Even the most optimistic of us do not bet on more than two decades remaining, and the general consensus is less than ten years. The loss of biomass may have started an irreversible decline in the atmospheric oxygen budget. What isn’t killed by the growing fungal tides freezes to death instead. We might win, by freakish luck and blind chance, only to perish as free men instead of slaves.
No, we are not even slaves, for slaves have value. We are but an infestation, an annoyance or perhaps a sport to the priests, less than dust to the Old Ones.
Still, we make our plans, and we gather our data, and we try. What else can we do? The human race is terminal, a cancer patient at full metastasis, every organ riddled with rot, the specter of death crushing a bit more air from every heaving of the lungs.
So I listen to this plan to cultivate an obscure type of jellyfish venom. Surely, like the fungi, it is those jellyfish who far more resemble the Old Ones than the cephalopods and amphibians old Howard Phillips Lovecraft was so fond of citing. This beautiful, as-yet untainted young woman — how? — whose name we will never know and who must have been a child when the end first came, explains how the vial she carries can be cultivated in long, low trays of saltwater, with an admixture of organic nutrients to sustain the jellyfish cells that produce the requisite toxin.
It is Julia Child by way of War of the Worlds. We plot the downfall of humanity’s most vile traitors via kitchen science, and hope to blind the Old Ones back into restless slumber in doing so.
I stay that night in the lodge, for my string of bolt-holes doesn’t begin until about fifteen river miles inland, at Knappa, Oregon. As is our usual practice, most of the others leave. Those far along into the transformation, including Madeleine Gervais, whom I’d known quite well back before the end, are far more nervous about this plan. The girl from Crescent City is unable to tell us how the poison might affect us, only that it has worked on captured priests, who cannot be slain except by extreme violence, followed by reduction and burning of the corpse.
We can make them die unknowing. Oh, the joy that thought brings me. These traitors who have already brought the deaths of billions are beyond any redemption of suffering or vengeance.
Curling in my little nest of borrowed blankets in one of the old basement saunas, I am quite surprised when the girl comes to me. I know her by her footsteps and her scent already.
Her fingers brush my shoulder, the light pressure of them through the fabric of the blanket the first human touch I have felt in almost nine years. We do not hug, or even clasp hands, in the Second Resistance. “I saw that you understood,” she whispers.
The hairs on my neck prickle, as my cock strains like a clothyard shaft. “I do,” I whisper, then immediately curse the echoed meaning of those particular words. I still wear my wedding ring, though my finger has grown around it until the band is almost invisible. Most days I cannot recall the faces of my wife and daughter.
“It is darker here.” She squats back on her heels, shadows against shadow, barely an outline through some stray bit of light elsewhere in the basement. It is enough for me to notice the swing of her right breast beneath the concert t-shirt, and I recall enough of women to know she has done this on purpose.
“Darker than California?”
“Yes.” She shivers slightly. I realize her nipple has stiffened to something pleasingly mouth-filling. “So many of the Old Ones love their cold.”
“They are creatures of space, and night, and the darkest depths.” For no good reason, I add, “Such bright and risen madness in our names.”
That hand touches me again as the breast strains against its enclosing fabric. “Are you lonely?” she asks in a soft, lost voice. I am too taken up in her to wonder at the question, for already I am lifting my blanket to show her just how lonely I am.
The woman is gone the next morning, a note telling me she heads north for the Aberdeen lodge, if it can still be found. Here in Oregon we’ve had no word from the Washington side this year since the river thawed in May, though in past years they’ve come across at Longview two or three times a month by boat during the free flowing season. Priests burned out the Lincoln City Lodge last December, the members stripped and broken and laid before the dark tide of shoggoths, digital prints of their deaths tacked to walls and telephone poles all up and down the Northwest coast as a warning to the remaining feral humans.
No such word of Aberdeen, for good or ill.
I should go back to my own routines, but there are vats of jellyfish toxin to establish. Someone will have to scale the odd-angled walls of the Risen City and carry the stuff in. Or allow themselves to be captured, and pray for a slow enough death to be able to spread the poison first.
In any case, the sauna room smells of sex and me and her, and I know I shall never again experience the sweet caress of a woman. The scent-memories are precious, while they remain.
I work for days, as Madeleine stays with me after the last stragglers depart. She knows that I touched the girl with my body, just as I will never again touch her lidless, staring eyes, and damp, spotted skin. The painful memory returns, that it was she who gave me the wedding band I still wear.
Can she be jealous now, beyond the end of all things?
Still, the little cells grow, the trays glowing slightly in a curious echo of the walls just offshore. Madeleine’s lips are no longer well formed for speaking, and neither is her larynx, but she grunts her fears to me.
The toxins will kill us all, or at least those of us who are transforming. Her. Me. Everyone but the girl from Crescent City. Or perhaps the toxins will kill no one, and this is all but a cruel hoax. Maybe the Old Ones toy with us, even now.
Finally I take her into my arms one night in the old sauna. Though true coupling is not possible for us, I make love to my memory of who my wife once was, while her lidless eyes weep acid tears to scar my chest and shoulder.
In the morning, I find her shriveled corpse next to the toxin trays. A faint smear still glows around her lips. I wonder if I should cry, but tears are years gone.
There is nothing more to be done. I gather my strength and purpose. As we were instructed, I press the cells in old cloth, so the toxin can be more easily spread by air or contract. As it dries, I bottle the stuff into old light bulbs from which the metal stems have been broken off, then bind them with duct tape. If the priests beat me upon my capture, they will be very surprised.
I leave detailed notes and diagrams showing our work, for when others of the lodge return. Eventually I step outside into the chilled mist and stare across the water at the Risen City. I shall take a dory and row me down to that watery hell, bringing blindness to the Old Ones, and death to my immortal enemies.
As I ply the oars, I wonder if the girl and Madeleine planned this for me. The waters around me roil with evil, the sky is Armageddon-dark, and I find it does not matter.
“I love you,” I tell the world. Then I row some more.
THE SEALS OF NEW R’LYEH
Gregory Frost
“Did you hear something?” Detwiler asked. Stipe paused to listen.
Detwiler couldn’t help himself; he glanced back down the tunnel. He could hear blood ringing in his ears; underneath that he wasn’t sure if he heard wind or the “whump-whump” of leathery wings. It was paranoia. He needed confirmation of that.
“Besides wind, you mean?” Stipe asked.
“Yeah.”
“Just them chanting upstairs. But you have to listen hard.”
“Fine. Let’s hurry up.” Detwiler turned his attention back to his pry bar. He’d already chipped out the mortar around the massive stone block, enough room to wedge the bar in. Whatever else he had to say about life under Cthulhu, he appreciated the dependability of the architecture — dependable in the sense that it made the removal of one stone from the foundation wall a simple matter of physics. Fulcrums, levers, and offset stones. Stipe referred to the form as Ugaritic. In the old days, Stipe had read a lot on the toilet, mostly National Geographics. Detwiler only cared that he could pull out one stone and not have the whole wall collapse on top of him.