“This is the welcome you should have,” Claire said. “You do belong here.”
“I hope so,” Dana said.
The afternoon was almost gone when Dana realized Josh had not returned. She had lounged away the time outside on the porch with the goat skull for company, bundled in her coat, too tired to read. Not a single car had passed. She felt as if she were waiting at the end of the world.
Claire walked out of the stand of leafless trees that edged the property, and waved.
“Dana,” Claire called, “I have something else for you.”
“Okay,” Dana said, not moving from her seat.
“No, come with me,” Claire said, coming closer.
“It’s going to be dark. Josh has to be back soon.”
“Maybe. We’ll leave him a note” Claire said, pulling a crumpled ball of notebook paper from her front pocket. She smoothed it out on the hood of the car and tucked it under the wiper blade.
“He’ll know what to do,” she said.
Dana sighed and got up, following Claire across the yard. As she passed the car she glanced at the scrap of paper. The writing on was the same lettering as in the yellow silk book.
The sun slanted down behind the trees as the afternoon waned, the sky dissolving to a deeper blue. They walked into town, and then turned down Airport Road to follow its long loop. When they reached the nursing home Claire pulled Dana across the facility’s parking lot toward the woods behind it.
As they passed the building Dana saw a line of slack figures propped in wheelchairs, drowsing in the deepening dusk. Their postures reminded her of how Joe sagged, boneless yet waiting. From where she stood it looked as if their skin was sloughing off like birch bark, peeling away and drifting across the concrete pad in shreds. Like masks, she thought. Like paper masks for Halloween. She wiped the back of her hand across her eyes.
“What’s wrong with them?” she asked Claire.
Claire paid no attention to the nursing home patients. “Inbreeding. Cousins,” she said, without glancing toward them.
Dana looked at the people in the chairs. Maybe Claire was right, and it was an ineffable weakness in the blood.
“Mason cousins?” she asked.
“Come on,” Claire said. “It’s not far.”
Behind the home’s parking lot a path snaked back through rough grass toward the trees. Claire tugged Dana along behind her, urging her to speed up, to reach the woods. Cedars and pines and bare maples grew over the path, blocking their line of sight, forcing them to push through the branches. Over their own noises Dana heard voices, and the sounds of other passage all around. Claire gave no sign she heard anything.
In less than a mile the trees thinned out, becoming sparse and unhealthy. The ground grew soggy underfoot as they walked into the swamp. Cold seeped through the soles of Dana’s shoes. Claire stopped before they reached standing water.
“Here,” she said, and pointed. “This.”
The hulk of an ancient willow listed like a shipwreck a hundred feet from where they stood, rotten and broken but still alive. Where its roots had pulled free of the ground a great pit opened, greasy with mud. It gaped like a mortal wound to the earth.
Claire raised her arm and the sky suddenly dulled, the remaining light fading into ocher and purple and acid green. Night swarmed down.
Dana saw movement near the jagged pit. Long branches whipped with no wind to drive them. Distorted figures moved through shadows. Across the shallow water voices rose and fell in ugly song.
“Iä! Iä! Shub-Niggurath! Lord and mother, hear us. Lord of the woods, hear us. Mother of Winter, hear us. Shub-Niggurath! Black Goat of the Woods with a Thousand Young!”
Dana recognized the words, and screamed. She turned to run but Claire grabbed a fistful of her hair and dragged her forward into the water. “No,” she hissed, her grey eyes like lanterns, “You belong here.”
Dana twisted, caught. Figures emerged from the cavern beneath the willow, moving to form a ring around them.
“Iä! Shub-Niggurath! Black Goat of the Woods with a Thousand Young,” Claire chanted with them, and yanked Dana’s head in time to the incantation.
Dana could see the approaching figures had heads and arms and swollen bellies, but a swarm of churning limbs where legs should grow. They had faces, with the skin grey and loose and slipping. As they drew closer, she thought one was Joe. Then the face she recognized fell off the misshapen head.
She screamed again, helpless, wild. Claire called out again, laughing.
The dimmed sky erupted in roiling black clouds, and withering cold washed over them. Water crackled and froze around them, crunching beneath the moving forms. Dana fell forward into the swamp, leaving a clutch of her hair in Claire’s grasp. She struggled to rise, but the ground seemed to shift under her. She looked up.
Something had heard the chanting.
Shadows in the sky coalesced into a column of black mist, shot with lightning and scored with flickering tendrils of smoke and muscle. It descended, wet with a slime like an afterbirth. It pooled in the hole beneath the shivering tree. Smoke and ichor dripped over the figures as they called out to it. Where the dripping touched them they burned.
The chants howled into a frenzy. Claire had forgotten her, staring up at the blackness with joy and terror in her face. Dana gazed at the thing descending. She did not want to run, now.
“Iä!” she whispered. “Shub-Niggurath!”
She belonged.
A human figure emerged from the woods, dressed in a horned goat’s skull and a still-wet skin, dancing and lurching and raising its bare arms to the thing in the sky.
Dana recognized Josh beneath the costume. He chanted, too, raising his voice to be heard above the roar of the tentacled cloud squatting over them, above the relentless chanting of the circling crowd. But his words were different than theirs. She stood unsteadily and reached for him, trying to answer.
Lightning cracked across the sky. Dana’s senses wobbled as if she tumbled under waves.
She could see through Josh’s eyes, under the edge of the skull. She watched his bare feet cross the rutted swamp to the fallen willow. She felt the weight of the dead skin hanging from his shoulders. She felt the fear that weighed in his lungs, and the need. He knew what to do.
Then she stuttered back, fell, and was in herself again as Claire lifted her and led her into the pit. There she pushed Dana to her knees in the icy mud, muttered an unintelligible string of sounds, and retreated.
Something squirmed in the slime Dana knelt in. She arched away, startled. Long flexing limbs slipped out and wrapped her body, binding her to a cold mass that moved over her skin, languid, lithe, slippery as water. There was foulness in its touch, a stirring of desires that should not be sated. The mass seeped into her flesh, displacing her. She cried out in mortal fear and delight. She wanted this.
Josh stumbled forward under his heavy wrappings, tangling with all her new limbs. She felt the crack of his head striking rock, felt flailing strands stretch from her and sink into him. He pressed against the slick resistance of her swarming muscle, blooming as the undertow of her swelling body bore him deeper into her. He dissolved like sugar in water. Like warmth in winter. He had to end, that she could begin.
She opened her mouth to sing out but another flowed in. Great ropy strands within her swelled, filling her, bursting her apart. Her flesh stretched and shredded, her mind scattered like dust. A million icy stars spilled out of her, a million cilia thrashed from her skin into blackest space. She rose in the column of her own wet flesh and smoke, seeing across the voids through a million lenses.
The chanting voices were so far away, the creatures that made their pleas so very small. She could not understand what they said with their small voices. What they wanted. But it didn’t matter.