“Here,” Clarence said. “You’re staying . . . here.”
To Paulette, nothing seemed more natural. “It’s got everything we need.”
And that was that. They turned their backs on him, returning to the cellar, and the last he saw of Young Will was his arm, reaching up from below to swing the rotting wooden door closed again. As Clarence remembered the other day, not without shame, telling Will that he and Paulette didn’t match.
They would. One day, they would.
On the drive back to the motel, solitary and endless, the pain worse than if a piece of him had been amputated and burned before his eyes, he passed the same dead barns and farmhouse ruins but saw them differently now. Had that really been him, last week, talking of breaking one down for the wood?
It was inconceivable now. No telling what such a place might hold. They only looked dead from the road.
Maybe she just walked away.
To go where? Where do you go from here?
She had her pick, didn’t she? There were so many, all waiting like carcasses for the flies to come and settle and breed.
His eyes started to play tricks, imagining he caught a glimpse of her in this one, that one, and the next. Peering out at him from between fungus-eaten boards, and then there were worse tricks to come, as he divined it wasn’t just her. No, she had a companion, a man the likes of which they didn’t make anymore. A changed man who wouldn’t even know his own grandson if he watched him drive by.
Because there were so many more lasting things worth knowing.
The phone calls started three weeks later.
But the first came at nearly four o’clock in the morning, so Clarence missed it, and it went to voicemail.
I was right. He’s out here. Somewhere. I can feel him. I can feel him passing by in the night. It’s happened twice. Sure as god made little green apples. But I don’t think he wants to be found. Maybe it’s because I’m not worthy of finding him yet. You think so? Hello? Are you there?
After that, Clarence got a new phone for everyday use, and let the earlier one go straight to voice mail. Permanently. He wanted the connection. He just couldn’t hold up his side of the conversation.
If you were dreaming the dreams of a mountain under the sea, how could you tell anyone what they were so it would all make sense? That’s what this is like.
He went to Boston, where he shut down as much of Will’s life as he could, and took over the phone bill, so the conduit would remain open. How Will was keeping a charge in the phone was anyone’s guess.
We’re getting closer. I can feel him. He’s a mighty thing. I wonder if he’ll be proud or angry. Paulette says hello. I think that’s what she meant.
The months passed, and the calls came in when they came, infrequent and random, no pattern to it, other than the way every time he thought Will had finally stopped, surely by now he’d stopped, another message was waiting a day or two later.
I was wrong. This isn’t what I thought it was going to be. I just don’t know if it’s better or worse. It’s . . . it’s the knowing that changes you. Like a download of information wakes up something that was always inside. I never could buy it that what they call junk DNA is just junk. Are you even there anymore? Why don’t you ever answer?
And it was Will’s voice — he would recognize it anywhere — yet something was different about it each time. It was more than how each call sounded a bit farther away, fighting past a little more static and noise than the previous time. It was in the resonance of his throat, and the tones it produced.
Mom’s gone. Isn’t she. I don’t know how I know that, I just do. Don’t be sorry for her. She’s lucky. She’s beyond what’s coming. You should be too. I shouldn’t be telling you this. You should kill yourself, though. Rochelle first, then yourself. You should be okay then. I know you, you won’t want to do it because she’s pregnant, but you’ll be glad you did. That day will come. If you can’t trust your baby brother, who can you trust?
A thousand times a day, he thought of cutting the connection. But never could.
I shouldn’t tell you this. When they come, they’ll look like meteors. But that won’t be what they are at all. When the sky changes color, it’ll be too late. Nothing will make any difference then. They’ll already have you. That’s when you’ll wish you’d listened to me. Don’t ask what color, I can’t really describe it. But out here, I’ve seen the kind of green the sky turns before a tornado. That’s a start.
We’re really getting close now. I wonder if Daisy will let me call her “Mother.”
And when it had gone nearly a year between calls, and so much had changed, and Clarence was a father now, with a father’s fears, he knew better than to think the calls were done. They would never be done. Even when they no longer conveyed any words he could understand.
Since coming home from Kansas for the last time, alone, he hadn’t listened to his grandfather’s tape any more, the longest in his life he’d let it idle. There was no more to learn from it. He would rather forget.
But there was no forgetting such a song. He knew it, still, the moment he heard it begin, coming through miles and static and time. He would always know it.
Yet now there was a difference. He could no longer hear the lamentation in it. Just the rage. It was a song of endings and rebirths, a song for green skies and streaks like blue-white fire among the clouds. A song he would never be fit to join and sing.
And, finally, it was coming from more than one throat.
He counted two the first time.
He counted four the next.
In the end, he counted a choir of multitudes.
Helen Marshall
Helen Marshall is a critically acclaimed Canadian author, editor, and medievalist. Her debut collection of short stories, Hair Side, Flesh Side won the 2013 British Fantasy Award for Best Newcomer. Her second collection, Gifts for the One Who Comes After, was shortlisted for the Bram Stoker, the Aurora, and the Shirley Jackson Awards. She lives in Oxford, England, where she spends her time staring at old books. Unwisely. When you look into a book, who knows what might be looking back . . .
“One of the finest books I have read in recent years is Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle,” she notes. “Merricat Blackwood is a bizarrely engaging narrator with her love of her sister Constance, and Richard Plantagenet, and Amanita phalloides, the deathcap mushroom, and the mixture of naiveté, love, loyalty, and killer instinct that she shows in the novel has always resonated with me. When I was asked to write for this anthology, I had one of those wild, improbable titles that made me giggle to myself with enough manic glee that I knew I was onto something — We Have Always Lived in the Cthulhu. But what might have been nothing more than an amusing pastiche began to take on more and more depth as I explored alongside Caro and her grandmother the spiraling shell of an ancient ocean-dwelling creature and the terrible secret at the center of it. What has always fascinated me about Lovecraft’s stories is the madness that accompanies any sort of genuine knowledge — but the question I have always wondered is what happens afterward? How do we live in madness? How do we accommodate ourselves to knowing too much? Much like Jackson’s delightful black comedy, which finds something redemptive and oddly touching in the apparent insanity of the Blackwood family, this story seeks to provide some sort of answer — albeit a very strange one.”