Future Lovecraft (29 page)

Kendrick feels like he should be confused by what McCabe is saying, but it makes a strange kind of sense. McCabe learned something. Of course he did. Something that he wanted to keep secret. But men like he and Kendrick were in the business of finding secrets, of running them to the ground, even in places like this, places
made
of secrets. So, he tried to hide in the one place he knew that no one, not even dreamhounds, could track him: death.

“You should have told me,” Kendrick says, taking a step forward. “I could have helped. I could’ve protected you.”

McCabe shakes his head, takes a step back to match the one that Kendrick has taken forward, which makes him freeze. He’s made a mistake, he realises. He’s misunderstood something.

“I’m not protecting the secret, Kendrick,” McCabe says sadly and Kendrick can see that there are tears in his eyes, this man whom he’s seen shot, who he’s seen kill, and never seen shed a tear. “I was protecting you. But I can’t, not anymore. You’re here, now, and even if I could make you leave without explaining, without showing you, you’d come back. Again and again, until you found out. Wouldn’t you? Even if I asked you to leave it alone? Even if I asked you to walk away?”

“I’d try,” Kendrick says, softly.

“But you’d fail, yes?”

A nod.

“I know. I would, too, if our places were reversed. I’d come here, eventually, to see what it was that had taken you from me. So, I’ll show you, I will, but you have to promise me something first.”

Kendrick nods again, knowing already that he’s lost, somehow. Lost a friend and more than that. “Anything,” Kendrick says, and McCabe tells him the secret, and then he pulls down the curtains and shows him.

 ***

The men guarding the two bodies are bored. It’s been three hours since Kendrick plugged into the machine and dropped away from the waking world, and since then, they’ve had nothing to do but stand and wait. There’s nothing here to guard, not really, but their jobs depend on them staying, so they stay. The technician who monitors the readouts on the dozens of screens connected to McCabe and Kendrick is asleep in a chair. One of the guards stares out the big picture window; the other plays solitaire on his phone. Neither is prepared when Kendrick suddenly wakes up.

Normally, riders coming back from the Labyrinth are sluggish, half-drunk from the things they’ve seen, their senses still attuned to the dreamland. But Kendrick is a professional, one of the best, and he’s gotten accustomed to acclimating quickly. He’s on his feet before the machines can give their warning beep and he’s crossed the room before the guard has even looked up from his phone. Before the technician has come awake, Kendrick has the first guard’s gun out of his shoulder holster and is using it to kill the second guard, whose phone drops to the floor and shatters. The first guard tries to elbow him, but Kendrick steps back, faster than he looks, and shoots the guard twice, once in the back and once in the side.

If the technician hadn’t been asleep, he might have had time to run. Might have made it as far as the door of the hotel room. But as it is, by the time he’s gathered his wits enough to be afraid, Kendrick is already standing over him, his finger already squeezing the trigger. Then he walks over to McCabe and begins unplugging machines. McCabe will die on his own, given time, without the machines to keep him alive, but there will already be more men coming and neither of them has that much time. Kendrick touches his friend’s cheek, puts the gun under his chin, and pulls the trigger.

The door of the hotel room is already locked, but he pushes a chair under the handle to slow the men who’ll be coming to break it down. Then he walks over to the window and looks out and down, down all those many stories to the street below. He could do for himself the same way he did for McCabe and he will, if he has to, but he wants a few more minutes, first. He can hear the men out in the hallway, already, hear their muffled shouts and the banging on the door. It won’t be long until they’re inside. He looks down at the gun in his hand.

Three shots are enough to shatter the window and then he steps out. For a moment, he’s flying, flying as he sometimes does in his own dreams, and then he stops dreaming for good.

 ***

“We’re so goddamned arrogant,” McCabe had said in that room, in the heart of the Labyrinth. “We think we’re the masters of this place, the makers of it, that it sits out here for our entertainment, our enlightenment, our edification. But we’re fools and we’re wrong. That’s the secret, Kendrick, just that.

“Look at this place. Look around. It doesn’t seem familiar, does it? This isn’t something we made with our thoughts, our wishes, our prayers. This place is a dream, of course it is; what else could it be? But it’s not
our
dream.” And here, he had pulled down the curtain, torn it from the wall, and Kendrick had felt himself carried to the window to look out across a vast expanse, like an alien planet, with hillocks that darted at the movement of the eyes beneath, and vistas that rose and fell with gigantic breath. He had seen the great, dreaming, cyclopean thing and he had finally understood.

DEEP BLUE DREAMS

By Sean Craven

Sean Craven
regards H.P. Lovecraft and Alfred Jarry as the two literary figures with whom he most strongly identifies. The accuracy of this self-assessment is a stark and shocking testimony to the loving nature, powerful will, and extremely poor short-term memory of his beloved spouse, Karen. Sean’s creative output includes paleontological illustration; editorial illustration; bass, vocals, and songwriting for The Dizzy Toilet Devils; assistant-editing, designing, and illustrating
Swill Magazine;
scripting for old-school internet cartoons like
Thugs On Film
,
Absolute Zero
, and
The God And Devil Show;
and gallery art in the form of surrealistic landscape montages made out of macrophotographs. Try and make a resume out of that.

ALL THE JELLYHEADS are going to the beach. Emily and me, all our friends. It’s like the water drawing back before the big wave washes everything away. I cared at first, but the world is too big. Now, all I care about is Emily. I don’t get to be her lover, anymore, but I’m still something.

When I started this, it was going to be a book or an article or something. The jellyhead story, the real story. Now I don’t know who I’m writing for, but I can’t lie down and sleep the way she can, and I can’t just sit here. I’ll start screaming or jump through the glass doors or something. I don’t know what. I don’t know how to have a breakdown and I don’t want to find out.

Before Emily lay down, we covered the bed with sheet plastic. She looks so small, curled in the middle, naked, gleaming, the organisms seeping from her body, pooled inches deep around her, ropes of clear jelly clustered in mounds, each snotty, knobbly tendril writhing, burrowing into the mass, away from the air. Just like Brad in jail, in the hospital. Jason in the tank.

Emily, you’re six feet away from me, and we’re going to be together forever, and I still miss you.

That’s why I’m going down to the sea with Emily, instead of checking into the hospital to die. It’s the difference between something and nothing.

Maybe I’m not writing this for anyone. Maybe I’m writing it for Emily. I won’t let her see it, though.

***

Jelly is not a specific chemical; it is an animal venom. The primary active components are tryptamines, including DMT and bufotenine, but these are potentiated by a variety of psychoactive chemicals, including oxytocin and tetrodotoxin. It cannot be stored. It cannot be eaten. The dose must be delivered by a living source. Jelly.

They talk about the way meth and crack faded away in favour of jelly as a shift in national character, successful drug education, or some other ripe bullshit. Oh, no. The collapse of the shipping economy did it.

When the RIAA gained the rights to aggressively mine government records of Internet activity, they provided solid evidential chains enabling tax boards to monitor Internet sales. And local boards tend to tax out-of-state goods at a higher rate.

Internet shopping had changed the nature of warehousing; in a greenhouse world, fleets of trucks had become the equivalent of warehouses on wheels. All because it was cheaper to buy online. When they added out-of-state sales tax to your Amazon spree? The wheels stopped rolling.

Jelly was something you could grow in cold saltwater, something hard to kill that just needed some mice or something every once in a while. Something that took you away to a place so blue it was black, so cold it snuggled you down, someplace you weren’t alone. And when you came back, you never felt alone again. You’d see someone who’d been there and you’d know.

Brad was lucky. His tank was meant for lobsters and crabs, had a filter and aerator and everything, and it only cost him two hundred bucks and a quarter-pound of seedy ditch weed. In all the shitty little towns and fucked-over industrial centers, all the side-tracked cities and worn-out projects, people were having the same kind of luck. It spread fast. By the time people started pointing at the freaks in Hoboken and Innsmouth, the Omaha scene had been going on for more than a year. Long enough to start feeling permanent, like we’d found our way of life.

Lying there in the dark, all day and all night in piles, listening to slowbeat, hands linked. People who say slowbeat is bad music are missing the point; it’s there to synchronize heartbeats. Emily would lie in my arms for hours, letting me pet her as she pushed against me, moving with the same, slow insistency as the animals in the tank. It was living in a dream, a dream we had on purpose.

And every time we’d touch a strand of jelly to the underside of our tongues (They said Sylvia would hit up in her vagina and we believed it), the tiny little stingers that got us high would break off and swim into us, and make themselves at home.

***

The motel we’re staying in, we have the living room in the front and a bedroom in the back. At night, when there isn’t any traffic, you can hear the sea. Everyone I know is in the hospital, or they’ve left for the coast.

Emily could still talk when we got here, so when the news hit, she was able to call me from the other room. I came in, and she shushed me and pointed at the screen. “They keep showing it over and over.” Her voice was choked and it was all I could do not to put my arm around her.

The image on the screen was Brad’s big, refrigerated tank, one end bubbling furiously from the aerator. Through the one glass wall, you could see a thick, brown mat growing on top, thinning to threads of clear jelly underneath. Animals float in the chill water, imbedded, threads of jelly bursting from their heads and hindquarters. They are not dead; they shift constantly but very, very slowly. Primitive motion. Mice and dogs and cats and one nude human body, pale, thin, clothed in jelly.

“Shit,” I said. “That’s our house. That’s Jason.”

Brad, microphones in his face, orange jumpsuit, looks awful; he’s crying. “I swear, I didn’t know this...I didn’t know what to do. He crawled in there and he was still alive, and he’s dead now, right? When they took him out, they killed him. I was the one who took care of Jason–”

The way they cut him off, he must have started swearing.

Now we knew we weren’t going home. It was settled.

***

When Emily seemed asleep, before her jelly came out, I cupped her breast. The nipple pushed into the palm of my hand and made me think of a kitten nosing for a caress. I drew my hand away, filled with shame at my act and resentment that Emily’s body still remembered me, even if Emily had forgotten. I don’t understand why she won’t let me go, but I understand why I’m staying. Hope is a bitch.

***

There’s a booklet, a ‘zine I made the spring Emily and I got together. I called it “
Deep Blue
” and Xeroxed it onto light blue paper, and embarrassed goosebumps just lifted the hair on my arms. Every time a friend asked for a copy, I gave them a handful and they made their way around. Sometimes, I’d find a copy in someone’s bathroom and get a chance to wave it around and say, “I did this.” I talk about the specimen they found in the Smithsonian from an old Antarctic expedition, claim it was a jelly-infected penguin. It could have been. And there’s something I found from a website for fishermen, talking about ghost nets.

Drift nets get loose from time to time, walls of plastic mesh moving on their own through the ocean, harvesting for nothing but rot. They call them “ghost nets”. So, when the strange things started showing up on sonar, unmoving schools of fish with dolphins floating among them, orcas and seals in an unmoving mass in the dark of the ocean, they figured they were ghost nets.

And when some boats that reported those strange things disappeared, the fishermen figured ghost nets were bad luck. Then they found out some ghost nets had been overgrown with something strange. Jelly. Turns out a polluted, overfished ocean turns into a slime farm—jellyfish, medusas, salps, and so on and so forth are opportunists that thrive in the areas man cleared out and poisoned. That’s what they think is happening. Jellyheads have other ideas.

I printed the story over a faint photograph of Emily on jelly. I called it “Oneirovore”. That’s what I think the jelly needs from the animals it infects. I think it eats our dreams. And isn’t it just too perfect the way jelly uses the mammalian diving reflex? Of course, I’m a fucking jellyhead and that’s the kind of thing we say.

The jelly organisms are colonial mesozoans, parasitic relatives of jellyfish and the other slimes. They aren’t a single animal; they’re a self-contained ecosystem. The stingers, the nematocysts, can’t penetrate human skin. You need to touch them to a mucus membrane.

At first, jelly was like jenkum, another fake drug the news gets panicked about. If you were actually doing it, the first news stories were hilarious. Then they found the way it entrained people’s brains. The mirror cells, the areas of the brain that allow us to understand other people by mimicking their hypothetical behavior, enlarged and became more active. There was talk of using jelly as therapy for sociopaths.

Jelly was too cheap and easy to cultivate to interest the investment class of criminals. And nobody ever got mugged by a jellyhead. After crack and meth and heroin, it was such a fucking relief.

It took a couple of years for the infections to advance to a stage where people started noticing anything was wrong. And let’s be serious. Not everyone was as honest with their doctors as they could have been.

***

Now I’ll be honest. I talk about jellyhead love, but Jason wasn’t my friend. He was just an asshole I had to put up with because I wanted to be around Brad and Brad’s jelly. Getting high and crawling into the tank is exactly the kind of thing that creepy little moron would do, and it’s different than what Emily and I are doing.

I can hear the noises, the slicks and bubbles as Emily’s jelly draws back in. I don’t like to look. In a few minutes, Emily is going to stand up. Then she’ll get her sun dress off the back of the chair, put on her flip-flops with the daisies on the toe-strap, and we’ll walk down to the beach, walk toward the lighthouse until we’re alone.

Then we’ll wade out into the water. And I know Emily. When the waves hit her, she’ll be scared. She’ll reach for my hand and, when I take it, she’ll hold onto me for protection, and I’ll help her under the waves until we get out far enough to swim. We will dive into the dark, a soft place where noises are all muffled by distance, take our place in the ghost net, and I will go to sleep and never be lonely again.