoulder bags, and a few tampons, soon used. Most bags including mine had been left aboard the bus for our brief stroll into Staglieno.

As time wore on, Zsuzsa was taken similarly, and Selma Strandberg and Nellie van Oven and Wim Ruyslinck and Hans-Ulrich. The monster only rarely resorted to glue, preferring the direct approach. Nevertheless, not each far sortie resulted in a victim. Cthulhu preferred to fool us that by luck or at random we might return safely. Hence the rabbits would scurry to snatch their suppers.

No one spotted another lens in the prevailing mist, supposing that the original lens was designed for us to see. Of course we didn’t venture outdoors more than was essential — oh, the crushing endless fearful misery, even though for distraction we took turns telling our life stories. I think there was only one lens, and that it showed a memory of our world just before the Cthulhu creatures arrived, not an image of normality continuing in some parallel reality that might even be reachable. Nor did anyone stumble upon a mini- monster to stab and slash and crush.

Monster? More like a baneful sadistic god, if it could multiply itself on different scales all across the world! If it weren’t simply this cemetery of Staglieno that had been abstracted from ordinary reality by a potent entity from another universe that could conjure up illusions.

Nor did every abducted victim scream through the night. Maybe a tongue was removed first of all.

“Each person lost,” said Garrett one day, “is a sacrifice to it. A human sacrifice. As in pagan antiquity. But worse. I think it’s. rationing out its sacrifices. Or maybe it’s like a serial killer who gets satisfied for a while until the head of steam builds up again.”

Garrett frequently goes outside to keep watch, from the top of the steps to the Pantheon. Thomas Henkel doesn’t object to what might seem to be a desire for martyrdom on the evangelist’s part — at least, until martyrdom actually commences. Any additional information is valuable in our field marshal’s blue eyes, sometimes cool, sometimes almost twinkly. I think we’re all losing our sanity somewhat, or else we no longer remember what sanity is or was.

And I accompany Garrett, despite a dark look of mistrust from ex-beauty queen Mary-Sue.

“I quite often see him walking in the garden,” Garrett tells me. “That’s to say, it walking in this cemetery. I’m still a witness of the Lord’s, whatever has happened.”

I feel more sympathetic to the evangelist now than at any previous time. He’s trying to cope without ranting nonsense.

“Look, Sally.”

And there is the Cthulhu thing in the distance, pacing slowly, rollingly, as I imagine a sailor newly on land after a very long voyage. On our land, of which Cthulhu has taken possession. The Cthulhu thing turns, aware of our scrutiny, and once more I experience the sensation, thoooo-looo thoooo-loooo, that it’s staring directly into my eyes, into my mind which may seem very simple to it, like a seashell with a soft little body inside.

Rudolfo gone. Paul gone. Dionijs Ruyslinck gone. Anders Strandberg gone, to join his wife, as it were. And Angela Henkel gone — our field marshal needed to send her out voluntarily more than once to bring food back, otherwise he might have seemed to be protecting her, thus impairing his authority. The available pool of foodbringers is diminishing all the time. What an unbalanced game of chess, wherein pawn after pawn is removed from one side only when we make a wrong move, as is inevitable. Despite Thomas Henkel’s laudable pretensions, our side only consists of sacrificial pawns, no king or knight or queen.

All the cut flowers in vases died long ago, but rain falls frequently and suddenly to lubricate the cemetery, whereupon Cthulhu walks in those heavy showers to lubricate itself, wafting its face tentacles. What does the creature muse about? Maybe it had a million years previously to muse, and now it amuses itself. Creator and creature are quite similar words.

I total the days scratched by me, as Henkel’s adjutant, on the wall in five-bar gates. Does a week of five days, rather than seven, make the time pass more quickly, even though that system produces more weeks? Look: we survivors have lived for twenty-three weeks by now. August should be the current month, although the temperature stays much the same as that mild April day of our imprisonment; the brightish oval wavery yellow shape which we sometimes see above the mist, and which moves across the sky, should be much hotter by now if it’s the same sun we knew.

The piles of food put out, or materialized, in unpredictable places for us pets to find grow smaller in proportion to our diminishing numbers; Cthulhu is keeping tally. It plays like the wicked boy inflating a frog with a straw through its anus until the poor creature explodes. Or pulling the legs off a spider one by one to test its balance. Only much more so.

Discarded playthings are sometimes still alive when we reach them, maybe without teeth, or with a tiny worm swimming in a single gaping double-yolked eye, gibbering softly, leaking, no longer seeming human; we dispatch those with a spade blow, those of us who remain.

Our leader has gone; Thomas Henkel is taken. So am I in command now, promoted from adjutant on the disastrous field of battle, or rather of massacre? The others seem to expect this, and I can’t reasonably demur. Jimmy Garrett blesses me.

Garrett is taken, to meet his new master, intimately.

By now, those of us who remain are myself and Katie Drummond and Anne Gijsen and Alice Goldman and Jack Ballantyne. Four young women, one young man. Is a vile parody of Adam and Eve to be enacted? To my best knowledge no one has fucked anyone else since this all began, for mutual comfort. Stone floors, for a start; and who would sneak off into the softer sheltering groves? I think Anne and Dionijs came close, some time after brother Wim’s death, but they were too upset.

Even though there’s supposed to be an instinct to propagate the race, in extremis. Can it be that we’re the only surviving human beings? Or are other iterations of Cthulhu playing variations on this vicious game all over the world? The latter seems more likely than that we should be the. privileged ones.

thoooo-looo thoooo-loooo

When we awake from dire dreams this morning, Katie is dead, apparently strangled, to judge by bruise marks. Of course we gave up posting guards weeks ago now.

“If one of you doesn’t confess,” I say, “then we must assume that it can come here while we’re sleeping.”

“Naw,” says Australian Jack, “that would be too merciful.”

I wait for him to fess up.

“It was me,” says Anne. “I go, I went, to judo classes in Holland. It’s a judo strangle.” She crossed her hands, back to back, grips an imaginary shirt or blouse collar, and rotates her wrists. “Pressure of the wrist bones on the carotid arteries. Unconscious in fifteen or twenty seconds, death in maybe a couple of minutes. Katie begged me. She was so scared.” Anne looks from face to face, almost expressionlessly. “Well. Does anyone else want this? If only,” she adds, “I could strangle myself.”

“Yessss,” comes from Alice Goldman. “Yes, please. ” Jack and I have kept quiet.

Anne nods. “I shall not strangle more of you, though. No more of us. Only Alice. I don’t wish to leave myself alone.”

“Do you want,” Jack asks Alice, “that we leave, then come back after a few minutes?”

“No! Watch! Witness me!”

In what sense, witness? Witness her being brave, of all things? Cowardly brave?

Alice lies on her back across two slabs. “Like this?”

Anne nods.

“What if my blouse snaps?” Our clothes are by no means in tatters, merely very soiled.

Anne advances on hands and knees, then she lowers herself beside Alice, one leg across her body as if to restrain her; and her reversed hands slide round the American girl’s neck as if lovingly.

After several seconds Alice does slap her entire free arm upon the slab as if in submission at a judo contest, but only once. Her exposed feet drum a little, then are still.

Anne remains pressed upon Alice for what seems a long time, before the young Dutchwoman rolls aside.

“See,” she says, sitting up, “I can be a murderer too, just as well as the thing.”

“I’d hardly say — ” begins Jack.

“Say nothing.”

None of us wish to be left alone, so we all go out together to hunt for our food, or be hunted. Like an offering, we find two vacuum-packs of sliced mortadella sausage and half a dozen oranges on the step under a grandiose melancholy memorial attended by a kneeling, praying woman and a bearded man who stands respectfully with gaze downcast. That woman’s crocheted shawl is so intricate. Her ruffled cuffs, the teardrop the size of a lemon pip spilling upon the side of her nose. He, with a coat over his arm, clasping his hands before him, a couple of fingers loosely — though inseparably — holding a grey bowler hat. Midway between the petrified pair, our meal.

“Two packets,” says Anne, a quaver in her voice.

And Cthulhu comes.

for her.

At least there’s no distant screaming tonight. Maybe a tough tentacle is down her throat, no doubt allowing her to breathe, though, as she writhes.

Jack and I don’t catch sight of Anne’s corpse anywhere on today’s search for more food. This takes us hours, but there are no birds to steal. Finally, we find what we seek upon the simple marble tomb of Mazzini’s mother, within a railed little garden in front of the squat Doric columns supporting the massive architrave carved with the name of the great Italian patriot, wrapped over by creeper-clad rocks — for the atrium and then the crypt beyond, very dark within, burrow into the hillside in this part of the wild woodland. Paradoxically, quite close to our sanctuary, almost the last place we think to look.

On his mother’s tomb by a towering tree: a single plate of white pasta scattered with clams. Brought from where, and how?

“Ladies first?” enquires Jack with an effort at humour.

Together we advance into the little railed garden.

A soft stirring sound from within the mausoleum.

k-thoooo-looo

comes.

I do hear the shrieks tonight, and try to stopper my ears. Maybe I should jam into my ears the long-expired Pope candles. The scene repeats in my mind: stooping to pass under the architrave, the tentacled monster had surveyed us. No point in fleeing; we knew it could catch us.

Heads or tails, male or female, Jack or me?

Then Cthulhu had swooped upon Jack and swept him away howling back inside that mausoleum. Is it so shameful that I seized the plate of pasta and clams and ran off with it?

So I’m all alone in the labyrinth now; and I’m hungry. Does something really special await the solitary, and female, survivor?

Maybe a boiled lobster, and no evil consequences on this particular occasion.

I’m in the gallery where a boy and his sister, hair and clothing perfectly rendered, are witnessing the departure of their mother’s soul to heaven — the bronze door of the sepulcher above is already half-closed as the boy gestures upward, his other arm tenderly embracing his sister. Beside the children’s feet lie a big bar of nut chocolate and an overripe banana. Chocolate! Immediately I’m tearing off the paper and silver foil, and biting into the sweetness.

But for the sudden assault of stench, I almost fail to notice Cthulhu coming until it is upon me, entangling me, its suckers tearing off slacks and shirt and underwear. The suffocating smell is of sewers and rotting fish.

Face tentacles sliding into my ears, thoooo-loooo thoooo-loooo, arm tentacles probing my anus, my cunt.

A storm of ecstasy like a blinding enveloping light! A momentary shaft of terrible agony as if I’m burned alive!

The ectasy again! I would crawl begging to the beast for this, like those rats that burn off their paws by pressing a red-hot plate that stimulates the pleasure centers in their brains.

Cthulhu is. calibrating me as, yes, it copulates with some organ or tentacle or other.

And I’m alive, lying naked and used — for how long? — upon flagstones bearing names of the dead. Alive. So violated but alive. Cthulhu has gone, though leaving his odor upon me.

At the tomb of Mazzini it must have been choosing whether its bride should be an Australian youth or me.

And what is a bride but a receptacle for seed?

A movement. What?

The statue of the boy has lowered its arm and removed his hand from his sister’s shoulder. She turns and steps down, and he copies her. The chiaroscuro of dust still remains on these nineteenth-century children as they step towards me, as I roll with difficulty on to my hands and knees so as to press myself up from the floor, and haul my aching abused self upright. The children remain marble, yet that marble has become a flexible, mobile parody of what it represented so faithfully for a century and more. Those clothes of theirs wouldn’t come off them, I know that — the bodies are as one flesh with the garments. The boy and girl pause, looking up at me now.

Confused words come from their softened mouths.

Not Italian words, no.

Words with a Swedish lilt, I’m almost sure.

The voices of Anders and Selma Strandberg, the bank manager and his wife.

“. help us. ”

“. how small we. ”

“. where we been. ”

“. what we. ”

“. hurt. ”

“. hurt. ”

Within half an hour a score of statues have found me, arriving slowly, step by step.

The pious little old proletarian peasant woman, long-skirted, aproned and shawled, whom Gabriella had said sold peanuts all her life to save up for a statue of herself in Staglieno — she still carries strings of inedible peanuts as if those are rosaries.

The tall young swoony woman, nude to the waist, now detached from the grasp of the veiled skeleton.

A suited businessman, crumpled bowler hat in hand.

More children, dressed like miniature adults.

Some of the minds in the statues seem insane from the experiments they suffered. Others are very confused. Two can only speak in what must be Hungarian.

Eating or drinking is plainly impossible for them. Do they envy or resent my chocolate? Impossible to tell. Will their minds emerge more, and maybe heal, as time passes?

For what capricious purpose have we been reunited? So that a score of animated statues can provide company while something grows inside me — until at last I give birth surrounded by mobile dusty marble people, in a reverse of their previous roles as mourners at death-bed scenes. How often will Cthulhu play with me stinkingly again.?

Jack is the brightest of the children. He knows how his father died, and how he himself died. And how, but for me, he would now be bearing spawn in his belly.