The world is still drowning.
The stink of oceanic brine rolls down into the tunnels of the mine.
I tune the dials of the ham radio, call out a few more S.O.S. messages.
The.45 sits on the blanket before me. I stare at it, gleaming with silver promise.
Evelyn isn’t here to stop me this time. One quick, clean shot, and I won’t smell the ocean stench any more, won’t have the dreams anymore, won’t hear the static. The unbroken, white static.
My bottled water is running out. I can’t drink the rain, but I know sooner or later, I’ll have to. I don’t want to think what it will do to me. But thirst is a demon no man can outrun for long. I sit staring at the gun, listening to the radio static, making my decision.
I pick up the.45 and slide the barrel into my mouth. It tastes cold and bitter. Static fills my ears. I fix my thumb so that it’s resting on the trigger. I say a silent prayer, and think of my daddy’s face.
Something breaks the static.
A momentary glitch in the wall of white noise. I blink, my lips wrapped around the gun. I pull it from my mouth and fiddle with the knobs. There it is again! A one-second break in the static. a voice!
I turn the volume up, wait a few moments, then pick up the mike, dropping the pistol.
“Hello!” I say, my voice hoarse like sand on stone. “Hello! Is anybody there?”
White noise static. then a pause, followed by a single word, ringing clear as day from the dusty speaker, thick as mud.
Cthulhu.
I drop the mike. Something twists in my gut, and I step back from the radio like it’s another monstrosity burst from Evelyn Colton’s belly.
Again it speaks to me, a voice oozing out of the cold ocean depths.
Cthulhu.
The word sinks into me like a knife, a smooth incision. a length of cold metal between the eyes would be no less effective. The pain is a spike of understanding. I bend over, my hand hovering between the silver-plated pistol and the radio mike. I grab the mike, not the gun, and raise it to my lips.
I stare into the darkness at the back of the cavern and sigh out my reply.
“Cthulhu. ”
I drop it to the floor and kick over the little table on which the radio sits. It crashes against the stone, spilling the lantern. Flaming oil ignites the blankets, and the cavern fills with noxious smoke. I turn my back on it and walk toward the smell of briny rain, my throat dry as bone.
As I come up out of the silver mine for the last time, the storm rages, winged things soar between the clouds, and I hear a chorus of howling and screeching punctuated by moaning thunder. Thirst consumes me.
I open my mouth to the black skies and drink the oily rain. It flows down my throat like nectar, quenching my terrible thirst in the most satisfying way. It sits cool and comforting in my belly, and I drink down more of it.
I’ll never again be thirsty, I realize.
This isn’t the end of the world.
It’s the beginning.
My body trembles with hidden promise. I know I’ve got a place in this new world.
Towering things with shadow- bright wings descend to squat about me, staring with clusters of glazed eyes as
I crumple. shiver. evolve.
I raise my blossoming face to the storm and screech my joy across the face of the world.
His world.
Cthuuuuulhuuuuu.
Spreading black wings, I take to the sky.
THE SHALLOWS
John Langan
“Il faut cultiver notre jardin.”
“I could call you Gus,” Ransom said.
The crab’s legs, blue and cream, clattered against one another. It did not hoist itself from its place in the sink, though, which meant it was listening to him. Maybe. Staring out the dining room window, his daily mug of instant coffee steaming on the table in front of him, he said, “That was supposed to be my son’s name. August us. It was his great-grandfather’s name, his mother’s father’s father. The old man was dying while Heather was pregnant. We. I, really, was struck by the symmetry: one life ending, another beginning. It seemed a duty, our duty, to make sure the name wasn’t lost, to carry it forward into a new generation. I didn’t know old Gus, not really; as far as I can remember, I met him exactly once, at a party at Heather’s parents’ a couple of years before we were married.”
The great curtain of pale light that rippled thirty yards from his house stilled. Although he had long since given up trying to work out the pattern of its changes, Ransom glanced at his watch. 2:02. PM, he was reasonably sure. The vast rectangle that occupied the space where his neighbor’s green-sided house had stood, as well as everything to either side of it, dimmed, then filled with the rich blue of the tropical ocean, the paler blue of the tropical sky. Waves chased one another towards Ransom, their long swells broken by the backs of fish, sharks, whales, all rushing in the same direction as the waves, away from a spot where the surface of the ocean heaved in a way that reminded Ransom of a pot of water approaching the boil.
(Tilting his head back, Matt had said, How far up do you think it goes? I don’t know, Ransom had answered. Twenty feet in front of them, the sheet of light that had descended an hour before, draping their view of the Pattersons’ house and everything beyond it belled, as if swept by a breeze. This is connected to what’s been happening at the poles, isn’t it? Matt had squinted to see through the dull glare. I don’t know, Ransom had said, maybe. Do you think the Pattersons are okay? Matt had asked. I hope so, Ransom had said. He’d doubted it.)
He looked at the clumps of creamer speckling the surface of the coffee, miniature icebergs. “Gus couldn’t have been that old. He’d married young, and Heather’s father, Rudy, had married young, and Heather was twenty- four or — five. call him sixty-five, sixty-six, tops. To look at him, though, you would have placed him a good ten, fifteen years closer to the grave. Old. granted, I was younger then, and from a distance of four decades, mid-sixty seemed a lot older than it does twenty years on. But even factoring in the callowness of youth, Gus was not in good shape. I doubt he’d ever been what you’d consider tall, but he was stooped, as if his head were being drawn down into his chest. Thin, fraiclass="underline" although the day was hot, he wore a long-sleeved checked shirt buttoned to the throat and a pair of navy chinos. His head. his hair was thinning, but what there was of it was long, and it floated around his head like the crest of some ancient bird. His nose supported a pair of horn- rimmed glasses whose lenses were white with scratches; I couldn’t understand how he could see through them, or maybe that was the point. Whether he was eating from the paper plate Heather’s uncle brought him or just sitting there, old Gus’s lips kept moving, his tongue edging out and retreating.”
The coffee was cool enough to drink. Over the rim of the mug, he watched the entire ocean churning with such force that whatever of its inhabitants had not reached safety were flung against one another. Mixed among their flailing forms were parts of creatures Ransom could not identify, a forest of black needles, a mass of rubbery pink tubes, the crested dome of what might have been a head the size of a bus.
He lowered the mug. “By the time I parked my car, Gus was seated near the garage. Heather took me by the hand and led me over to him. Those white lenses raised in my direction as she crouched beside his chair and introduced me as her boyfriend. Gus extended his right hand, which I took in mine. Hard. his palm, the undersides of his fingers, were rough with calluses, the yield of a lifetime as a mechanic. I tried to hold his hand gently. politely, I guess, but although his arm trembled, there was plenty of strength left in his fingers, which closed on mine like a trap springing shut. He said something, Pleased to meet you, you’ve got a special girl here, words to that effect. I wasn’t paying attention; I was busy with the vise tightening around my fingers, with my bones grinding against one another. Once he’d delivered his pleasantries, Gus held onto my hand a moment longer, then the lenses dropped, the fingers relaxed, and my hand was my own again. Heather kissed him on the cheek, and we went to have a look at the food. My fingers ached on and off for the rest of the day.”