Whatever it was, it had called him here to this beach with its hornsong. The same sounds he had heard over the years, only stronger now, more desperate.

A lonely dirge-like cry sang inside him. It engulfed him in waterlogged sadness, drowning out the soft whining chorus. He felt a strange kinship with this thing, one that he could not explain.

Ancient intuition clawed its way into his awareness. The creature-no, she-was stranded, beached here in the alien air. Unable to return to the sea, she knew she was dying.

Tears scorched his eyes. He rushed at her, vainly throwing his weight into an attempt to roll the immense cylinder of her body back into the sea.

As reward, Diego's bare chest, arms, and back were scored with tiny nicks from the scattered orange scales. His torso was smeared with a gritty, viscous film that made the open cuts swell and burn like bee stings. He cried out in frustration, looking around for a way to save this bizarre and wondrous creature.

His eyes came to rest on the abandoned truck. He strode toward it, for the moment ignoring the piteous lament in his head. A search of the truck revealed a lawnmower and gas can, hand tools and pruning shears, shovels and rakes, a wheelbarrow and some clear bags-but nothing that would help him return this behemoth safely to the sea.

Despair filled him like freshly poured concrete. He returned to her side. The inky waves were almost washing up against one puckered end.

The kitten-like mewling started up again in earnest. He put a hand on her, careful not to let the sharp orange speckles cut him. On some primitive level he felt the squirming fluted ma.s.s of life within her.

They could have been her brains as easily as they were her young. It didn't matter to Diego; he knew that they needed to come out of her.

He gulped, approaching her ocean-side sphincter again. The dank smell of salt and rotting seaweed mixed with her ammonia odor, an unsettling combination. He carefully pushed the waving tendrils away from the opening. This would not be easy.

Diego plunged his arm into the unearthly creature, straining to keep down his gorge. His heart beat fast and loud in his ears. Something skittered across his foot and he jumped-a ghost crab.

His arm was buried to the shoulder. The keening in his head was louder, more frantic. He grasped the end of a slippery fat hose and pulled. It came out with a slurping noise and a geyser of foul liquid.

Diego dropped the greasy pus-thing and vomited all over it. It writhed there, celebrating the glorious emptying of Diego's guts. Then, like a slow but enormous blond worm, it inched its way into the waves.

The mother's song was faint now; the chaotic internal cries of her young continued to gnaw desperately at him.

He jabbed an arm into her again, feeling nothing but the pain of his burning cuts and the squish of her organs. He removed his arm and went to the opposite end. This time it was easier. Diego eased two of the worm-things from the orifice, each over six-feet long. He deposited them gingerly into the lapping water.

They lay there motionless. Diego could suddenly smell their corruption, even over the ammonia and beach scents. Stillborn. As were the others still rotting within the dune-side womb.

He had saved one of the disgusting things. Wasn't that enough? The wailing chorus of those still in the sea-side womb disagreed, begging for release. One day they would grow into creatures as beautiful and alien as the one dying here before him. But not if he left them inside her to die.

He went to the back of the truck and returned with the pruning shears. Sticking the bottom blade into the sphincter at the water's edge, he crossed himself, preparing for what he had to do.

Diego squeezed the rubber coated handles together with all his might. The blades weren't as sharp as he had hoped. They did not cut so much as chew slits into her, widening the puckered hole. She did not bleed, at least not so he could tell it, but the ammonia smell nearly made him pa.s.s out. What kept him conscious was the soft saxophone moan of her pain-her fear-echoing through his head.

He finished carving a second slit out of the rubbery flesh. He knew he had the will to do what was required. Nevertheless, he was thankful that his stomach was already empty. Diego took one last look around.

The moon had escaped from the clouds, leaning closer now to cast a pallid eye on the boy and the primeval sea thing on the beach. His father's truck stood lonely watch from atop the dunes.

Diego pulled off his sweatpants and boxer shorts, leaving them in a heap on the sand. He grunted, drawing in one last breath before he burrowed naked and unflinching into the womb of the beast.

Rough slimy tissue like pus-soaked leprous scabs pressed all around him. He was waist deep inside her, and clawing his way closer to the maggoty nest of her tender young. The vapors were rank, infectious. Every one of the cuts on his body screamed as they were filled with her vile inner fluids. Worming himself farther into her, Diego gagged on bile.

He could feel the wind kick up, tickling his feet and ankles. Every other part of him was embalmed in the gelatinous tract to her inner organs.

Diego heard her wordless voice again, clearer and richer, a quiet ululation. From within her the music embraced him, every note entwining his soul and hers. She sang to him of the deep black ocean floor, of submarine cities chiseled from stone and sh.e.l.l that had never been touched by the sun. He shot harpoon-fast through majestic salt-water caverns populated by unimagined species both great and terrible. An age long past-and yet to come-dazzled his mind; those who once reigned would awaken. They would sweep the planet clean of humanity, sloughing man's frail advances from its face like dead skin.

His reaching hands dug into a torn membrane, ripping it farther. Diego scooped up the howling coils of her knotted young, dragging them back with him through her awful stickiness in one armful. He collapsed to the sand, the writhing blond creatures squirming free of each other and all over and around him, then crawling blindly into the waves.

Finally, the last one slipped beneath the surface, leaving Diego with only the moon and the gorgeous stinking carca.s.s for company. He felt grief wash over him even as he saw the tide drawing his pants and vomit out to sea.

Scientists would come in the morning, and reporters. They'd take their pictures and measurements. Scratching their chins in wonder, they'd speak earnestly of evolution and the coelacanth. They would cut her up in their laboratories, puzzling over the secret of her genes. In time, someone would realize the horrible truth; the world would be warned of mankind's short leash.

Diego rose, his nude body sticky with foul juices and pockmarked by the swollen cuts. He dug in his toes, kicking wet sand across the beach.

He made one last trip to his father's truck, rummaging in the glove box first before grabbing the metal can from the bed.

With remorse like he had never felt before, Diego splattered gasoline all over the she-carca.s.s and her stillborn young. He stood there feeling the loss of the music for a long time before he set fire to a wad of napkins and papers. Mouthing a silent and unintelligible prayer, he threw the flaming papers upon her.

She went up in a quick blue whoosh that in other cases might have made Diego jump. He danced an unfamiliar dance around her instead, growing dizzy from the fumes. Naked to the moon and sand and wind, he made dirge noises never before sounded upon the earth by man.

The pyre burned itself out about an hour before dawn. Diego hunched on the sand, watching the last smoking embers. She had no bones; the flame left nothing behind but a sprinkling of orange scales. He poked the blackened sand with the shovel before turning it over and over upon itself, hiding even this evidence from the failing stars above.

He was sweating, coated with sand and sticky filth. No one would know what had transpired on this beach; Diego was certain of that. The secret of her kind would remain hidden for another age or more, until they chose to reveal themselves.

Diego walked, then ran, then swam as far and as deep into the frigid black waves as he could. The last thing he heard was the music of underwater horns, calling him home.

It's from N'kai that frightful Tsathoggua came-you know, the amorphous, toad-like G.o.d-creature mentioned in the Pnakotic Ma.n.u.scripts and the Necronomicon and the Commoriom myth-cycle preserved by the Atlantean high-priest Klarkash-Ton.

"The Whisperer in Darkness" H.P. Lovecraft (1930).

* TSATHOGGUA *

Michael Shea.

An elderly woman named Maureen, neatly dressed and manicured, sat on a bus-stop bench in San Francisco. She was watching the leisurely approach of an old shopping-cart vagabond up the sidewalk. Maureen believed in being courteous to everyone, but the vagabond woman strongly irritated her, perhaps because Maureen had put her dear little Buddy to sleep not so long ago. And the gaunt, sunburned wild-haired tramp was pushing, along with other things in her cart, a box with a tiny, sick-looking little dog in it. A whippet.

Maureen and her friends in her church Discussion Group had been talking about Speaking Out lately, about not being so courteous when something hurtful was done. About protesting in the name of decency.

"I'm sorry," said Maureen, a little loud and unsteady at the newness of this, "but I just think it's disgraceful. Whyever you've chosen to degrade yourself, I think its terrible to subject that poor little animal to this existence! It's unforgivable!"

The old cart-pushing dame paused-she had a long stark tendony frame. In her baggy jeans and denim jacket she was deep-seamed old, but one of those bionic oldsters, tight and sound as a banty rooster. "Hey," she said. "We've spent his whole life walking around this city. You think because he's dying he doesn't wanna get around any more? I'm his chauffeur!"

"But you should put him to sleep! Look how decrepit he is!"

"He's going to sleep. You think I wanna rush him along, who's been my friend his whole seventeen years? You've gotta excuse me, I'm taking us home for a bath right now."

"You have a home . . . ?"

"What am I, wearing a label? You see me dressed for walking, you think I'm Homeless?"

And on she went, her cart rattling softly. Maxie was her name. Her hair was white, but luxuriant still. She wore its s.h.a.g like a plumed battle-casque hooding her brow, head and neck. It tendrilled like tree-roots on her gaunt denimed shoulders. Her ancient whippet though, Ramses, was aged beyond all vigor. She bent her face to him as she pushed, and Ramses, a living skeleton, raised, in palsied dabs, his tiny muzzle towards her, sniffed too, now and again, the early autumn air.

In the front of the cart were a kitchen-box of goods and utensils, and next to it the bedding-and-clothes box. Last night they had shared their sleeping bag among the trees below the Legion of Honor. Had a twig fire in her firecan-invisible from twenty feet away. Had soup and tea for them both, and then some blazing stars to look at above the Golden Gate. Ramses had gone to sleep. Maxie had reread and relished Mitch.e.l.l Smith's Due North by her tiny reading light.

Here they were back at their building. Maxie's home, Butler Street County Housing, was sited in the hills above the Panhandle, the neighborhood at least a nice one. The building had its own little parking lot, and well-kept plantings all around. She had a niche in these where she always tucked her cart. She took the knapsack of her and Ramses' dirty laundry, put her two days' dirty dishes and cooking pan into its side pockets, and slipped it on. Had already slipped on the child-carrier pouch frontwards, and tenderly hoisted Ramses, holstering him against her chest.

Her apartment was on the third floor, and there was a lot of hallway-life on the third floor, hang-around kids and young men with drugs to sell each other, and att.i.tude to maintain in front of each other. Everybody poor and desperate enough to make violence always an uneasy possibility. Inside the entry she turned hard right for the stairs. The tough element always claimed the elevators. The stairs were faster anyway, and better exercise.

She emerged in the hall of her wing, and found her local, mainly Hispanic, crew on duty. Their lead rapster, in a sideways-billed cap, was a guy she thought of as Dog. That's what he called Maxie because of her always carrying Ramses, and what he called her now: "Hey Dawg! Dawg back! Wa.s.sit gonna be? You need to pay you police services fee. Now iss twenny aweek, Dog, why you don't pay up? You gotta pay the vig, Dog! You gotta pay the vig!"

This was the way it was supposed to go: Maxie would reply I'm not payin anything! Get outta my way! She would say this, but not try to get past them. Then Dog would push his bullying little riff again, and then Maxie would refuse again-all while his audience just sort of idly enjoyed the show of Dog putting Maxie through her paces. And then, at last, they'd let her pa.s.s.

But this afternoon Maxie was wrung out. That crazy woman had ticked her off, reminded her that truly, Ramses was near death. Scared, weary and p.i.s.sed, she snapped, "Leave me alone! Get your lazy candya.s.s outta my way! You moron! Vig is interest on a loan! You're trying to extort Protection from me, you ignorant a.s.shole!"

That stopped Mr. Dog hard for a moment, took him like a punch, her steely contempt where he'd thought himself comfortably feared.

If Dog hadn't had his whole crew with him, if it had been just him and another one he particularly hung with, a guy they called Carne who had sick dreamy eyes, then he would have hit her, certainly cracked her jaw, or some part of her body.

As it was, he shoved her, the heels of his hands to her shoulders, and she stumbled backwards, fighting to keep her feet under her, and Ramses safe in his carrier. Back she came, marched past them to her doorway, got inside.

As she ran the tub full, Maxie faced it: a line had been crossed. They'd laid hands on her, and it might come readier next time. These kids had nothing, possessed not even the barest information about their world. They would cling to whatever sad debris life brought their way. Would seize and cultivate any contest that got started in their hallway world.

It was on the chilly side in the bathroom. She put Ramses in the electric blanket while she bathed and washed her hair. Bathed him next, while their tomato-soup-with-cheese-melted-in was cooling-Ramses' vitamins mixed in his, Maxie's in hers. After they ate, there were all the utensils to be scoured and re-packed in the pockets of the knapsack. She cleaned and flossed her teeth, and then hung Ramses in a clean carrier on her chest and took up the knapsack of wash. Time to check out the laundry room.

She cracked her door open. The corridor was empty. She made quick time to the stairwell and slipped inside it. Stood listening.

Ten flights of metal stairs and scarred pipe-railing above her, a zigzag of six flights below her. From the laundry room door would well the echoes of any activity. Nothing.

She always listened before descending. People partied down there, dealt, OD'd occasionally, and Maxie always stood ready to turn on a dime and truck on out to a laundromat in the neighborhood-more expensive but ha.s.sle-free.

She started down quietly. Got down four of the six flights, the laundry room and the maze of storage lockers that surrounded it sounding perfectly empty . . . and then there came one very soft little resonance of metal.

So minor a sound, like the slightest tap against the hollowness of one of the big washers or driers down there. Listening, listening she heard nothing more.

It could have been the stir of someone hiding down there.

She peered into Ramses' face, checking as she'd done through the years for his reading of a risky vicinity. He looked up at her, feebly alert, but inscrutable. Ah, how her little sidekick's life had waned.

A flare of anger started Maxie down again. She was sick of dodging around this gloomy, risky place. But old persons, well, the whole world was bigger and scarier for them all. If she was tired of ducking and maneuvering in the world's brutal bigness, Maxie should just give up, right? The fact was, she would save two bucks using these machines. That was an extra c.o.c.ktail at Pete's tonight. So. Was she getting so chicken-s.h.i.t that she didn't dare go down there and win herself a bit of luxury?

The stairwell door hung open, and the laundry room beyond it was deserted. She walked down both aisles to be sure, and checked the bank of driers. The long-defunct machine back in the corner still stood with its door open, though the band of yellow plastic tape across it had been broken.

She approached it down the damp concrete aisle, where suds lay on the floor by the bank of washers opposite. A faint, ragged noise rose from the pouch. Ramses was growling a warning and there was something big inside the drier's black drum.

A person. A woman? Yes. A little Latin woman, curled up as if asleep. Was she asleep? And as Maxie leaned her head inside, Ramses' little growl grew echosome.

Asleep. She breathed softly, the little brown moon of her face childish and candid, seeming to dream.

On drugs? Drunk? Whatever, leave her be. You stick tight to your own business in this place. She backed quietly from the drier, and something squishy crackled under the heel of her Nike. She turned around.

One of the big washers behind her had shut down mid-cycle, had a load of unmoving suds in it, while the door of the one beside it hung open, thick suds dripping from the door's gla.s.s eye. She'd trod in the mess of foam it had shed on the floor. There was her shoe-print in the suds, and something small and dark crushed in its midst.

A slug? It always smelled so earthy down here, and right now more than ever. The dense dirt the whole building was rooted in, you could feel it right outside these concrete walls.

She went into the other aisle, got all their wash into one load, and set it going. She put Ramses down on the floor, and was folding his pouch into a little mat for him, when he got up and tottered off. Maxie smiled. Sometimes the earthen aura down here persuaded the old Ramses that he was outside where he could take a dump. Let him. It would be small and dry and easily scooped. She watched his trembly progress.

d.a.m.n that self-righteous old b.i.t.c.h, but it was true: her poor friend was on his way out. Maxie had gotten him for Jack in those last two years Jack was dying. Jack had named him, for his habit of ramming blindly into things as an impetuous pup. Fifteen years dead, the dear man. How she missed him still! And now old Ramses here, the last piece of life they'd shared, was pa.s.sing out of the world.

Maxie opened The Guns of August, and fell right into it, re-entered that vast machine of long-ago armies locked in stasis, locked in butchery.

She would allow herself an extra cigarette today-six, not five. Her regimen iron-fast these last ten years, her six-smoke days were an indulgence earned by their rarity. She lit one up, and gorged on the satiny entrails of a Marlboro's smoke as she read.

Going to dry her load, she saw Ramses down at the end of the aisle, sitting before the little Latina's odd dormitory, his gaze alternating between it and the lush suds still undecayed on the floor. When Maxie started her own dryer, it roused no stir from the sleeper. How strange to have a little dreaming neighbor like this. What kind of life would the girl step back into when she woke? What dangers, disorders, unmet needs? How many years did she have left? Far more than Maxie had, no doubt.

Maureen had one of those decent-sized little backyards some houses have out in the Avenues, and she and m.u.f.fin were out in it, watering their flowerbeds. The dog two yards over, King, that dreadful big mastiff of Wyatt and Eve's, was barking again. His relentless barking had long ago worn a blister on Maureen's patience, and then the blister had become more like a callus, though sometimes it was more like a blister again.

Meanwhile little m.u.f.fin, also vocal, was yipping incessantly at the hose. Maureen thumbed the water into a fan and moistened the trilliums, finding m.u.f.fy's puppy-relentlessness a little trying after all. Maureen had been younger when she'd broken in her beloved Buddy. But if you loved small dogs, you had to handle that hyperness that goes with them, especially at first.

No one could replace Buddy of course. The grief for Buddy, whom she'd had to put to sleep, came to her again, as Maureen had long ago accepted it would. She gazed down upon m.u.f.fin, trying to see in him the dear companion he would become in future years. As she was musing in this way, the hose she held gave a kind of lurch in her inattentive grip, twitched sideways, and sent a stronger stream down on m.u.f.fin, drenching his head in mid-bark. The dog shook himself, and then began to lick his chops, while Maureen looked closer at what seemed to be a thicker kind of water now coming our of her garden hose. It fel slicker to her thumb and fingers, and it splattered rather than splashed on the soil.

And against the background of the soil, into which it quickly soaked, it was hard to tell but weren't there, like, little black clots in the water? They soaked in too fast to be sure.

Then the water ran normal again. Some bit of debris in the line.

"I don't drink that much Maxie," Vera said, stabbing the bar with her forefinger, "and I saw what I saw. You enjoying that drink?" Vera had a sharp nose for a black lady, and little tufted, alarmed-looking eyebrows that made her eyes seem on the brink of outrage.

"I am enjoying it, and I am listening."

"What number is that?" Referring to the cigarette Maxie was unlimbering.

"Two. I get six today. I might smoke two in a row, sitting on this very stool." Maxie waved another round from Pete. She had Ramses in the sling-would have wanted to bring in his box and put it on the stool next to hers, but Pete drew the line. "The dog can come in, but not in his bed for Chrissake! I already let you park your G.o.dd.a.m.n bag-lady cart outback, Maxie! This is a bar! Jack would have said the same!"

"Jack loved Ramses!"

"This is a bar, all right," put in Vera, "but this is a Neighborhood Bar. It celebrates Neighborhood Diversity; including the whackadoo practices of the local seniors." Elbowing Maxie's ribs here. They had been neighbors for seven years, and then Vera had protested against the decline of the Butler Street Housing. She had agitated and done the red tape till she was re-lodged in a better building. And now, that building was already as bad as Butler, if not worse.

"So. What do you think, girl? About what I saw? Look at me. Do you think I'm drunk?"

"No."

"Well this is exactly how it was last night crossing the Panhandle. So you going to just dismiss what I told you?"

Crossing the Panhandle at about two a.m., Vera had seen a man lying on a bench under one of the pathway lamps. He was pa.s.sed out, it seemed, as she approached, still a block away, but then the man suddenly appeared to be struck by seizure. His legs started violently kicking out as he lay there Vera hurried forward, the path curving and some trees blocking her view for several long moments as she limpingly picked up speed, striding as fast as her bad left hip would let her.

When she came back into view just yards from the bench, the man lay quiet again, totally still, his eyelids shut, his face slack, his left arm hanging off the bench-and one of the legs of his trousers flat and empty on the slats of the bench.

"I like to've wet myself," were Vera's words. She had seen both legs kicking in the dim lamplight and now this empty fabric tube.

And just then, she heard a sc.r.a.ping, as of rough skin wrestling through undergrowth. She caught a blur of movement off in the gra.s.s to her right.'