Oliver

  Man is most contemptible when compared with his own pretensions.

  Time passed strangely. The stretches of blackness were eternal, and the moments of light mere blips – confused glimpses of white walls, metal machinery, and strange faces. Nothing sounded right. Voices were muted or absent, sounds warped and burbled as if underwater, and even the blank stretches of nothing were infected with a whispering that Oliver felt he could understand if only he could listen harder. It was deep, and quiet, and formless… but it almost made sense. He spent ten thousand years trying to hear it, and when the world intruded it was an annoyance.

  He’d been sitting in a car for a long while before he was conscious enough to realize it. The first thing he noticed was the feel of his forehead stick-slide-sticking to the passenger window. Then he saw houses gliding past in the darkness outside, and his hand twitching feebly in his lap, and then the cracked vinyl dashboard of their ancient Corolla. He knew his dad was driving without looking. He couldn’t look yet. It was too hard to lift his head. Instead, he fumbled his hand toward the driver’s seat and felt for him. Sure enough, there was the thin shoulder under the washed-once-a-week polyester shirt he’d worn Olly’s entire life.

  “Hello, son,” he said gently. “We’re on our way home. Just rest.”

  That sounded like a fine idea, and the passing houses faded to blackness for an unknown stretch before returning. His head felt a little clearer and the muffled cocoon around his brain was shredding. He was able to lift his head, though it still felt wobbly.

  “Am I dying?” he asked softly, not looking at his father.

  Walter Mason chuckled. “No, son. You’ll be fine.”

  “Black goop running out of my face all the time isn’t fine.”

  “I know you’re concerned.”

  “It’s been getting worse. So much worse.”

  “True enough. You may think me hopelessly out of touch, but I see more than you think.”

  “Dad!” His fists clenched weakly in his lap. “Something came out of my nose and crawled away. How can that be fine?”

  “It isn’t the first time that’s happened, you know.”

  Oliver gaped at him. “What?”

  “You were sleeping. It was six weeks ago. September second. I have it written in my journal.”

  “And you didn’t tell me?”

  “Some things have to be learned at the right time, son. I knew it wouldn’t be long.”

  “You saw something crawl out of me and didn’t take me to the doctor or something?”

  “You don’t take a buck to the vet when it sprouts horns, son.”

  Oliver hardly heard him. “And when did you see me sleeping?”

  His father shrugged, smiling faintly, his eyes still on the road. “I know we have a hard time talking, but I still want to spend time with my boy. I come in and check on you every now and then in the night. Us old folk don’t always sleep much.”

  He didn’t know what to say to that, so he stared out the window. They were only a few blocks from home. Finally, he said, “What happened?”

  “I got a call from Elizabeth Rajani saying you’d collapsed at their house, and they’d taken you to the hospital in Medford. I got there as quickly as I could and sent them on their way. I wish you’d told me your friend was the Rajani girl. I’d have had a few things to say about that.”

  Oliver frowned. “Like what?”

  “That you’d be wise to find safer friends.”

  He was shocked. It was the firmest statement of preference his father had ever made. “I don’t want other friends. She’s cool.”

  “Cool matters very little in the long run, son. Those people aren’t to be trusted.”

  Oliver shook his head, feeling dislocated. Hearing his dad take a stand on something was like seeing a mouse attack a cat. “Are you for real? ‘Those people?’ Do you have something against Indian people? My dad’s a closet racist and I’m just now finding out.”

  “Be calm, son. There are things far deeper and realer than skin color or race.”

  “Yeah? Like what?”

  His dad’s lips thinned. “That’s what I’m trying to tell you, if you’d stop to listen.”

  “Great, dad. You say I shouldn’t spend time with literally the only friend I’ve made in like five years, longer maybe, and you have more? Please, I’m all ears!”

  “The sarcasm isn’t helpful, son.”

  “Neither is finding out my father knows I’ve been sick for ages and he’s cool with it.” Rage churned in his stomach, and his mouth kept going even as he tried to clamp it shut. “I thought I was dying, Dad, and I was too scared to even think about it. I told people it was a sinus thing. That is the stupidest thing ever, and I said it over and over just because I couldn’t handle thinking it was something real. You know why? Because I knew you wouldn’t help. You’d just shrug and say it was fine and go back to your prayers and I’d die and you’d finally have some peace. And hey, look at that, I end up in the hospital and what do you say? ‘You’re fine, son.’”

  He slammed his fist into the dashboard, relishing the pain. Tears dribbled down his cheeks. He could almost hear that same whispering he’d heard in his dreaming. “Cut the bullshit, Dad. Something’s eating me inside. I’m dying.”

  His father was silent for a long time. “There’s no need for cursing.”

  “Yes, out of everything I just said, that’s the right thing to focus on. Good job.”

  “I swear by all I hold dear that you are not dying.” He pulled a manila envelope from the dashboard in front of the steering wheel. “I know exactly what’s happening to you, and I can show you. But first I need you to promise me to stay away from the Rajani girl.”

  “I won’t.”

  “You must, son. She will hurt you.”

  “Dad, it’s not like we’re dating.”

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  “That’s not the kind of hurt I’m worried about. You don’t know who she really is.”

  They pulled into their driveway, and Oliver decided he’d had enough. “Keep your little folder. I don’t care.”

  “Oliver, we have to talk about this.”

  He opened the door and got out. “We’ve talked more in the last ten minutes than we have all year. Turns out I like it way better when we don’t.”

  He slammed the door and ran inside, still feeling a little wobbly on his legs. He shut the door and turned the deadbolt out of spite. His father had the keys, but a few extra seconds without him sounded nice. He stormed into the living room, wanting to break something. Mom’s framed picture on the shrine beckoned to him, and he crossed to it, enjoying the thought of his father’s anguish at seeing his precious shrine defiled, the frame shattered, the glass exploded all over the carpet.

  When he snatched it up, though, his mother smiled at him in her outdated clothes and horn-rimmed glasses, and he couldn’t do it. He might not remember her, but she didn’t deserve his anger. If she hadn’t died, it’d be different. He’d be better. I’d be better. He sighed and put the picture back. He heard his father’s key in the lock.

  On impulse, Olly knelt before the shrine and looked up at all the little statues and candles. His father found such comfort in all of this; why couldn’t he? He’d loved the statue of Angel Gabriel as a little boy, and if the Jesus on the Cross was a little gross, it had some powerful symbolism, didn’t it? Something caught his eye as being out of place, and he reached for it. It was Mother Mary holding her baby, and as soon as he looked at it, he felt a wave of vertigo. It used to be different. Someone changed it. Goosebumps rippled across his skin.

  Mother Mary no longer held a cherubic baby Jesus. Wrapped in her arms, bundled in white swaddling, was a black creature with a football head and little clawed wings arching out at the top. A tangle of black tentacles stuck out the bottom instead of feet. And there, perched on the shoulder of Sleeping St. Joseph, the same figure, one tentacle covering his eyes, another touching his ear. And carved into the frame of Mom’s picture, colored gold like the rest so he’d never really noticed it, the same football head with wings outstretched from its temples. It was everywhere, and he’d never seen it.

  He heard his father’s footsteps, but he couldn’t tear his eyes away from the hidden truth that was suddenly so obvious. “How long has it been like this?” he husked.

  “A very long time, son. You never bothered to look.”

  Olly held up the statue. “This. It’s the same. It’s the thing… the thing that…”

  His father knelt in front of him, setting his manila envelope on the rickety coffee table and taking his hands.

  “I never talked much about how your mother died.”

  Oliver blinked, thrown by the non sequitur. “You said the roof caved in and hit her. Freak accident.”

  “That’s true enough, as far as it goes, but the roof fell because something fell through it, and though it pains me, that part was no accident.”

  “What?”

  “Your mother was nursing you in the bedroom,” he said, motioning to the hallway where the master bedroom stood. “I was brushing my teeth when it happened. I heard the crash and came in. A shard of meteorite no bigger than my fist had crossed unthinkable distances of space and time, broken through the atmosphere, and came down right in there. It went right through her chest and into the floor. It missed you by inches. I’ve never been so heartbroken in my life. I didn’t even imagine such grief existed.”

  Oliver tried to imagine the scene and failed. “Why did you never tell me this?”

  In answer, his father reached over to the shrine and opened the drawer of the end table on which it all stood. From the very back of the drawer he withdrew a velvet pouch. He reached in and pulled out a rock shaped like an oversized egg, its surface pitted and scarred. A jagged crack ran right through its middle.

  “You kept it?” Oliver asked, bewildered.

  “How could I not? It’s the most important thing that ever happened to us.” His father shifted his grip, and the rock fell in two halves in his palm right along the fissure down the center. The middle of the rock was hollowed out in a perfect circle. “As I held your mother’s body, I left you on the floor. I shouldn’t have, I suppose, but all I could think was that she might still be alive somehow. Then the rock cracked open. It was still burning hot; I had to replace the carpet in the room from all the burns. Out of its core came the most incredible thing I’ve ever laid eyes on. A creature capable of surviving aeons trapped in its tiny vessel, withstanding the cold and the vacuum for time beyond space. It was smaller than a mouse, and it looked… well, you know what it looked like, don’t you? I’d done enough searching into the ancient mysteries that I knew such things existed, but I never dreamed I’d see something so far beyond my own understanding. It came to us, son. It needed us. I reached for it… and it moved away from me like water flowing over stone. I’d been too long in this earth, had grown too corrupted. It was another grief piled atop your mother’s death, and for a moment I sincerely wished to die.” He paused, wringing his hands. Tears glittered in his eyes behind his glasses.

  “It might have accepted your mother. I often think that had it been half a second later, the earth’s rotation just a hair faster, it might all have gone differently, and far better. But wiser minds than mine prevail, and your mother was… unavailable. So this tiny scion of the Oldest of the Old Ones, it chose you.”

  Oliver felt numb. He knew, but he asked anyway. “Chose me?”

  His father took the manila folder from the coffee table and laid it in his hands. “I was very lucky that the imaging technician in Medford is a member of my congregation. There might have been difficult questions otherwise.”

  Oliver opened the folder, and inside, tucked amid a sheaf of official-looking hospital documents, he found an x-ray image. He held it up to the lamp’s light and his breath caught in his throat. He saw his own skull and brain laid bare. The base and back part of his brain looked as he expected; just like pictures he’d seen in textbooks and encyclopedias… but where his frontal lobes should have been lay a darker mass shaped like a football, two vestigial wings clearly visible folded against its upper curve. Tentacles descended into his eye sockets and nasal cavities.

  “You were chosen,” his father said gently, “to take us to the next stage of humanity. You are what comes next, and I couldn’t be prouder to be your father.”

  “You sound like that crazy librarian. She said the same things to Amrita.”

  His dad shook his head. “Gilman and her ilk worship a monster. A fallen god. You know how the Bible talks about the fallen angel that became the devil? That story came from the ancient knowledge of Cthulhu. He wants to destroy us all, son, and he’s fooled a good many folks around here into thinking he’ll save them. He won’t. We need a higher law, and our master Yog-Sothoth will give it to us. Through you.”

  Oliver felt at his nose. It was dry for once, but he imagined he could feel the wiggling of tiny tentacles deep in his head. “This is insane.”

  “The proof is in your hands. I waited as long as I could to tell you; I wanted you to have as much of a childhood as possible. But you know how when you have something you’d like to say it’s hard to hold it back and still think of anything else to talk about?” He shrugged, motioning back and forth between them. “That has been my entire life with you. You have no idea the relief this is.”

  Oliver looked at the shrine. “All this time I thought you were praying to bring Mom back.”

  “I suppose I was; it just wasn’t the kind of praying you thought. I can teach you the words. You’ll need to know them in the days to come.”

  Oliver clutched the x-ray and tried to think it through. His father was more real, more present than he’d ever seen him, and having him really looking for the first time was a balm to Olly’s soul in a way he’d never hoped for. As he talked, it all made a deranged kind of sense, and Olly had seen too much in the last couple of days to say it was all garbage. Still, the logical part of himself rebelled.

  “You let a little squid monster crawl up your son’s nose right after it had killed your wife.”

  “I did fear when I first saw it happening. But son, no great thing is accomplished without fear or pain. The headaches and the nosebleeds will stop soon, when the symbiont you bear stops producing Little Ones.”

  “And then?”

  “And then we will see. You’ll be the one who knows what comes next, but it will be grand.”

  Oliver’s mind latched onto something his father had said earlier. “How can a meteorite falling on our house not be an accident?”

  “Oh son, that’s what I mean by pain and sacrifice to bring about something better. I had no idea when or how it would happen – and I certainly didn’t know it would end your dear mother’s life – but I was the one that summoned the being your bear. I found the incantations. I studied for years. And the Greatest of the Old Ones answered to save us from the devil stirring in the depths.”

  Oliver tottered to his feet. “I need to think.”

  “Of course. Listen to your heart. Listen to your head.” He tapped his own forehead with a smile. “Listen to your little friend, if you can hear it.”

  Olly made his way up to his room, leaning heavily on the banister, his mind awhirl. He felt nothing. He closed his door behind him and sat on his bed, staring into space. His mind was silent. He was a void inside.

  THIS IS THE WAY, something said inside him. It was the whisper that he’d been hearing even before he woke, but now he was quiet enough inside to hear it. It was a warm, calm voice, and it filled him.

  Then he heard a rough tapping at the window, and it broke him out of his trance. There, crouched on the tilted roof, eyes wide and braid askew, was Amrita, and she wanted to come in.