For a minute, Aitch jibbers about tentacles and boy-weighted plummets and voices rising from the deeps. “The Aunts—”
“Always does things too fancy,” Southwark says. Clapping Aitch on the shoulder, his gaze drops to the talisman hanging round the boy’s neck. Thick, callused fingers inspect the leather pouch, then pat it gently against Aitch’s chest. “It’s their way or no way . . . Ye ken me, don’t ye?”
Aitch nods, relieved.
“Told them, didn’t I, to keep it simple. But those women . . .” Southwark pauses, slants an eyebrow. “They’s got a different take on simple, don’t they just?”
Aitch’s cheeks tighten and twitch, caught somewhere between a sob and a smile. “Can you take me home? Please?”
“’Bout time someone did.”
Grinning now, really grinning, Aitch makes for the brigantine, but again the captain stops him short. “Crew’s reveling,” he explains, steering the boy toward the last rowboat, guiding him under the railing and over the gunwale. “I’ll take care of yer me own self, won’t I.”
“Hurry,” Aitch says.
For a man of his bulk, Southwark is light on his feet. The dory hardly rocks as he boards; despite the choppy water, his stroke is smooth, their progress swift. Within moments the shoreline has fallen away, the wharves, the gold-littered reef. Southwark tilts his cap at the shadows chanting there, then puckers the billows around his mouth and begins trilling, picking up their funereal beat.
An icicle forms at the base of Aitch’s heart, stabs into his stomach. “I don’t know the direction,” he says, leaving bloody palm-prints on the crossbench. He looks back at the headland as the boat shoots past the breakwater. The lighthouse searches, searches, but he’s gone. He’s out of reach. Turning back to the old man he asks, “Is it far?”
Southwark glances up at the moon, gauging distance by the few visible stars.
“Fathoms,” he replies, locking oars.
Pouncing.
With practiced ease, he pins Aitch with one hand, grabs the anchor with the other. A flick of the wrist and the sink-rope whirrs round the boy’s ankles. “This business don’t have to be hard, son,” he says, upending Aitch easily as emptying a pail of chum. Throwing him overboard. Aiming the weight at his surfacing head, tossing it. “See?”
Fluid hymns sing Aitch down, down, further down.
Limbs numb, ankles bent out of shape, arms waving ten little cylinders in front of his face. He grabs the leather tube strung around his neck, tears it open, wrings. His caul oozes out, unfurls, and is swept away by strong undercurrents.
Mother, he quails, voiceless. I’m drowning.
Tessellations spark around him as he exhales. Neon alphabets, pink and purple and green. Luminescent pictograms of algae. Jellyfish punctuation, bright tremulous sentences felt as fin-flutters. Paragraphs sketched in krill, tiny oxygen explosions. Entire stories swimming in syllables of elder seas.
All ushering him down towards — what? He can’t say.
All communicating things he can’t understand.
Aitch is not special.
He’s just a half-finished thought, sinking into the abyss. He’s an initial, merely one of the first. Many others — he’s sure, he foresees — will be thrown in as bait after him. On and on, until — when?
Soon, the Aunts would say, meaning, possibly, forever.
Meaning, We don’t know either.
At last, Aitch inhales.
A tentacle emerges from the darkness, latches on. Squeezes him for dear life.
Caitlín R. Kiernan
Caitlín R. Kiernan has been quoted as feeling “too many people are obsessed with Lovecraft’s monsters, tentacles and polyps and shoggoths . . . I think they’re missing the point. At least, they’re missing the part that has played the greatest influence on me, and those elements would be the importance of atmosphere, the found manuscript as a narrative device, and his appreciation of what paleontologists and geologists call deep time. Deep time is critical to his cosmicism, the existential shock a reader brings away from his stories. Our smallness and insignificance in the universe at large. In all possible universes. Within the concept of infinity. No one and nothing cares for us. No one’s watching out for us. To me, that’s Lovecraft.”
With “The Peddler’s Tale, Or, Isobel’s Revenge,” Kiernan uses oral storytelling rather than a discovered palimpsest for a story told (in the fabled city Ulthar) of Lovecraft’s vast Underworld, a universe as indifferent to humankind as the rest of the cold, remorseless cosmos.
Kiernan is a two-time recipient of both the World Fantasy and Bram Stoker awards. Her recent novels include The Red Tree and The Drowning Girclass="underline" A Memoir, and, to date, her short stories have been collected in fourteen volumes, including Tales of Pain and Wonder, A is for Alien, The Ammonite Violin & Others, and the World Fantasy Award-winning The Ape’s Wife and Other Stories. The most recent collections are Beneath an Oil Dark Sea: The Best of Caitlín R. Kiernan (Volume 2) (Subterranean Press) and Houses Under the Sea: Mythos Tales (Centipede Press). She also wrote Alabaster, an award-winning, three-volume graphic novel for Dark Horse Comics. She recently wrote her first screenplay and is currently working on her next novel, Interstate Love Song.
The Peddler’s Tale or Isobel’s Revenge
“If you are very sure that’s the story you wish to hear,” said the peddler, the seller of notions and oddments, to the tow-headed girl child who called her Aunty. They were not related, by blood nor marriage, but very many people in Ulthar called the peddler Aunt or Aunty or the like. Few people living knew her right name or her history. Most felt it impolite to ask, and she never volunteered the information.
“You should be certain, and then be certain you’re certain, before I begin. I’ve come a long, long way. And tomorrow I leave the city and will not soon return. So, be sure this is the tale you wish to hear.”
“Aunty, I am very certain,” said the girl impatiently, and the other two children — both boys — agreed. “I have no doubt whatsoever.”
“Well, then,” said the old woman who wasn’t her aunt. She sat back in her chair and lit her pipe, then squinted through gray smoke at the youngsters who’d arranged themselves on the floor between her and the crackling hearth fire. Also, there were five cats, none of whom seemed the least bit interested in peddlers’ yarns.
She took a deep pull on her pipe, then began.
“You’ve all heard the name of the King of Bones, and you’ve heard the tales of how he came to power. And of his Queen, his twin sister, Isobel.”
The children nodded eagerly. And the peddler paused, because she knew that the making of beginnings is, as many have noted, a matter not to be undertaken lightly. And, too, the girl had requested of her a very grim tale, which made the beginning that much more delicate an undertaking. The old woman watched her audience, and they watched her right back. She was well versed at hiding exhaustion, disguising an aching back and sore feet behind a pleasant demeanor, not letting on how her weary sinews wished for the rare luxury of a soft mattress. Duty before rest. This tale was the price of her night’s lodging and board, and she was a woman who paid her debts.
Shortly after dawn, the peddler had led the strong draught pony that pulled her wagon over the ancient stone bridge spanning the River Skai, that wild path of meltwater gurgling down from the glaciers girdling Mount Lerion and flowing northwards towards the Cerenarian Sea. She’d lingered a while on the bridge, admiring the early autumn sunrise, the clean smell of the river, and the view to the east. This was always a welcome sight, the cottages and farms speckling the hills beyond the bridge. Behind her lay Nir and Hatheg, neither of which had proven as profitable as she’d hoped. With so many merchants and craftsmen — and it seemed there were more every year — few in the villages and cities had use for a traveling tinker and a seller of oddments and notions, a peddler of medicinals and salves, a woman up to almost any menial job for a few coins. She’d become an anachronism, but at so advanced an age it was hardly practical to seek some other more lucrative trade.