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.