Maureen's legs thrust muscularly forth, and they (and her other selves in them) departed, surging reptilically down the hall and bursting-first one, then the other-with a slick whispery sound of pa.s.sage out through the pet door.

While she who remained in the Barcalounger lay with tail thrashing to a metabolic rhythm, lay enthralled by the great strength blossoming in her newly potent shape.

Transfiguration! Accelerating now. Her flesh became whip-taut and cool. In smooth convulsions, her head and jaws usurped all the ma.s.s of her erstwhile body from the ribs up. And her eyes came back! My G.o.d, how they came back! Maureen could see all the way around her, her great orbs swiveling like greased ball bearings, eyes big enough to hold the world, catch every least movement in it.

Then, huge-jawed, her skin a glossy armor tough as leather, she wrenched free of her robe. She leapt, in a cavorting dolphins arc, from the Barcalounger, and hit the floor with the four surprises of little legs and clawed feet to break her impact. She scrabbled and slithered toward the front door.

By G.o.d in Heaven, Maureen was hungry! It was a raging void in her, a cyclone of need. But her head was too huge for the pet door, and her forefoot too crude for the k.n.o.b. She rammed the door, cracking it lengthwise, but also hurting her head. She mustn't use her head as a ram yet. Her instinct told her that food was strength, and she would grow mightier with eating. The kitchen window should be easier than the door. She craved something large to eat, and the thought of the backyard-even as she toiled swiftly back down the hall-brought instantly to mind what she wanted to eat. It was when she was out back gardening, that she was most tormented by King's barking.

She leapt up onto the kitchen table. Perched on the table, her legs seeming to grow with every pa.s.sing second, she gathered herself for a mightier leap-straight at the double panes above the kitchen sink.

Erupting into morning sun, in a sparkling spray of gla.s.s, Maureen dropped splay-legged-whumph-onto her deep, lush lawn.

King lived two yards over. Even now he was barking, with deep, baying deliberation.

She regarded her st.u.r.dy plank fence. She sensed that a moment was coming, not too distant, when she would have hind legs that could launch her right over it. But for the present, she began to ram and claw her way into the soft earth at the base of the fence.

She made rapid progress into the soil. As she worked, she heard the strains of Barry Manilow. That was why King was so vocal-his people, Wyatt and Eve-were out in their Jacuzzi on the back deck, enjoying the day with him.

With her cart stashed, knapsack packed, and Ramses in his sling, Maxie headed down one of the steep trails to the beach. Ramses was lively, head up out of the pouch, turning the little wand of his muzzle left and right. And there was a scent of something. A cool October day, a shred or two of cloud across the blue, but it didn't smell as fresh as it looked. There was a rankness that flirted with her mind.

Ramses got even livelier. Had to be put down. Tottered to a tree and peed on it. He seemed conscious of some adversary here, one he meant to meet. She put him in the sling the rest of the way down, but when they reached the narrow beach, he insisted on getting down again and tottered, zig and zag, ahead of her.

Maxie climbed the rocks a little way, and saw the yellow curdled foam mantling the sea for a hundred yards offsh.o.r.e, an unbroken collar arcing eastwards, curving round back towards the Golden Gate. In that direction the creamy expanse narrowed. Would it taper finally to a point of origin?

Ramses was already well ahead of her. She hurried after. Look at the life and purpose in him today! Put him to sleep? The idiocy of that woman.

They picked their way across rock shelf and gravel bar. Maxie found Ramses' unflagging energy as astonishing as she did the foam, which was indeed tapering, narrowing, till they came to a sharp inv.a.g.i.n.ation of the bluffs' wall.

Rounding this, they confronted a vertical cleft that vanished into the vegetation overhead. It was reminiscent of the much higher one Leon had taken her to, but its cleft was moister, and faintly foamy, and from its juncture with the barnacled rocks, a thin, milky threadwork branched out into the sea. The whole great stream of foam rose here!

Her clawed feet seemed to grow in strength with use-they gave Maureen a surprising amount of leverage in the earth. But it was her ma.s.sive muscled head, and sinewy fish-like thrust, that enabled her momentum through the loam.

Surfacing in a spray of marigolds (Miss Saunders' largest bed of them) she charged to the next fence, and dove again against the earth, the dense soil a medium almost as yielding as water to her miraculous new shape.

She erupted in front of King's sizeable little house, which was in the corner of the yard the dog most loved-for from here he could bark at houses on every side of him. Maxie rose like a geyser of hunger, a craving void that must obliterate this beast. King had spirit. He yelped, he snarled, he lunged-into Maureen's widening, up-rushing jaws, which possessed his forelegs, head and chest, and lifted his struggling hindquarters skywards.

The game brute was chewing ferociously on Maureen's tongue, a ma.s.sy organ which felt not pain, but tingling imminence, and then that tongue swelled and thrust more deeply into King's throat, a thick, expanding root that exploded King's skull within her mouth. She heaved him back, and yet again back, bagging the dog-near inert now, just tremoring-all the way down her gullet.

For an indeterminate time she crouched there, hidden by King's house from Wyatt and Eve in their Jacuzzi. Crouched there while Barry Manilow swelled suavely overhead. Crouched there discovering that King within her, though the architecture of him was dissolving in her corrosive stomach acids, though the brain and the bone sh.e.l.l that had held his heartbeats, his thoughts, were dissolving in her hunger, King himself was not dissolving, the animal's spirit emerged intact within her as his fleshly structure crumbled away. She felt, in the darkness of her digestion, the barking brute's horror and dismay, to find himself existing within the black sphere of her belly.

And as if this doleful incarcerated life in her were some kind of dynamo, an imperative deep in her new body, Maureen's bones branched creaking to life, and the muscles of her legs bulged along these bones. Almighty G.o.d in Heaven! I behold your wonders and I cry hallelujah unto you! Behold I open like a blossom under your radiance!

Swelled-in moments!-to half again her size, Maureen could just overlook the roof of the doghouse. In her almost spherical gaze, how shapely did Wyatt and Eve look, waist-deep in their Jacuzzi, drinks at their elbows! And how she hungered for them! Their fleshiness. In them lay her own more lordly stature! Behold the greatness the Lord declared that she had earned! To s.n.a.t.c.h them into her need's whirlwind would be to tower like a colossus when the meal was done. Still her hind legs grew, her steel-spring knees jutting higher to her sides, the muscles swelling like melons. And now, low though she squatted, Wyatt saw her.

She met his gaze. Such a square, fleshy young man, very intimidating whenever she'd gone to him with her faint, courteous complaints about King's barking. At present he didn't look threatening, looked astonished and suddenly Maureen absolutely knew that she could splash down into that hot tub with a single leap- And as she thought it, launched it, thrust old bony mother earth so powerfully beneath her that she hung on air, a weightless bubble sailing the blue sky, and hit the water swallowing, Wyatt already socketed in her vast mouth, so that she reared his legs high in a crown of spray, and got him all down with a gulp.

She sat in the water with Eve, pinning her against the tub's rim. Maureen and Eve both sat astonished-Eve at Wyatt's vanishing, and Maureen at Wyatt's arrival within her, for as her cauldron belly's acids licked him swiftly to bone, his mind, his memories coalesced within her own. She knew him inhabiting her, and he, thus pent, knew her.

Loving Lord! You show me, unworthy, your wonders! Your glory is as a feast you set before me!

She was saddened to find that she could not communicate this grat.i.tude to Eve, and tell Eve how she was not going to be annihilated, but was to live again within Maureen. Her attempt at explanation produced only a long sticky amphibious hiss, at which poor frightened Eve cried out, and peed in the tub water. Maureen gripped Eve with her forefeet, and thrust the young woman headfirst into her jaws. Soon, once she was dissolved, Eve would understand, would know it was all right.

For almost an hour longer, her globed eyes dreaming, her body sunk in metabolic meditation, she squatted in the foaming water. It seemed her mind half dozed, while her body grew so vast that stars were coming out inside her, winking on here and there, a visceral swarm of tiny suns.

Then Maureen came more awake. These stars she felt inside her. These myriad points of light. they were her eggs. She had to find her way to water-big water, in the dark earth. She had to meet someone.

Ramses squirmed to be put in his bed-box in the cart's prow. Not to curl up, but to sit propped on his rickety forelegs, sniffing the air, his attention drawn everywhere. Her little protector was back, but what kind of danger could waken him so? She walked along California, up Arguello to its end, crossed the park, thence along Waller (Haight itself, though she liked to scope all the people and what they were wearing, took too much steering of her cart), and then down along Divisadero to the Castro. Went into the Gin and Beer It, which had a back alley where Yves let her park her cart between his dumpsters.

"How's our little man?" Yves leaned his beaky nose down to Ramses, who dabbed his answering muzzle from the sling. To Maxie, setting up her gimlet, he said, "Why didn't you tell me you had a new friend?"

"I don't have a new friend."

"Well, Leon said to tell you, if you showed up, to stick around a little and he'd be back."

"A scrawny whacko with a white mustache?"

"So you do know him. I've known him for years. He's a walker, like you. And here he is! Well howdy, Miss Dee." This to Leon's companion. A gray-haired woman with a handsome face-gray eyes and gaunt cheeks. She carried an old fashioned walking stick with a bra.s.s head.

Leon said, "Maxie, this is Dee. Let's take a table-you gotta talk to Dee, Maxie."

"Don't be so abrupt." Dee poked his shoulder. "I'm very pleased to meet you, Maxie. I've seen you around. The thing is, I do have to talk to you. Would you please? Can I buy you another gimlet?"

"Well, sure. Yes you can, dear." It was fun using the old-ladyism "dear." She had the right, had maybe fifteen years on Dee, and liked her too, liked her eyes, both kind and tough. It occurred to her Jack had been just around this woman's age when he died.

At the table Leon sat opposite Maxie, and while Dee got some books from her little backpack, Maxie asked him, "What are you staring at?"

"I'm just keepin' my mouth shut till you've heard her and gone through all the usual changes."

A comeback died in Maxie's throat. For some reason, his sarcastic conviction called sharply back to her Vera's two a.m. vision in the Panhandle. Vera was not the hallucinating type. A cold, cottony sensation moved delicately down Maxie's spine, recalling white rags of sourceless sea foam, tumbling before the wind.

"There's no way to ease into this," Dee told her. "Please. Just listen. And after a while, I'll tell you what I've seen with my own eyes." And she began to read from a battered gray book.

"Our little Earth is beset by t.i.tans. In the infinitude of s.p.a.ce and time, the Great Old Ones swim like krakens through the deep. Time and again they find us, in worlds that have been, and worlds that have yet to be anywhere and anywhen they find, have found, will find us, time without end, but in this present time, in the cosmic deep they navigate, there hangs one particular window of light and color that draws them. Like a stained-gla.s.s pane high above, it tempts the t.i.tans' appet.i.tes with a flash of rainbow radiance. And that is the window on our twenty-first century.

"For now, in our age, it is this Queen of Cities, skirted by her seas, it is this jewel among metropoloi, crowned with towers, limbed with mighty bridges, robed in lushly architected stone-it is San Francisco that beguiles the t.i.tans' mossy megalithic eyes, as they drift through the cosmic benthos.

"In our present time, it is towards San Francisco they converge, hither they swim! Hither they glide, drawn to this radiant window on the rest of our world.

"Of the Great Old Ones, the mightiest, dread Chthulu, is among us already. He appropriates our souls, possesses our wills. Legions of his minions, his devout Ganymedes, already infest our corporate boardrooms, our governments, our churches.

"Dagon too is among us already. He feeds more frankly on our flesh. His benthic zombies come dripping ash.o.r.e to harvest our bodies in the night, while offsh.o.r.e his vast hands can seize the greatest vessel and crack it for the nutmeats of its crews.

"Tsathoggua too is among us already."

Here Leon laid an interrupting hand on Dee's arm. He leaned toward Maxie and told her, "Tsathoggua. That's the one you can meet for yourself, right where I showed you. You can meet him tonight. Then you'll know some s.h.i.t!"

Maureen moved through the foliage of Golden Gate Park in the dusk. She went by leaps and lurks, vaulting through the dense cover, and crouching with rubbery resilience through more open ground-and freezing, seizing, and feeding wherever sudden occasion presented itself. She consumed a jogger, a small, quick woman in black spandex. She launched the elastic shroud of her tongue and s.n.a.t.c.hed a wildly kicking cop off his motorbike and down her throat.

And went on, seeking water. Her body knew the touch of water all around her. Each wart on her great surface (she was big as a Volkswagen bug now) sensed every molecule of water in a radius of miles. Just west, of course, the mighty Pacific foamed on the beach, but no, this water was too turbulent to receive her tender sp.a.w.n.

She sensed already the smaller, stiller pool she sought. Sensed too that she would soon meet her mate-to-be. He drew even now towards the selfsame spot. The eggs within her seethed to be born, and thus it was, just as the first few stars were coming out, that she muscled through the foliage around the rim of Stow Lake.

The paths, the little plaza, the parking lot were deserted, but out on the oil-black lens of the lake there was movement, and a muted, hilarious commotion. A couple kids had broken the lock on a paddleboat and ridden it from its corral out to the open water. Bottles glinted, and hoa.r.s.e guffaws broke out, imperfectly m.u.f.fled. The little scamps! Maureen hungered fiercely for them!

But even as she advanced, a glittery black hugeness erupted near the boat, and overturned it. Two human shapes thrashed spray and foam and were engulfed as one by wide, inhuman jaws.

It was He, and his feeding was her own-she felt it in her own bowels, and her unborn young rejoiced in the feast. Maureen and He were already one, were two halves of a host on the very threshold of being born. Maureen slid down into the lake.

In the silken dark, buoyant as bubbles, they met. They clasped fore claws and spun and tumbled and spiraled in the satiny deep. For the first time in her life, Maureen knew Love, and knew its consummation was at hand. She broke their grip and swam towards the lake rim. A muddy cove she found, curtained by leafy vines, and into this she climbed, leaving only her hindquarters in the water, and waited His advent.

His great smooth underbelly surged onto her back. He locked his forelegs round her throat, his hindlegs round her mighty thighs. His cloac.u.m hung just atop her own, still shallowly submerged.

In a delirium of fulfillment, Maureen unpent her eggs, and felt them bubble unendingly from her cloac.u.m.

Each bubble was an atom of her own raging hunger, and that hunger in herself was not diminished by its ejection, its diffusion over the black lake. With this birthing her own hunger was vastly magnified, enlarged into this spreading fan of sp.a.w.n.

For as she sp.a.w.ned, her mate's sperm joined its stream to hers, the sperm like a gelatinous explosive, a viscous dynamite that individually detonated each little globe of her greed, and woke it to life.

Long was their transport! Long their embrace! Long and long the sweet effusion of their kindled brood upon the waters!

Until, at length, they lay spent, lay piggybacked as one in a curious, tingly hiatus that became a growing expectancy of something else, something more awaiting them, something vastly larger than the miracle they had just performed.

Maureen knew they had just begun, not ended, something grand and glorious. Of course her tadpoles even now a-forming, would within this very night sprout limbs and disperse into the surrounding greenery, would radiate from the park in all directions and find their way into storm drains and sewers and backyards and gardens all over San Francisco. But none of this now seemed half as important as what lay before her.

She and her mate crouched, cold to the wonder they'd worked. A greater marvel beckoned them now, a radiant immensity drew them to itself, commanded their nearness as a shining planet commands its moons.

Her mate unclenched her, and slid crunching away through the foliage. Maureen followed him.

Leon led them along the path he had shown Maxie this morning. They talked low, and interruptedly, for by moonlight the path was even trickier. "The thing to hold onto," Dee said, "is to know they can be hurt. Can be fought."

"I have to be honest," said Maxie. "I don't think I quite believe what you've told me." Back in the Gin and Beer It, Dee had told her a very great deal indeed, as night fell outside, and the time drew on to come here.

Ahead, Leon growled, "No problem. You will."

They smelled it just before they reached the gully's edge: a coldly yeasty breath of swamp. He brought them to a place where the rim of the gully shelved slightly. There was crouching room here where the scrub grew more spa.r.s.ely. The seam was a darkness below them, save at its upper end where the moon angled in and glinted on the seepage from the cleft clay there.

Too old to crouch, Maxie sat on the coa.r.s.e gra.s.s, and set Ramses down between her legs on a pad made from his folded pouch, for he whined to be set free. He sat there alertly, still galvanized by that vitality he'd shown all day.

"Just remember," Leon growled. "Don't do anything. We're just here to see. So you'll know."

Maureen had seen a print of a wonderful religious painting somewhere, where all these souls were rising up a shadowy shaft, rising into a circle of glorious radiance above, their faces and arms lifted in love and acclaim towards the eternal light that drew them up to Itself.

That image had stayed with her for years, sometimes made her eyes misty; just thinking of that moment when G.o.d lifted his chosen ones straight up to His everlasting bosom.

And this was happening to her. The shadowy shaft was a dense night-black undergrowth she climbed through, and her mate, some ways upslope, climbed before her. She toiled her bulk up through the lightless tangle of this World Below, and there was a great light, a sun above her that she climbed to. Its radiance had not yet burst forth, but it was near, so near! Just ahead up this steep bluff at whose foot they had emerged from the sea.

Tears welled from Maureen's huge globular eyes. She had always known this was coming to her! Yes she had! Not out of pride, but because she had always taken the teachings of her church to heart, had always done the right thing, had walked steadfastly on the higher path.

Now the foliage yielded to a deep bare gully, an incision up the flank of the bluff. Ahead there in its blade-shaped pool of shadow, was her mate: a mottled, muscled sheen toiling toward the apex of the fissure. The gibbous moon peeked in up there to show his goal: a muddy seam in the clay not unlike her own cloac.u.m.

There lay her re-birth. Her life unending! She climbed in awe. Her mate thrust himself into the fissure, his great bulk smoothly, incredibly received by the dense earth, till shortly only his herculean hind legs were visible. They pistoned once, twice-and he had vanished into the cliff side.

Maureen's heart took wing. She leapt forward, but was still some thirty yards short of her own apotheosis, when something small and snarling hurtled down upon her from the gully's rim. Agony collided with her left eye, and tiny teeth tore at it. This dwarfish but excruciating a.s.sault severely trauma-ed her ecstatic soul. She seized the attacker in her foreclaws-a tiny dog!-and crushed its life out, even as she thrashed and rolled side to side, battering the walls of the gully in her pain.

It caused a kind of rapture, to see the Impossible so plainly. As Maxie watched the huge amphibian claw its way into the earth, something stirred far away inside her, a primitive jubilation in her soul. It was true! The life in her exulted to know for a fact that the universe was a miracle in progress.

And then she realized there was another monster, following the first one up the gorge. In her rapture she rose to her feet-all three of them were standing, as if they were invisible, looking on from another world. There was a commotion in the gra.s.s at Maxie's feet, and suddenly there was Ramses, a stripe of moonlight across the last glimpse of him Maxie ever saw, diving into the dark, his little fangs bared. The dauntless whippet plunged straight down upon one of the second monster's eyes!

The brute thrashed explosively, down there in its darkness, its glossy hide flashing in its throes. "Ramses," Maxie whispered, seeing her little friend killed then, stepping to the gully's extreme brink.

Up where the first brute had penetrated, the moonlit earth moved. The clay tremored, and the seam in it spread, and from this aperture, a geyser of glittering flesh erupted into the moonlight. An immense tongue leapt ninety feet down the gorge and s.n.a.t.c.hed back from it, and into the moonlight, the t.i.tan toad that seemed t.i.tanic no longer: the brute Ramses had died defending her from was mummied in tongue up to its eyes. The moonlight flashed on the trail of blood that glittered from its wounded eye, and then it was s.n.a.t.c.hed peremptorily into the cliffside.

In a dim green light, in an immense cavern within the cliff, Maureen-so silkenly bandaged in tongue, like a fetus undelivered!-was lifted higher, higher, to hang above an alien planet, a single cyclopean Eye. Its pupil was a tarn of absolute black, ringed with a thin golden iris. The black void fractionally contracted as it studied her, making the pupil seem like an unearthly maw taking tiny bites of her.

And perhaps this was the mouth that spoke to her, for its words murmured stickily in the very center of her mind: All you've seen and done is mine. All you know I will forever know.

And then Maureen was s.n.a.t.c.hed into a different cavern, a Carlsbad of unearthly flesh, where a sunless sea of acids foamed.

There followed a dreadful pa.s.sage for Maureen, a purgatory really. Wherein she swam in acid in perfect darkness. Wherein her meat and her blood and her bones turned to smoke, and drifted away from her thrashing and astonished soul.

But then she was whole and calm. She was cleansed. Was purely and only her own immortal soul! In fact, she was Reborn, as her pastor had always promised! And all her memories, all her feelings, were still minutely, eternally hers, delivered out of the body's griefs and woes.

For an immeasurable time she lay in this blissful revelation. But gradually, a tiny question kindled. Why was Eternity so dark?

But no. No, it was not dark exactly. Dimly intricate visions swarmed round her, dizzying glimpses that her reaching thought could touch in all directions. Dear G.o.d! There was a mult.i.tude around her. No darkness this, but a matrix of other souls. Wherever she turned, she met a streaming traffic, a mob of other minds.

Wonder filled her, followed by the remotest little tingle of unease. This wasn't exactly like paradise. Wasn't it a bit more like being stored in a tank? Maureen struggled to understand the Benign Intent here.

Perhaps the fault was hers. Yes. She was supposed to reach out completely, to partic.i.p.ate in her apotheosis. She must really look about her. Really commune with her angelic company.

And when she really reached, dear G.o.d, she found a wealth indeed! She entered an astonishingly detailed landscape, sunsets on planets unknown, wars fought in alien bodies, unspeakable grapplings of these indescribable bodies. Entered grieving reminiscences, entered the beloved winds of a carven ice world where wolvish beings skated on paws of polished bone and exultingly drank moonlight forever gone, entered amoebic manta-rays winging like gossamer through maroon oceans of methane, balletically copulating within a gas-giant home world forever gone, entered long- fingered saurians, graceful as b.u.t.terflies on water wings like great ribbed fans, farming the continental shelves of amber seas forever gone.

And suddenly she heard, understood the ghostly tumult of remembered voices arising from this mult.i.tude. It was a stentorian chorus of woe everlasting.

As this understanding dawned, an alteration moved through this whole mosaic of pent minds. An impalpable wave arose, and its front was sweeping towards her and seized her. She was lifted, was hung in an acid bath of searing light, and every instant of her sixty-five years flashed through her, was lived again in one unending moment. And with her own life, all the lives she had collected were also evoked within that searching illumination-King, Wyatt, Eve, the little jogger, the kicking cop-each intricate detail of their being flowered in her devourer's possessive gaze.

And then Maureen subsided again into that vast anonymity of captured lives, that universal hubbub of unsleeping memories.

Now she understood. Now Maureen knew it all. Oh, how they had lied in that church of hers! How blackly and solemnly and piously her Pastor had lied! This was not an eternity in glory! This was not a Beneficent G.o.d!

The sun was well up. They sat on a slope below the Legion of Honor, backs leaning against different sides of a cedar's trunk. They had fallen asleep in these postures some time near dawn, and now awake, they still sat silent for a long time, gazing into s.p.a.ce. At length Dee sighed, and took out her battered gray book. "Margold says some things about Tsathoggua." She turned pages. "Yes. Here, right after this pa.s.sage about Dagon. I told you I've seen Dagon myself, or part of him." She read aloud. " 'Dagon has cruised our world before, came up into the Sunless Sea beneath the Mountains of Madness and fed upon the Elder Race, and in another eon he dived from the skies upon Earth in the ancient Deluge that drowned it, and swam in those storm-tormented waters, s.n.a.t.c.hing into his jaws the flood-doomed nations clawing at the surface, clinging to their rafts and spars and shards.' "

Silence fell. Dee's eyes were somewhere else.

Maxie prompted, "That's Dagon."

"Yes."