At the top of the garden, dangling from the boughs of the apple trees there, the fruit that had ripened into a score, two, of red replicas of Matt’s face, his eyes squeezed shut, his mouth stretched in a scream of unbearable pain, swung in a sudden breeze.
For Fiona
SUCH BRIGHT AND RISEN MADNESS IN OUR NAMES
Jay Lake
“Long have we dwelt in wonder and glory.”
The passwords are ashes in my mouth. The last of the First Resistance was crushed eight years ago, when shoggoths swarmed the final submarine base hidden in the San Juan Islands at the mouth of Puget Sound, but the Second Resistance struggles onward, ever guttering like a starveling candle flame.
My contact nods, his — or her? Does it matter any more? — head bobbing with the slow certainty of a collapsing corpse. The Innsmouth Syndrome transforms so many of us who were once human. The voice croaking a response bespeaks more of the benthic depths than any child of woman born. “Such bright and risen days these are.”
And simply as that, I am admitted to the tiled lodge here at the mouth of the Columbia, amid the ruins of Astoria. We meet with our rituals and our secret rooms in imitation of Dagon and the Silver Twilight, because their rites worked.
Oh, we were warned. Lovecraft, Howard, Smith — they had a glimpse of the truth, which they disguised as fiction. Who believed? People actually made up games about the Old Ones. As if the mile-long shattered corpse still rotting across the Seattle waterfront nine years after the U.S. Air Force’s last bombing run could be made into a joke or a rattle of dice.
All that saves us now is inattention. Cthulhu, Yog-Sothoth, all are like children in their godhood. Dead, they lay so long dreaming that they lost the habit of attending to the world, except through such rites as move them.
The First Resistance fought the elder gods themselves. But how does a B- 2 fly against something that can warp the very fabric of the stars with the power of its mind? The Earth’s new masters did not need their priests to awaken them to those dangers, not after the Dunedin and Papeete nuclear strikes.
The Second Resistance struggles against the priests instead. Dread Cthulhu could snuff my life with the merest of thoughts, but he will no more bother to do so than I will snuff the life of a single amoeba deep within my gut. Traveling across six hundred million years of time and space, then slumbering eons beneath the waves in lost R’lyeh, does not equip one for such minutiae. His priests are the immune system, seeking to eradicate the last, hopeless glimmerings of human liberty and free spirit.
This lodge meets within the battered Sons of Finland hall along Astoria’s deserted waterfront, in the shadows of the ruined Astoria-Megler Bridge. This was once a thriving coastal city of nineteenth-century sea captains’ mansions, twentieth-century fisheries and twenty-first century tourism.
No more. Not a mile out on the bar of the Columbia river loom the unearthly non-Euclidian geometries of one of the cyclopean Risen Cities, strangely angled walls that endlessly glimmer a feeble green while screams echo across the water. Our priestly enemies hunt far and wide, but even under their noses we are scattered and furtive. We never see the stars any more, and little of the sun, for the Old Ones’ emergence and the nuclear attacks of the First Resistance wrapped the Earth in permanent winter that varies only a little by season. A man may walk from Oregon to Washington across the frozen Columbia seven or eight months out of the year.
We are in the old ballroom now, a baker’s dozen of us. That number would once have been deemed unlucky, but Cthulhu and his fellow, rival gods have drained the world of luck.
The doorward drops his cowl. He is newly come among us, and must prove himself. Now I see he is a woman, as she lifts off a crowning mask that has misshapen her head. Beneath she is actually a reasonable-seeming human being, albeit as grubby and hunger-raddled as the rest of us. She slips from her robe as well, unhooks a padded hump, releases bindings on her legs, and stands straight, clad now in only blue jeans and a faded black t-shirt advertising a band called Objekt 775.
This is like looking at a piece of the past. I wonder where her parka is.
Inspired, I slip my cloak free and let it fall, along with my own fatigue coat, until I am clad only in ragged thermal underwear and combat boots. I am barely transformed, my hands overlarge and my fingers overblunt, but the change seems to have stopped there, as can happen with we who resist strongly enough.
Around me, others remove their cowls and hoods and cloaks, until we stand as an array of human and formerly human faces. Some eyes are bulbous and unblinking, others scowl furiously, but we all have the full measure of one another for the first time in years.
Also for the first time in years, as I look at our doorward, I feel stirrings in my groin. A natural woman.
“I am come from the lodge in Crescent City,” she announces. Now her voice is blessedly normal as well. “Bringing news from Mendocino and further south.” There are no lodges in the formerly great cities of the world, because none of those cities remain whole and unpolluted. “A lodge along the Sea of Cortez has made an important discovery. We have found a poison that will harm even the undying priests amid their armors and their spells.”
“Despite the Old Ones’ protection?” I ask.
“Yes.” She smiles at me, and I am erect for the first time in years.
Just as foretold, the Old Ones are stripping the Earth from pole to pole. They are in no hurry, not by human standards — surely they perceive time so differently from us, this past decade may all be a single moment not yet passed to them, one thunderous tick of the clock of the long now.
Strangely, in places of some technology where electricity can still be induced to function, odd corners of the world away from the attention of the priests and their gods, we find that many of our space assets remain in order. Curiously, this is despite the abilities of the Byakhee and Mi-go to traverse the emptiness between planets. The last cosmonauts starved on the ISS seven years ago, and the station has since fallen burning from the sky, but their observations had proved invaluable. Likewise weather and spy satellites, not all of which have yet strayed from their courses or lost their mechanical minds.
The world’s cities were crushed or blasted or sickened, sometimes by human effort in the First Resistance, more often by the Old Ones themselves when they finally stirred from their watery graves. Now great, slow waves of fungal rot progress across the continents like a nightmare tide, swallowing forests and prairies and bottomlands alike. I’ve been as far east as Estes Park, and looked down on the Great Plains being scoured to bedrock. The mountains and coastlines are yet spared, but surely that is only a matter of time.
With this data, and a tenuous network of wanderers and observers, the Second Resistance has our guesses about how many years are left to do something against the priests who focus the lamps of the Old Ones’ eyes like mad projectionists beaming death about the world. That the gods themselves are narcoleptic was perhaps the world’s saving grace, before someone, somewhere, finally succeeded in summoning them to shore in their fullest strength.
We must believe it happened thus, for if they returned only because the stars were right, well, no one can fight the stars.