“Don’t leave,” he whispered, and held her tightly until he felt her relax against him. There, in the dark, their bodies had found familiar configurations and the entangled strangers lay in silence.
Kara was crying softly.
“Are you alright?” Jake asked.
“We used to sleep together like this.” She turned to face him. “It just reminds me so much of you… before.”
Jake stroked her hair, pulled her close. His lips found her neck and a familiar response shivered its way through her. He withdrew and brought his face close and she did not resist when he touched his mouth to hers. A whimper escaped Kara and then her arms were around him. They sought solace in one another, trying to find the thread that had once bound them.
No shy exploration, no tentative touches — he pressed her back onto the bed, made quick work of her jeans and panties, unhooked her bra. He grasped and caressed, skillfully drawing moans from her mouth and making her body respond to him. A sharp gasp from her and they were joined, his fingers tangled in her curls and his eyes wide, looking directly into hers. Her nails pressed into his back and he arched, giving her the only thing he felt he had left to give. She stole his breath and he bruised her lips with needful kisses. For a little while she felt as if she were with him again, the way he was before, ascending to the starry heights.
He was gone when she awoke the next morning and she cursed him again, even though this time she understood.
She’d tried to help him. She shared her notes, showed him the drawings he’d made for her during their long discussion. His memory of those things had gone. In the one night she had spent with him he had regaled her not with physics and math but with chilling stories of interrogators, clicking away in some bizarre alien language. He spoke of encounters with monstrous, misshapen beings. He recalled studying in the Great Library but could not remember anything he had seen or learned from its manuscripts.
The day she’d spent with him after his change, he’d been so different. In his first incarnation he’d been cold. She now realized he hadn’t shared her ardor, had been only a willing supplier of knowledge and recipient of her fervent embraces. In his second incarnation he had been a lost soul, empty and tortured. She’d not known him anymore and he hadn’t known himself.
In the months that followed, Jake had ended up on the street and was in and out of mental facilities. He didn’t want to see her, refused to live with her or let her help him in any way. Jake’s eventual death didn’t take Kara entirely by surprise. Finally, unable to regain equilibrium in the world and unwilling to contact her again, he’d gotten up from a park bench one day, stood at the edge of the sidewalk, and then walked in front of a freight truck.
Jake was gone, in every incarnation.
Kara, no longer distracted, pursued a Ph.D. in Theoretical Particle Physics. One night at the library, while poring over mathematics tomes and the old Jake’s notes, she was tapped on the shoulder.
“Where did you get that?” A young man she didn’t know picked up the top sheet and studied the curvilinear marks and their notations.
“I — from a friend. It’s his research.”
The interloper nodded. “This is exotic stuff. Looks a lot like some drawings my Great-uncle Wingate has in his office. He’s a professor up at Misk-U.”
“Misk-U?”
“Miskatonic University. Ever heard of it? It’s a big old school in Arkham.”
Kara just stared.
“And Arkham is in Massachusetts. I’ve heard crazy stories about that place. Anyway, I can give you his number, and you should give him a call. He’s pretty eccentric but he’s harmless. Likes to tell horror stories though. When I was a kid I found a whole book scribbled over with this stuff and he told me a story that they were from some brain-stealing aliens. They were called the uh, Great Race or something. I had nightmares for weeks and my mom never let him tell me stories after that. He could probably help you make sense of this stuff. Just tell him you know me.”
He scribbled a telephone number onto a scrap of paper for her.
“I should probably know your name, then,” she said.
“Oh, right!” He thrust his hand out. “Winston Peaslee. Pleased to meet you.”
“Thanks. I’ll hold on to this.” She took the phone number but didn’t take his hand.
Winston smiled reassuringly at her but she’d lost interest and had already turned back to her papers.
After a long, awkward pause, Kara was relieved when he left her to her work, and walked quietly away. Jake was right about one thing, she thought.
No one on this planet was going to understand.
Leon J. West
AMID DISQUIETING DREAMS
Your Fisheater is coming again tonight, the same as last night and every night since he first whispered to you from the darkness: “follow me, friend.”
And you, fool that you were so long ago, followed him. He took you to a city with fish-scale streets, on an island that swims. The island is called Cui-ui; the city is called Cui-ui; the undead fish impaled upon your Fisheater’s staff is called Cui-ui.
You are just called “fish”.
Your Fisheater crawls along the outside wall of your apartment, several stories above the dark and wide streets. You can smell him, like the sex smell of a girl about to lose her virginity, or maybe a little like the smell of burning drugs, or perhaps, like everything else on Cui-ui, your Fisheater just smells of fish.
He climbs straight for the porch because he knows you forgot to lock the porch door.
You snuff your candle, huddle in the far corner of your little apartment, and watch. You see his pale-skinned hand first, gripping the corner of the patio wall. Then his head, staff clamped between gleaming, white, serrated ridges of bone rather than teeth, the fish impaled on the end of the staff thrashing sluggishly. His hair is colorless, like fiber-optic cables, and lank. He climbs over the twisted iron railing and enters through the unlocked porch door.
Without preamble, he takes a box from his pocket, sets it on the low table in the living room, sits in the wood chair by the door, and waits. It’s like a ritual, this hiding and seeking and waiting, and you’re not entirely sure it is your will to hide.
After minutes or hours or days, you creep out of the shadows and open the box. You always do. Inside you find a straw, a vial full of opaque yellowish pebbles the size of peanuts, a one inch by ten inch strip of aluminum foil, and a black plastic Bic lighter.
You scurry back to your corner to hold out for another sweating eternity, telling yourself you don’t need it, don’t even want it. But it’s all just part of the ritual. Deep down you’re happy he’s brought you something more substantial than the dreams he’s been buying from the city above the clouds.
“I won’t do it unless you stop the dreams,” you say.
The Fisheater ignores your empty threat. The impaled fish on his staff opens and closes its mouth in silent agony, mocking your words.
“I’ll do whatever you want, anything you say, whenever you want me to, if you stop the dreams.”
He just waits. He has no need to bargain. He owns you, and he knows it.
Finally, when the shaking and sweating become too much to bear, you crawl across the floor on your hands and knees, embracing your debasement, reveling in it. Your Fisheater smiles and unfastens his robe.
You don’t even care anymore.
You cut off small pieces of rock, roll the plastic lighter over the pieces, crushing them into powder, then sift the powder onto the strip of aluminum foil. When you inadvertently block your Fisheater’s view of the proceedings, he taps you with the end of his fish staff, and you reposition yourself so he may watch.