The Book of Cthulhu

Cinderlands

Tim Pratt

Close to the end:

Dexter West woke to the sound of claws skittering on hardwood floors above him, thinking in a muzzy, sleep-headed way that the upstairs neighbors must have gotten a dog, even though dogs weren’t allowed, and now the horrible noise was going to keep him up all night. But as he sat up in bed he remembered there was no upstairs here. He’d moved out of the apartment building into a house of his own. After turning on the lamp, he went into the walk-in closet, where the noise—the scuttling—seemed loudest. A heating duct ran along the ceiling, and he pressed his ear to the metal and listened to the click and patter of tiny claws rushing along inside.

Was it… rats? Rats in the ducts? Rats in the walls?

He banged hard on the duct with his fist, and the scuttling stopped.

“I’ll get a cat,” he said aloud. “I need the company anyway.”

He went back to bed, and dreamed of digging holes in his back yard. Holes filled with squirming, black-furred rats the size of kittens. Holes that went down forever.

∇

Earlier:

Dexter crouched beneath the toxic fruit trees in his grassless back yard, turning over black earth with the spade he’d taken from the old man, and every shovelful revealed worse things:

clumps of cinders and the dust of ashes;

rusting nails, practically dripping tetanus;

wickedly-curved shards of brown glass;

bullets of various sizes, crusted with dirt;

and a foot or so down, fragments of black-stone statuary, showing here the partial orbit of a life-sized eye, there a broken mouth filled with crude triangular teeth, here a tiny hand with six fingers, all clawed.

Dexter looked toward the unmended fence again and said, “What do you mean, this used to be the cinderlands?”

But the old man next door was gone.

∇

Earlier still:

Dexter moved in the early spring of his thirty-fifth year. The houses on either side of his own were boarded up, and the neighborhood had the appearance of a mouth filled with missing teeth: empty lots and empty houses outnumbered the inhabited three-to-one. But he didn’t mind. After living among noisy neighbors, the silence and solitude surrounding his new life as a homeowner seemed a blessing.

The faded yellow house at 65 Mumford Street was a sprawling one-story affair with additions of varying vintages sprouting from all sides. He loved the labyrinthine interior, despite its many flaws: sagging air ducts from an abandoned remodel, a roof shedding shingles, cracked linoleum. It was still a bargain at the bank’s price. The original owner had died, and the dissolute heirs had run the place as a sort of commune—one bank official leaned close and whispered “cult,” though she wouldn’t elaborate. When the heirs vanished and stopped paying the mortgage, the bank seized the property.

Dexter paid cash, using a little of his settlement money from the case against the city. A year before he’d been attacked and beaten by police on his way to work, a case of mistaken identity—he resembled an escaped serial arsonist who’d recently burned down an officer’s home. Even after buying the house he had more than enough money to take time off to fix up the place. He was sure the neighborhood would get better, justifying the investment—the recession couldn’t last forever—but in the meantime, he’d enjoy the quiet.

The back yard was full of fruit trees, shading the earth so deeply that no grass could grow, and he spent the evenings under the branches drinking beer and watching the wind stir the leaves, body aching pleasantly from painting, and sanding, and hammering, and laying tile. After so many years teaching history to high school students who barely seemed to care about what had happened to them yesterday, it was refreshing to work with his hands and see the measurable progress of that work each day.

As the trees began to blossom, he looked forward to the fruit—lemon, plum, crab-apple, cherry. He decided to plant some tomatoes in the yard, and choosing between the two spots where sunlight actually touched the ground when a voice from beyond the broken side fence said, “I wouldn’t put roots down here if I were you.” An old man dressed in a faded white suit of archaic cut leaned on a walkingstick and smiled affably from beneath a broad-brimmed straw hat.

“I didn’t realize anyone lived over there.”

“At my age I don’t come out often,” the man said. “Only when the weather is just exactly right. Saw you in that spot of sun. Thinking of gardening? Don’t. The soil’s poison.”

Dexter frowned. “The trees seem healthy.”

“Things might grow, but there’s so much… oh, lead, and mercury, and who knows what else in the dirt, I wouldn’t eat any of it. Plant in containers if you must, though even then…” He shook his head. “The air’s bad, too. This whole area used to be the cinderlands.”

“I guess I could get the soil tested for lead—”

“No need for all that trouble.” The old man reached into his suit and, improbably, drew out a spade with a gleaming blade. “Just dig down a little, you’ll see.”

“Okay.” Dexter had liked his neighbors better when they didn’t exist, but he took the spade, and dug… and found sharp, pointy, broken things, though the bits of statuary were the most disturbing. “What do you mean, this used to be the cinderlands?” The old man didn’t answer, and when Dexter went to the fence, he was gone, and the yard over there was as derelict as ever, the house just as uninhabited-looking as before.

∇

Later:

Dexter decided not to start a garden after all, and when the trees put forth fruit, he knew he’d made the right choice. The lemons were small, and while they were yellow, it was less the yellow of cartoon suns and more the yellow of jaundiced skin or nicotine-stained teeth. The plums seemed to rot rather than ripen, dripping off the branches in slimy clumps. The cherries were hard, and shriveled like shrunken heads, while the crab-apples grew so huge and fast they split their skins—and the inside of every apple was home to vast numbers of worms… possibly, he thought, of a kind unknown to science.

∇

A bit later still:

Dexter came home from the hardware store, unlocked both deadbolts— it paid to be safe, since thieves weren’t above stripping the copper from any property, inhabited or not—and stepped inside to find unmistakable evidence of intrusion. There were scraps of paper scattered on the floor, covered with peculiar geometric diagrams, and muddy footprints, and in the middle of his living room floor: a straw hat with a crushed crown. The back door stood open, and there were marks on the ground, as if something heavy had been dragged toward the vine-covered back fence, but the trail vanished there.

He went to the neighbor’s house and pounded on the door, but no one answered, and when he peered through the windows he saw only empty rooms full of dust. He called the police to tell them he’d had an intruder, but when he gave his name, the dispatcher paused, said, “Dexter West? The guy who sued the city? The reason, my bosses tell me, I didn’t get a raise this year?”

“Ah—no?” he said.

The dispatcher laughed. “We’ll send someone right over. You just sit and wait. Be sure to call us if your house catches fire, too—lots of my friends are firemen, and you know as well as anyone there are arsonists around.” The dispatcher hung up.

No one ever came. Dexter was astounded to realize he’d managed to personally anger and alienate the bureaucracy of a city—an institution normally so vast and impersonal that it was wholly unconcerned with individuals. In a way, it was quite an accomplishment.

∇

Very near the end:

The scuttling in the ducts continued all summer, increasing until even pounding on the metal failed to make any difference. Dexter spent the deep darkness of the nights awake and listening, and slept through the heat of the days. Work on the house ceased. He only went to the hardware store to acquire rat poison—hadn’t he read somewhere that heart medication and rat poison worked on the same principle, by thinning the blood?—and scattered the poison throughout all the secret places in the house: the odd-sized storage rooms, some inexplicably painted red; the little cubbyholes filled with dusty blue glass bottles; the low cabinets with their strangely-angled, cramped interiors. He never saw rat droppings or nibbled wires, but the noises every night told a different tale.

Dexter got a cat, a sleek black one from a shelter that came already equipped with the peculiar name “Ninja-Man,” but the animal was dead within days. He was never sure why—maybe it had gotten into the poison, but he preferred to think it had possessed some undiagnosed heart defect or other hidden flaw.

Dexter buried the animal in the yard, deep, though not as deep as he’d intended—about two feet down he began to find things that looked suspiciously like knife blades made of flaked stone, and then fragments of bones that suggested his cat wasn’t the first thing to be buried here in the cinderlands. He chose to dig no deeper.

∇

Just before the end:

When the scuttling crescendoed just after three am, he decided to smash the ducts. They weren’t even connected to anything— just remnants of a past tenant’s attempt to modernize the place with central heat and air. He’d left them in this long because he thought he might install such amenities himself someday, but the noise was overwhelming, worse tonight than ever. He hadn’t slept well for weeks, convinced he heard not just rats but also human footsteps and voices, either in the next room, or in the back yard, or in the upstairs apartment which he intermittently forgot didn’t actually exist.

He picked up his wrecking bar and began smashing at the ducts, leaving dents and little else, until he finally struck a seam in the metal and caused a plate to pop loose and gape open downward like a sprung trap door.

Dark shapes spilled forth from the duct like a greasy black flood, fur and wriggling noses and tails, and he fell back against the wall, clutching his steel bar, terrified the rats—dozens! scores! hundreds!—would attack him. But they kept running, through his open bedroom door, into the hallway, toward the kitchen and the back door. He imagined his house filled, infested, overrun by rats—

But they weren’t rats. Or they weren’t entirely rats.

He’d seen a program on television once about parasitic wasps. They attacked cockroaches, injected venom into their tiny roach brains, and took control of the insects, driving them like six-legged golf carts into their nests, where the roaches became paralyzed incubators for wasp eggs.

Something similar had been done to these rats. There were glistening greenish-black growths on their necks and heads, foreign tissue sometimes obscuring their eyes, sometimes extending down their backs to their tails. The growths looked wet, and they pulsed, and they might have been a sort of fungus or horrible external tumor…

Except for the eyes. Every growth had a single, marble-sized blue eye somewhere on its mass, gazing backward. The eyes blinked and moved in unison, as if they were parts of the same organism, temporarily separated.

Dexter dropped his wrecking bar and fled, and since he could only flee through the door— the same door the rats were pouring through, endlessly, how could there be so many?—he tried to leap through the door over the flood. He leapt well, but the leap had to end, and he came down in his bare feet among the rats. They squealed and twisted and rushed away from him. He lost his footing and stumbled through the dark hall, toward the kitchen—

—where his back door stood open, the rats and their passengers racing through the opening and away. Dexter stared through the door, into the yard, unable to comprehend what he was seeing.

The human eye and brain have ways of coping with size and distance. Objects seen up close appear larger, and as those objects move farther away, they appear to shrink, growing ever smaller as they recede into the distance. So the great ship that looms large as a building while you’re standing on the dock becomes a tiny speck of blackness as it vanishes over the distant horizon.

The rats were exactly the opposite. They looked normal-sized up close, but as they streamed into his yard, getting farther away, they seemed to become larger, until—in violation of all laws of nature and perspective—they were easily the size of cars by the time they reached the back fence, the eyes on their backs as big as tires, all staring not at him, but past him. Just before they should have crashed into the fence, the enormous rats vanished, as if they’d turned a corner that didn’t exist… or fallen into a deep, hidden hole.

Dexter stood aside, staring down at the rats as they fled, afraid to lift his gaze again to witness their impossible growth. After a long time—it seemed like hours, though it couldn’t have been so long, surely?—the scuttling in the ducts ended, and the final few rats disappeared into the back yard. He watched the last ones go, growing from rat-sized when they left the house, to dog-sized when they were halfway across the yard, to pony-sized and bigger still as they reached the fence… until, finally, the last one vanished.

He released a breath he hadn’t realized he was holding. He shut his door, engaged the locks, and only then asked himself—how had the door opened? Had the press of the rats somehow shoved it wide? Maybe the old man who didn’t actually live next door had been there to open the door for the creatures. Or maybe—

Something in his bedroom thumped, like a great weight hitting the floor.

Frozen by the back door, listening, Dexter suddenly wondered: what were the rats running from? He had no doubt the creatures were fleeing, either in terror or under orders from the staring growths on their backs. Dexter couldn’t imagine where they’d originally come from; certainly not within his walls. Nor could he tell where they were going. They were simply… passing through. Whether his house was along some mysterious right-of-way or merely a hastily-chosen detour, he couldn’t know, but he was sure of one thing: this was an escape route.

So what, exactly, were the creatures escaping from?

Another thump, this one louder, and Dexter began to open the locks, his fingers clumsy, his hands slick with sweat, the thought scuttling and skittering in his mind as insistently as the claws of a thousand fleeing rats: run, run, run.

The last locked turned. The door yawned open. The trees in the back yard rustled in the wind, and the old man from next door—now hatless—leaned on his walkingstick by the back fence, face lost in shadow, and shook his head.

Dexter sprinted from the house, but the back fence seemed to get smaller as he ran, and the old man seemed farther away with every step, and Dexter realized, before he fell—before something fell upon him, radiating ancient, indifferent heat—that he’d never reach the corner or hole or exit in time. That he was too small, and the world, and all the things in it, were just too big.

∇