Fading Light: An Anthology of the Monstrous: Tim Marquitz (28 page)

“Well, well, well, look at what we have here,” came a
booming voice filling the room. Chifford was looking down from his
perch high above.

“If it isn’t our lost sheep come back to the fold. How
nice of you to bring her back with you, Paul.”

Before we could react, hands grabbed us from behind and we were
bound. Immediately, I heard Professor Kiska chanting something in a
language I could not understand, but all that it did was elicit a
peal of laughter from the man above.

“Oh Paul, Paul, Paul. Trying to use that old spell of
Armitage’s? That would only work if I was from the other side.
Unlike my great Uncle, I am quite human.”

Doctor Kiska let out a sigh of resignation.

“It was the only weapon I had,” he whispered in my
direction. “Sorry, Diana.”

At that point we were gagged and brought into the next room. What I
saw amazed me. In this large room was what looked like the top of an
ancient pyramid, but blood covered every point of it.

“I am glad you are here to see this, Diana. You get to see what
happens to those who oppose me. It seems Jeremiah, the last of the
Undecayed Bishops, decided to ignore my orders and refused to kill
you the other night. That was unfortunate for him.”

At the top of the pyramid I saw Mr. Bishop kneeling beside an altar
of stone.

“I tried to warn you about these degenerates,” he gasped.
“Why did you return?”

“Because she is the heroine,” replied Thomas Whateley.
“Because she couldn’t leave her students to die.”

With that, Whateley took his right hand, which I noticed was encased
in a steel glove, tipped with claws and dripping with blood, and
shoved it into Bishop’s chest and pulled out the still beating
heart while mumbling the name
Yog-Sothoth
while the din of
whippoorwills crescendoed above.

“Really,” he continued as Bishop’s corpse was
dragged to the side to be carried into the other room for processing.
“I was hoping you would have lasted longer. I was hoping to
marry you one day. You are really the first one to actually look into
the disappearing students. Everyone else just didn’t care.”

He reached out again and ripped out the heart of professor Kiska just
as if picking a cherry from a bowl. Once again the name of
Yog-Sothoth
and a crescendo.

It was now my turn. They led me to the altar, and he stared down at
me.

“You know, we’ve been doing this for so very long.
Pickings were very slim after the Underground Railroad shut down. We
even had to sacrifice our own for a while. I still can’t
believe how easily people are fooled. Nobody asks where the meat
comes from even though we haven’t had cows here for fifteen
years. You know, I listened in on your lesson about Hitler and how
they operated. He was a fool. We have killed millions but nobody
notices. Everyone notices the fat tick sucking too much, too fast,
but not the small tick that takes it low and slow feeding off the
weakened calf nobody cares about.”

He glared down with his hand poised to strike.

“They say mankind is the ultimate predator, but the hunt is
always best when the predator doesn’t know he is the prey. They
never see it coming.”

All it took was a flash of the hand, I heard the name called, then
heard the shrill cries of the birds, and then saw their flapping rush
of wings. It was time to struggle against their clawing grasp, and
all I could see was a fading light.

I was born on September 27, 1969. I have always felt I was born to be
a teacher. I grew up admiring teachers and I knew there was something
about teaching youth that always called to me. I also felt that there
was something else just out of reach. It is like a song whose tune
you know, but you can’t remember the lyrics.

I regained that memory last month, and have frantically been trying
to write it down on paper. It only took one word to recall it in pure
crystal clarity. All it took was the name of a town in an article
published in the
El Paso Times,
an article about the new
opportunities to be had in a town called Dunwich.

I recall one thing Whateley taught me. The best hunt is when the
predator doesn’t know he is the prey, and they won’t see
me coming.

Gran never did accept the explanation we heard on the news that a
dust cloud had come between us and the Sun, blocking almost all of
its light and heat from reaching us. She taught astronomy at UCLA a
lifetime ago, so I had reason to listen to her.

“It’s just foolishness. We’d—I’d—have seen it decades ago.
People are acting like it just snuck up on us.”

By now, six weeks after the Sun went out, it was an old argument, and
I just tried to keep a neutral face while I counted out her meds. Her
body was failing, but her mind was still sharp.

“Dust clouds are dark, Gran, unless something lights them from
behind. They could have missed it,” I’d say, and she’d
act like she wanted to throw something at me. Honestly, I said it to
get a rise out of her.

“They’re also big, light years across. The probability
we’d drift into something so small and so dense?” she’d
sputter. “It just beggars the imagination.”

She was right about that, though I’d never tell her so. A dust
cloud dense enough to block all but the dimmest flicker of light from
just 1 AU away? It would be denser than anything observed or
imagined. But, of course, there it was.

Week Six. Most of the succulent plants were already dead by this
point. They were getting snow flurries on the Florida coast. Even if
the cloud passed away right now, it was too late for us, for all life
on Earth. The plankton was dead by now, the food chain severed at its
base.

I watched thick, wet flakes blow past the window as I plopped the
last of the pills into their dated plastic trays. Beyond, the Pacific
stretched, black and silent. The Moon was black, too, of course. Only
whispering starlight was left to us now, barely enough to make out
the play of shadow and reflection on the sea.

Gran had done very well for herself in her academic days: authored
several books, done the lecture circuit, even had a couple of
television shows. They’d called her the First Lady of Science.
She retired at the height of her fame and spent most of her money on
this, a private cove on the Oregon coast. She still wrote a book
every decade or so, but they were light, popular reading at best,
nothing like the flights of imagination and fact she’d woven in
her early days. “They keep me in pizza money,” she
claimed.

Her retreat was silent and still, the rooms built way back into the
earth and rock with only a thin line of windows to show it even
existed. Water was from an artesian well and most of the power was,
ironically, solar. Thankfully, she’d included a large fireplace
in the great room. I’d rolled her bed into the great room, and
I slept on the couch in case she needed anything. Neither of us had
any illusions we’d ever leave this place.

I counted her pills again and compared them to the little chart I’d
made up, checking it twice to make certain I wasn’t about to
poison her ahead of time. We’d talked about what we’d do
that morning, breath pluming softly in the shadowed great room, each
of us wrapped against the increasing cold.

“I want it to be quick and painless,” I said into the
darkness.

“I hear freezing to death is supposed to be both,” came
Gran’s soft voice.

“True. Making naked snow angels or something has its appeal.”

Gran laughed. “The angels should be here for both of us, soon
enough.”

I cut my eyes over to her, but could only see her outline in the dim,
battery-powered nightlight. She’d been an atheist as long as
I’d known her, but she’d never mocked my faith before. I
decided she wasn’t doing so, now of all times.

“You’re certain about that, hmm?”

“Reasonably. It would fit, I think.”

“Fit what?”

“Things I’ve read,” came the soft reply, almost
drowsy.

I took a deep breath and let it out slowly, then eased my way out
from under the covers and into jeans and jacket. My cat Barnaby had
disappeared into the woods the day we got here, or he’d have
been warming my feet as he’d always done. He’d gone to
make his own peace with what was happening, I suppose.

“So we’re decided, then? There are more than enough
medicines to do the trick,” I said as I fetched the kettle for
tea.

Gran carefully eased herself into a sitting position in her bed, her
cheeks sunken but her eyes still bright. “I think so, but your
decision surprises me. I thought suicide was a sin.”

Her tone was earnest, and I concentrated on setting the kettle
correctly and then waking the fire, adding wood and using the poker.
“It is,” I answered, at last, “but I can’t
leave you alone, and I don’t want to be alone when it happens.
I could linger, and go mad, eventually freezing to death months
later, anyway. I’ve thought it over, and I’m thinking God
will understand.”

Gran said nothing, only nodding her head as she rose and dressed.

Now, later, I clicked pill trays closed and looked out the kitchen
window.

The Pacific shuddered under the winds. Months or years from now, it
would freeze over entirely. I blinked back tears, seeing a large
humpback whale breech and fall back into the black water. The poor
thing would be starving by now. The bottom feeders would be growing
fat and happy until slowly the food trickling down from the surface
slowed and stopped. Eventually, only the tiny things around the
deep-sea vents would be left.

I turned and almost dropped the tray. Gran was right behind me,
staring at the swirling water where the whale had been. Her face was
drawn, her lips quivering.

I put down the medicine and embraced her, drawing her slight form to
me, feeling her tremble.

“Have you heard anything, in the wood?” she said into my
ear.

I shook my head and stepped back, reached to arrange her hair. “No,
Gran. Most of the birds are gone. The bugs, too.” It had been
the height of summer in North America when the darkness came and
threw the entire ecosystem into a tailspin. I’d seen some very
bizarre animal behavior on the drive up to the cove.

“Of course. Be careful going out for wood. I suspect there
might be feral dogs.”

“There are cougars and bears in the region, too,” I said.

“Not for long. They’ll be leaving for warmer pastures, or
so they think. Their instincts might save them, for a time.”
She smiled suddenly. “You be careful, though,” she said,
and kissed my cheek.

I busied myself making sure that the various systems of the habitat
were still working, then I went for a walk on the deck outside.

The wind was only a breath right now. I suspected the climate was
slowly stabilizing towards an endless calm, with no sunlight to drive
the massive atmospheric heat engine. Before the last TV stations went
off the air in the wake of the fires and riots, I’d heard that
we were still getting about one percent of our former light and heat.
Enough, perhaps, to keep something multi-cellular alive. Someday in
the distant future, the cloud would pass and life would begin its
long climb up the ladder again. It had done so before and would do so
again. There was some cold comfort in that.

The cove was almost closed in, and the drop-off to the gray beach
below was a good fifty feet. The deck very slightly overhung, giving
me a spectacular view. Gran owned everything in sight, and I knew the
land was surrounded by a high fence so I was less worried about
animals than I was of people. The cities had surely been emptying for
weeks, now. We’d seen not a single sign of human life, though.
No airplanes, no boats, nothing.

I saw more whales at play, out in the far gray reaches of the sea,
and I leaned against the railing to watch them until I saw one
suddenly pulled under.

I wiped my eyes and felt my hand shake. I ran inside for binoculars
and returned, focused on the distant pod.

Gray-black shapes broke, spouted, and slid back into the water. It
could be an orca pack. The predators, they would be the last to go.
Then a smooth matte-black shape heaved itself out of the water and I
felt my knees go weak. It dwarfed the whales around it by an order of
magnitude, and my eyes wanted to slide off that infinite blackness,
wanted not to focus on it. A part of the … the not-whale split
off and slid into one of the humpbacks, like a slow spear. It
thrashed and was pulled out of sight. It was hard to see exactly what
happened; the hide of the predator was so black it killed all detail.
It was like watching a silhouette.

The whales hadn’t been playing. They’d been running.

I stumbled back until I hit the thick plate glass doors. The
binoculars dropped. They probably broke. A part of my mind told me
Gran would be mad. She’d told me to be careful with the
binoculars. They were grown-up things, delicate and expensive.

I wiped at my eyes and stumbled inside. Gran was sitting up in her
bed, watching me.

“I guess it’s happening sooner than I thought,” she
said, her face in shadow.

“What is?” I managed to croak. I clenched my hands to
stop them from shaking. What I’d seen was impossible. Nothing
that big could exist. Maybe it was the pills. I’d handled them
with bare skin. There could be a reaction, hallucinations, something.

I felt Gran’s touch on my shoulders. She turned me around to
face the ocean again, even though I tried not to. Her fingers were
achingly tight.

“Shhh, shhh,” Gran said, like she was calming a pet.
“I’ve known
something
would come along for decades
now. I didn’t know the shape or nature of it, though.”

“This whole thing, the house, the land … ”

“As safe and secure as I could make it,” she laughed
softly. “I was prepared for an economic or political collapse.
A new Crusade, an ethnic cleansing, a pandemic, a food blight, zombie
apocalypse; something like that.” Her fingers tightened.
“Something that would eventually end.”