Cthulhu's Reign

GHOST DANCING Darrell Schweitzer

By the time he’s on the beltway around Boston, heading north, he’s got the road to himself. But the radio still works and, although it mostly picks up static, every once in a while there’s a clear voice, often just babbling or screams or frenzied prayers, but once or twice something approximating a coherent news summary, describing incredible scenes all along the coastlines of the world: mountains of flesh, miles high, roaring up out of the depths, tidal waves and tsunamis wiping out major cities in minutes. New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Washington are gone. The air overhead looks overcast, but he can smell the oil and smoke, and he knows that’s Boston burning.

North. He has nowhere to go, really, but he’s driving north, all because of a last-minute email:

He hasn’t seen Robert Tillinghast since college, almost thirty years ago, but Tillinghast is right, it is as good a time as any, because as far as Eric Shaw is concerned, time has ended, and his life ended too the day his wife and two daughters went to New York to see a show and just happened to be there when something the size of several dozen blue whales misshapenly lumped together with several giant squids tossed in for good measure heaved up out of the Hudson and came slithering up Broadway with tentacles flying like whiplashes, toppling buildings until the whole of lower and midtown Manhattan looked like “one vast pyroclastic flow,” in the words of a newspaper reporter filming it all from a helicopter before something suddenly shot up and snatched him out of the air like a frog’s tongue zapping a fly.

Once, when he stopped at a deserted rest stop along I-95 in Connecticut, he sat down in the McDonald’s concession after helping himself to a cold hamburger, and he opened his laptop, got on the Internet, and saw that footage again.

The net was still up then, miraculously. But that was hours ago. It’s gone now. In a fast- moving world, hours ago is forever. Now, he doesn’t need the net and its wild speculations to tell him the nature and cause of the worldwide catastrophe, of the ending of the reign of mankind on earth. He knows that. Robert Tillinghast knows too. It’s their secret.

Their guilty little secret, because just maybe they might have had something to do with how things have turned out.

So he can only drive, and by the time he reaches that little stretch where 95 crosses a narrow strip of New Hampshire it is getting dark, and a thick fog has set in. He is still too, too terribly close to the coast, when he hears a bellow like a thousand foghorns, deafening, and something best described as a centipede the size of the Queen Mary with legs as thick as telephone poles comes lumbering out of the woods to his right, grinding up the highway into rubble as its legs slam/slam/slam down in front of him, behind him, as the black shadow of the thing passes overhead and by some dark miracle he is not crushed. This is no dream, no hallucination brought on by fatigue or grief, but something definitely there. A minute later he is alone again, desperately trying to pick his way by the light of his headlights through the less mangled bits of the road surface until he can reach a more or less undamaged portion. By then there are more bellowing sounds, more of those things coming out of the woods from the direction of the ocean, but he is, at last able to reach solid, flat asphalt and speed away.

Maine, when he was a child, into his adolescence, was a summer wonderland, where the family went for month-long vacations every summer, his home away from home, where he had a whole different set of friends, where he met and dated his first girlfriend.

He starts to see familiar signs now: Kittery, York, Portland, Yarmouth, Bath. There he has to get off I-95 onto the more winding, semirural Route 1 and follow the coast. Too damned near to the water all the way. Why the hell couldn’t Robert Tillinghast live in, say, Kansas, for God’s sake?

He knows perfectly well why. It is their little secret and has a great deal to do with the present circumstances, if very little to do with God.

So it is when he finally, finally reaches the vacation-land of his youth, and winds his way through a half-destroyed, still smoldering Rockland, and has a bizarre encounter with a dozen men and women who come streaking out of the darkness clad in white, trailing tatters like something out of a mummy movie, screaming and babbling, clawing at the windows of his car. After that little snapshot of mass insanity, and a slow crawl through a deserted but picture-perfect Camden — yes, there’s the library, the Village Restaurant, that overpriced bookshop, the schooners in the harbor; he knows every brick of this place; nothing has changed in twenty years, except of course that the world has ended in the meantime — after all that, with no time, alas, for wallowing in nostalgia, Eric Shaw, grieving father, widower for less than forty-eight hours, finally arrives at the address he has been given, one of those huge halfgingerbread, half gothic Victorian piles he’d driven by so many times during vacations in the past, the sort of place that tends to get broken up into apartments or turned into resort hotels these days; except for this one, because the Tillinghast family has always been unbelievably, fantastically wealthy.

After suitably spooky preliminaries, including standing on the cavernous porch for a moment and looking down over sloping lawn into the blackness where something like a series of enormous, glowing paper lanterns seems to be rising out of the waters of Penobscot Bay, after he enters the darkened house through the conveniently unlocked door, makes his way upstairs, cringing at strange sounds, some of them like grunts or muted barks — at the top, in a fully- lighted room he finds his old “friend” Tillinghast seated in front of an immense flatscreen TV, control device in hand, clicking through picture after picture, laughing hysterically.

Eric can only stand in the doorway of the room, too stunned to react, thinking, Yeah, sure, why not? Millions of people are dead and I just risked my life to drive hundreds of miles to sit and watch TV with a crazy guy I don’t even like.

But he does sit down on the sofa indicated, with Tillinghast beside him, because they have their little secret.

Eric can only stare at this gaunt, hawk-nosed, half-balding, but wild haired man who bears hardly the slightest resemblance to the fascinating, overpowering, and slightly terrifying Robert Tillinghast he had met when he was eighteen and Tillinghast was twenty, but then Tillinghast reaches over and grabs him by the scruff of the neck the way you would a cat, and twists his head toward the screen and says, “Now be a good boy, and watch.”

Tillinghast had always done that in the old days, because he was taller, had a longer reach, and was stronger. He’d treated Eric like a child, called him his “good boy,” but was not the sort of person, back then, any more than he seems to be one now, inclined to take no for an answer.

“Now look at this,” Tillinghast says, as he picks up the control and switches the scenes. It’s not a live broadcast, obviously, because nothing is being broadcast anymore. It’s something he must have saved off cable in the past few days.

There are scenes of religious ceremonies all over the world, a candle-lit procession up the side of a mountain in the Andes, great crowds of saffron-robed monks bowing down in front of a pagoda in Thailand, another candle-lit affair, but with people waving American flags and crosses and preachers screaming hellfire over a PA system, somewhere in a middle of a field in the Midwest, and then Tillinghast interrupts and says, “This one’s really good.”

St. Peter’s Square, Rome. Night. Lots of floodlights. Cut to: inside the great basilica, the Pope himself conducting mass, surrounded by dozens of cardinals. Cut to: outside, in the square, the packed crowd (thousands of candles like flickering fireflies). His Holiness and the cardinals loom above the huddled masses, projected on two enormous screens for the benefit of those who couldn’t fit inside the basilica. The Pope raises his hands and calls out to God to rescue the faithful in this time of greatest need, and he calls on the multitudes to renew their faith in Christ and look to the scriptures for some hope in the days to come — only by then the multitudes aren’t paying much attention because St. Peter’s Square has broken out in a bedlam of panic and carnage as something black and oily and huge starts pouring out of the sky, splattering across the floodlit dome like an immense, palpitating stain, pouring onto the crowd below.

“Shoggoths,” says Robert Tillinghast, chuckling softly. “It’s raining shoggoths in Rome. I don’t think there’s anything about that in Revelations.”

He spits in disgust and contempt.

Eric can’t think of what to say in response. He’s exhausted, drained, disoriented. It’s almost as if he hears someone else muttering, with his voice, “What happened in Mecca?”

“Pretty much the same,” is the answer. “Nobody knows, really. Mecca’s not there any more.”

The scene cuts to actual US Navy footage of the rising of the lost island of R’lyeh in the South Pacific. Something like green smoke pours out of crevices between the impossible angles of buildings the eye cannot quite bring into focus, and there is a hint of a massive shape rising up, writhing and wriggling, a cloudy outline of hunched shoulders; then wings spread wide, the screen goes blank, and Robert Tillinghast, in his best Porky Pig voice, cackles, “Th-th-that’s all folks!”

Eric places his elbows on his knees, holds his head in his hands, and begins to sob, not even consciously thinking of the deaths of his wife and his daughters, or of the end of the world, but merely because the tears just flow of their own accord. Only after a while, with great effort he is finally able to gasp, “Would you kindly tell me what the fuck your point is?”

Now Tillinghast puts his hand on Eric’s shoulder gently, as if to comfort him.

“My point is that it’s all ghost dancing.”

“Ghost dancing?”

“Yeah. You know how, at the end of the nineteenth century, when the American Indians — or do I mean Native Americans? — no need to be politically correct any more — knew they had lost everything to the white man, they started a new religion that held that if everybody put on their ghost shirts and did the magical ghost dance, then bullets would bounce off them, the white men would go away, the buffalo would return, and everything would be just peachy. That’s what people do, at the end, when they have no realistic hope left. They lapse into fantasy. That’s what’s going on right now. The ghost shirts and ghost dances didn’t do a whole lot of good against the Gatling guns at Wounded Knee. You saw what happened to the Pope. The spheres are conjoined. The gateways are open. The Old Ones return. That’s it. Ding! Game over.”

Eric just stares at him, and Tillinghast continues.

“Now I imagine you are exhausted, and have been under a great deal of stress, and you could use a good hot meal and a comfortable bath and a good night’s sleep before we calmly discuss our future plans, or even why I brought you here — ”

“Yeah,” Eric says. “I really could.”

But suddenly Tillinghast leaps to his feet, grabs him by the scruff of the neck and hauls him off the sofa. “Well, that’s entirely too bad, because the evening’s festivities won’t wait, and have been delayed as long as possible so that you could arrive. So, I’m sorry, but we have to go right now.”

Eric is too befuddled to resist as he finds himself hustled over to a closet and handed a robe of some kind, which, as he unfolds it, he recognizes. Black, hooded, embroidered, covered with sigils and signs copied from the pages of the Necronomicon. He struggles to put it on, over his clothes, remembering that in the old days it was customary to be naked underneath one of these things; but, as he hesitates, Tillinghast assures him that tonight such details are not going to matter.

Robed, the two of them take in hand ancient, golden lanterns of bizarre design, which allegedly came from beneath the sea, and, lighting the little candles within with an ordinary cigarette lighter, they proceed out of the house, across the porch, down a flight of wooden stairs, and then along a path along the edge of the lawn, downhill, toward the bay.

From somewhere up ahead he can hear chanting, and it occurs to Eric Shaw that on such a night as this — as dark as this anyway, overcast, starless — way back when, when the two of them were young, before their parting of the ways when he supposedly turned from the sinister life’s course he had found himself upon, moved to New Jersey and become a respectable illustrator of children’s books, most of which seemed to have something to do with happy bunny-rabbits — on such a night as this, one Cindy Higgins had, as it was whispered at the time, come to an exceedingly nasty end. The police never solved the case. Afterwards, Eric and Robert had parted, Eric to supposed respectability, Robert to his celebrated, scandal-ridden career as a poet and artist and alleged cult-leader of truly remarkable extravagance and rumored depravity.

All this comes rushing back to Eric now, the traumatically repressed details, the veils of hidden memories torn back, as he realizes that he is now on the very same beach, in the very same spot, where the aforesaid Cindy Higgins, who hadn’t been his first girlfriend from Maine vacations when he was a kid, but his first girlfriend’s younger sister’s best friend, whom he had lured into the orbit of Robert Tillinghast and his cronies with the promise of a really good time, had met her hideous fate, very much in the manner that the girl who is there now seems about to meet hers.

Eric, physically and emotionally exhausted to the point of delirium can only exclaim, rather ridiculously, “Jesus Christ, what a fucking cliché!” when he realizes that he and his host have now joined the company of about a dozen similarly robed cultists who are standing by torchlight around a stone altar, on which is stretched, bound with the requisite leather thongs, a genuine naked virgin, a pale, blonde, teenaged girl, probably about Cindy’s age, or his own younger daughter’s age, who screams and whimpers and sobs begs to be let go, promising she won’t tell, as if that somehow matters now.

It is, Eric realizes, just like old times. There are certain things in life that you can’t just walk away from, and being a member of a human sacrifice cult is probably high on the list. No good saying you didn’t mean it or you’re sorry. It’s way too late for that.

The only difference between this time and what happened to Cindy is that now there are things the size of small elephants, but spiny and rough and vaguely humanoid, crouched in the water, almost out of view beyond the range of the torchlight. They would be hard to see if their eyes weren’t glowing. You might think they were rocks if they didn’t make a chittering and hissing sound.

The last time he and Robert had done this, after they were done and Cindy was gone, taken by something that reached for her out of the darkness, Robert had shouted something out across the water, and from the distance had come a reply, followed by a thunderclap, and a flash of light on the horizon, then a cold, rushing wind that whipped up waves like a sudden squall.

“We’ve opened the gate just a crack,” Robert had said then. “It is a beginning.”

Now, as the cultists begin their chanting and the girl whimpers, Robert whispers to Eric, “We have to open the gate all the way, to make ourselves useful to our new masters, so there will be a place for us in the new world.” After a pause he adds, regarding the girl, “Oh, by the way, she’s not a virgin. Not anymore. It turns out that doesn’t matter. So I took care of it myself. It’s one of the perks you get in this line of work.” Then he nods toward the hunched monsters in the surf and says, “You know what I’ve always said. If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em. That is why we are gathered here today, dearly beloved in the sight of Dagon.”

Inevitably, as the frenzied ceremony reaches is climax — as Eric plays along and waves his arms and chants along with the rest, because he’s been here before and he knows his lines — Robert Tillinghast produces from within his robe the vast, curved, polished ritual knife that the well equipped cult-leader always brings to a occasion like this, and it is only as Tillinghast stands over the altar with the knife upraised like something on a glowing, black-light poster you’d get in an occult shop back when they were kids, that Eric is able to formulate even a vague semblance of a plan.

He reaches up. He grabs Tillinghast by the wrists and prevents him from bringing the knife down.

“No. Let me do it!”

Tillinghast draws back, startled. The other cultists stop chanting.

“You?”

“Let me do it,” Eric says. “You know. To show commitment. I have to be a part of this. I’m not just here for decoration.”

“That’s right,” says Robert Tillinghast. “You’re not. Try to get the heart out in one piece. That’s what they like best.”

And looking down at the now silent girl and remembering Cindy Higgins and his own daughters, Eric suddenly rams the knife into Tillinghast’s gut as hard as he can, and pulls upward with a savage yank until he can feel ribs starting to give way, and he twists the handle, knowing he’s probably ruined the heart.

Nevertheless Tillinghast manages to cling to life for several more seconds, long enough to gasp, “What are you doing.? The ceremony must be completed. ”

He may even still be alive when Eric whispers in his ear, “No! It doesn’t matter. Can’t you see that? You’re just ghost-dancing like all the rest. You’re the biggest goddamn self-deluded ghost-dancer of them all. Not the Pope, you!”

But he is almost certainly dead when Eric holds him up, still impaled on the knife, turns him around as if he’s about to address his astonished, faithful flock, then heaves him face-down into the surf.

“Look!” Eric shouts. “Look! It’s all bullshit! This isn’t going to save you!” He points at the things now lumbering toward the beach. “They don’t give a damn about what side you think you’re on, and it’s not a case of fucking if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em, because they aren’t going to let you join ’em except the parts of you as they forget to pick from between their teeth!”

Now the monsters roar and come splashing out of the water and the cultists are screaming as teeth and claws tear them to shreds. Eric starts sawing away at the girl’s bonds with the knife.

From over the water come several thundering, honking sounds that might be foghorns or ships, but he knows they are not.

Gunshots ring out. Something slams into him in the side, hard, and he feels a burning pain that begins to spread as he works. But he has the girl free now, and he hauls her up off the beach, onto the sloping lawn, driving her toward the house, his car, and a possible get-away. He’s having trouble breathing now. He’s coughing up blood. He’s not going to make it. But she might. He tries to take off his robe and give it to her, but just loses his grip on her and falls down painfully onto his injured side, then rolls onto his back. He fumbles for his car keys, under the robe.

Above him, the fog has cleared, and the stars shine in all their distant, cold, pitiless brilliance.

He doesn’t know if he’s accomplished anything. This is probably just more ghost-dancing, but it sure felt good to try.

He catches hold of the girl by her ankle. She kneels down beside him. He gives her the car keys.

Above, the mad auroras roll.