Future Lovecraft (11 page)

“The music what? The Mother?” Yıldız bit her lip. “I saw something down there...too big, it was too big, though. The lake should be less than a metre deep in the summer, and yet....”

“Come with me!” Dicle grabbed Yıldız’s arm and yanked her to her feet. “Space and time are the same thing. The Mother has always been there, forever and ever through time, so it’s deep and big enough for her! Don’t you know
anything
?”

Dicle took off running toward the altar, dragging Yıldız behind her. She was jitter-jumpy and restless, and anyways, the Mother would explain better, once she was summoned.

“Where are we—”

“Just come
on
!”

“What the hell is that?!”

Even though Dicle had reached the bottom of the sacred stair, which was made of hard rusty-crusty iron and ran zig-zag up the side of the altar, she turned around to see where Yıldız was pointing. There, at the top of the hill, terrible and looming against the bright afternoon sun, was Stag-Face. Dicle could see his antlers. He’d spotted her, and was running pell-mell down the salty sand to get to her. She began to tremble.

“Stag-Face,” she whispered. “Oh, no!”

“That man has a deer’s head!”

“Come on!” Dicle would not be thwarted. She yanked Yıldız up up up the sacred stair, until they reached the flat top of the altar. She heard clomping on the stairs behind them as Stag-Face’s hooves rang on the iron. Mean old Stag-Foot! He wouldn’t stop her, not now!

Dicle rummaged in her bag and, under the roasted
balık
, found the sack of her mama’s bones. She placed those at the base of the big circle and found the thing that Wriggler said was called a
lever
—it was just where he said it would be, on the left-hand side.

“No!” cried Stag-Face. He had reached the top and was pointing. “Dicle! Whee! told me you’d be here! Such a bad girlie! You don’t know enough, yet! You haven’t purified your heart; you haven’t learned the right songs! The Mother will
not
accept you for changing! She will punish us all!”

“The Mother knows our hearts and loves us
all
, her children,” shouted Dicle, as she wrapped her hands round the lever.

“Stop!” cried Stag-Face and Dicle heard his hooves pounding on the roof.

“He’s got a knife!” shrieked Yıldız. She was fumbling with something hanging on her belt. “Wait!
Wait!
”

But Dicle wouldn’t wait, even if Stag-Face had a knife. She yanked on the lever and big, crackling shafts of lightning began to curl around the circle, writhing and touching each other, just like Wriggler’s arms, and they were even the same purple-blue colour. Dicle felt a burst of heat behind her; she heard the angry sound of Stag-Face in pain, and then the salt began to sing. It was so beautiful, it made Dicle’s heart shudder and her skin crawl all over, and she felt a sudden gush of sticky hot wet over her face as she pressed her hands to the sides of her head in agony. It was blood, flowing from her eyes and ears and nose—
ugh!
But that was the sign of the Mother and, as the Mother emerged, Dicle began to pray, harder than anyone had ever prayed before.

***

Yıldız, who was now Spots, came back to K’pah-doh-K’yah with Dicle, who was now Jackrabbit. Spots took over bossing everyone because she had teeth and claws like a leopard, and she’d also killed Stag-Face with what she told Jackrabbit was called a “laser pistol”. And that was okay, because the Mother had made her understand, and afterwards Spots was the smartest of them all.

“Ahmet and I went through the Hypersaline Resonator, thinking we could visit this other place, a place up there in the sky that the star-watchers had said was okay for us to breathe and see,” Spots had explained. “The Resonator was supposed to help with the problem of too much time passing here while we were gone. But when we got there, we saw a Mother—a different Mother, or maybe the same one, I dunno—and we were afraid it would come back here through the Resonator, because we didn’t understand that the Mother loves us all, her children, and that would be a
good
thing! Silly us! But now everything is better.”

Jackrabbit, who had been Dicle, was sure that Mother loved everyone, but she wasn’t sure everything was better, even though she had finally changed. It was true that the Mother had granted her prayers to be the fastest of everybody, but she was now also the scaredest and rarely wanted to come out of her hidey-hole in the caves. All the sounds were so
loud
in her big ears! She’d almost gotten gobbled by the ghouls on the journey back home because, every time she heard something or saw something, it terrified her and she couldn’t always control her urge to run away and get deep underground.

But, she reminded herself every day, at least she could dance in the revels and she could jump higher than anyone. Not that she felt like jumping or reveling much, even for the sake of the Mother. She was very sad, all the time. Wriggler hadn’t lived more than a few months after snuggling with her. When he’d seen her true self, he’d said she was so pretty and they’d done the huff-and-puff a lot, but only for a few weeks. All of a sudden, he’d gotten sick and pale and told her to go away, so she’d gone away. When she next worked up the courage to bolt down to the lake, she’d found his corpse washed up and rotten on the bank. No one had eaten his meat and that was sad. All Jackrabbit could do for him was clean his bones and put them with the rest, for the time when the next little babies grew up and made their pilgrimage to the Mother in the Salt. And nobody else wanted to be her snuggler, not even Whee!, because Wriggler had put a baby inside her, but when it had come out, she’d gotten so scared when everyone had crowded around to see it that she’d gobbled it right up!

Being changed was sure not like she’d thought it would be. Jackrabbit was always frightened and always alone. Nothing was wonderful. Not at all.

SKIN

By Helen Marshall

Helen Marshall
is pursuing a PhD in Medieval Studies at the University of Toronto, for which she spends the majority of her time in the libraries of London, Oxford, and Cambridge, examining 14th-century manuscripts. Her poetry has been published in
ChiZine, NFG
and the long-running
Tesseracts
anthology. “Mist and Shadows”, published originally in
Star*Line
, appeared in
The 2006 Rhysling Anthology: The Best Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror Poetry of 2005
and her poem, “Waiting for the Harrowing”, has been nominated for a 2011 Aurora Award. Her poetry chapbook,
Skeleton Leaves
, was released by Kelp Queen Press in 2011 and her collection of short stories,
Hair Side, Flesh Side
, is forthcoming from ChiZine Publications in 2012.

COLLEAGUES, AS MANY of you know, I have been at some pains over the last months to complete the research which your very kind donations have made possible. If it has taken a toll on me—if you can detect something of a dreary languor in my demeanour—I beg your indulgence. The archives can be an unkind place and History, herself, the cruelest of mistresses.

But I must tell you that it is more than the simple rigours of study that send a wild light to my eyes; it is far more than that. As you know, I have been engaged for some time in a study of a certain manuscript come to light recently in Biblioteca Estense in Modena, a small volume written on a fine vellum, much-damaged by fire, but still clearly one of the earliest copies of a Latin work thought to be attributed to Aristotle. Recent research has indicated—and my colleagues in Harvard have verified the results, checked transcription after transcription and traced both dialectal and paleographical evidence—that the book can be reliably placed near Heliopolis in origin, and may once have been housed in the lost Library of Alexandria.

The ramifications of such a find are far-reaching and will require far more study than I myself in a lifetime could ever hope to achieve, even with such generous donations as you may wish to give toward the endeavour. Nevertheless, it is not the contents themselves that disturb my composure. No, it is the parchment—the stretched and tattered skin, barely readable, discoloured by fire, yet still beautifully resilient after all these years.

In May, I departed for Cairo at the request of this esteemed governing board. My passport was stamped, my visa checked in triplicate, and the manuscript eyed hairily by authorities who neither understood its value nor my own purpose. “Where is the
usstaz
? The professor?” they would ask, ignorant of my protestations that I
was
the professor.

Finally, a small, svelte man with immaculate English arrived to take me to the Museum of Egyptian Antiquities. ‘Khaled Nassar’, he said his name was and he was a godsend, though, no doubt, he’d dispute the term bitterly.

It was at the university that my true work began, and an intoxicating blend of excitement and curiosity drove me forward, even as exhaustion threatened to drag my mind from those soaring pinnacles of knowledge that we have glimpsed in the gelid mists of our studies. I was alone, utterly alone, but for my rescuer who—it appeared—was to be my liaison. He helped me negotiate the streets of that wretched city, sweat crawling down my spine, and taught me the few words of Arabic that helped me survive. In the evening, he would bring a strong, sweet coffee, which we drank to the dregs together, discussing the struggles of research, the petty bureaucracies that exist in all universities. Between us, there was that flash of friendship that comes when two minds strike against each other, flint on steel; it was a friendship that would bring many rewards.

Mister Nassar, you see, had a brother in Giza who worked as a phylogeneticist with a team of French scientists. He had agreed to sample the manuscript and perform the necessary tests to verify its authenticity.

It took five days for the results to arrive from Giza, five days of the breath of Hades on my neck as I tried to fill my time reviewing my students’ Michaelmas papers in a hotel infected by fleas and Americans, five days of cryptic responses from my liaison: “Soon,
usstaz
, it will be soon.” The paper, when it came, was heavily worn and bore many official stamps. I opened it carefully, reverently, and it is that which I found inside—the words Mister Nassar translated for me from Arabic—that I present to you today. For indeed, I learned that this book
had
been housed in the Alexandrina Bybliothece—and there must have been many others like it—but even this, colleagues, members of the governing board, is not why I come before you.

The fateful words of dear Mr. Nassar are burned into my mind forever: “The skin,” he said, “the skin,
sahib
. It is not sheep.” And then he touched my hand. “Human.”

A chill still runs up my spine when I think on it. I have been a scholar for some years, and I have given all of my career and most of my eyesight to the study of books. When I sleep, I smell the musty scent of their pages; when I wake, my fingers explore them, probe their bindings, the threads that stitch them together. I know the soft velvet of the flesh side and the smooth, oiled surface of the hair side. I have studied the pattern of follicles, traced the network of veins that undergirds our most precious documents, the records of Western civilisation, the rise and fall of human knowledge. I have devoted my life to recovering the irrecoverable and rebuilding what was lost, searching out its ghosts and giving them flesh within monographs and articles.

But to learn that the skin I touched was human skin, the network of veins cousin to mine, and that the knowledge I had sought to reinscribe in the hearts of my students was written on the fleshly fabric of their would-be ancestors....

It was a shock whose subtle charge still haunts my nights.

I looked to Mister Nassar, and he to me, and in our blank, uncomprehending gazes, we knew we shared a secret that would shake the foundations of the Academy.

That was six months ago and it could have been six years. He and I, joined by the strange bonds of discovery, left Cairo that day, clutching the codex, but shuddering at the weight of its presence, for we knew, deep in our hearts, that it was not just one book.

Indeed, Mister Nassar’s connections were invaluable. Discretely, we were able to obtain samples of manuscripts from across the country—from Plato, Pythagoras, Aristophanes of Byzantium, Apollonius of Rhodes. For one and all, the answer was the same. “The skin, the skin,” he had said. “Human.” The Great Library of Alexandria was a charnel house whose secrets had been hidden in the fire that immolated all those stretched, disfigured bodies.

In the intervening months, we have visited many archaeological sites, studied the ancient midden heaps of Heliopolis, Sharm El-Sheikh and Aswan. Beneath the layers of refuse were bones, bones, bones, so many of them that it sickened me. Whole villages had been wiped out, their inhabitants sacrificed to the altar of the great gods of our civilization. A single codex could have required as many as three hundred hides and it was becoming increasingly clear that those of the young were valued most highly for their smoothness, their freedom from blemish. Children. A seven-year-old child could provide enough for twelve folios; an adult, perhaps sixteen, though the quality would suffer for it.

‘The unspoken holocaust’, we called it, as we huddled in tents that clung to the skin of the desert. We were as thick as thieves, he and I, whispering our secret again and again. “Human,” he would say, until the words meant nothing and the charred midnight air snatched them away.

Three days ago, an ancient bus knocked its way over potholes and hard rock, depositing us at last in the village of Deir el-Bahri. It was there we received a second letter, this one even more dishevelled, the number of stamps seeming to have taken to heart God’s commandment to be fruitful and multiply. Mister Nassar opened it, fingers shaking, but his face turned strange as he read the Arabic within.

For a second time, he took my hand and I wondered at the calluses on his finger, the rough texture of them, the way the pads were paler than the coffee-coloured knuckles. They were beautiful, those hands, the skin of them.

“It is my brother,” he said. “He must speak with us.”

We boarded the bus for a second time, proffered bills to the surprised driver, who made a sign and ushered us aboard. The ride to Cairo was long and, try as I might to question my companion, he would reveal nothing of our new mission and what might await us.

His brother could have been a twin. They had the same deep-set eyes, the same nervous manner about them. But whereas the one had the tongue of a linguist, the other spoke only in halting English, stumbling over words until he and his brother turned to a guttural Arabic, with only occasional breaks for breathless translation.

He led us into the university science complex where the smell of formaldehyde drifted in clouds from behind shut office doors. A rattling elevator brought us to the bottommost level and there, following him as Theseus followed his ball of yarn through the subterranean system of tunnels, we saw a machine—a great beast of a thing, a wonder of modern mechanical genius. I don’t pretend to understand most of what the second Nassar told us, only that he had been shocked by the discovery as much as we had, and that there was a way—perhaps—for something to be done....

What would you do, colleagues, with the weight of that knowledge hanging upon you? What would you do if you were offered a chance to set it right? The press of a button and that slaughter of innocents prevented? Would you have the strength of will to silence Aristotle, to let the words which shaped civilisation go unremembered, unpreserved, reduced to whispers and empty air? Would you preserve instead the genetic code of that dead, forgotten mass of bodies? For they
are
dead, those slaughtered children, flayed for the libraries, flayed so that we might—

They are
dead
. A plague could have taken them and history would not have cared one jot. They would still be dead today.

But it was not a plague. It was men. Men who desired books, who knew these things must last, that it meant more than those hundred thousand lives....

The pyramids were built on such sacrifices. Who are we to say?

The three of us—myself and the twin Nassars—took wine that night, though I had never seen my companion drink a drop in all our time, despite everything. We swallowed morbid thoughts with every draught, drank down our fears, our apprehensions. But as the sun sent pale fingers of light creeping through the window, across the table and its scattered papers, its empty bottle, I hailed a taxi to the airport and left Mister Nassar and his brother to their grim duty.

We had come to something there, a decision.

Members of the Academy, colleagues, I know much of what I say is doubtful and I can already hear the murmurs of my detractors. You do not believe me and I do not blame you. It is a horrid business.

But you need not believe me; you need not ever publish these findings; you need do nothing but wait.

We decided, you see, the three of us there with our forbidden bottle. We decided.

The second Mister Nassar and his machine—that damned machine. I cannot say how it will work, only that he has promised—sworn—that it will. That the past could be unwritten if we so choose.

And we did.

I stand before you, not to accept laurels for my findings. I stand here in shame, for a terrible thing will happen soon.

This is a vigil, you see.

Soon, even as I speak, the button will be pushed and we shall face a brave new world, a
tabula rasa
, with the guilt of sins wiped clean. What the world will look like, I cannot say. I cannot imagine a universe without those learned men, those sages—the words of Aristotle and Plato like a light for us in the darkness. Their words, written for us, on the skins of children. It is a terrible thing we have done, and I do not know if Mankind will be the better for it.

But I
saw
their bones and I have flayed myself of every pretension, every mark of civilisation, of academic certainty and distance. We live in a world in which a life must be measured against more than the length of a page—mustn’t it? Mustn’t it?

That is why what follows must happen.

They are dead.

The children are dead.

And so, colleagues, I ask that we wait, together. The button has been pushed. The world is changing. It will only be a moment now.