Light | Prologue
Not too far west of Arkham a small but deep wood hugs the Miskatonic River. For a long time ancient superstitions kept men from extending the general deforestation of New England to this particular population of trees; as these superstitions abated, new beliefs came to protect the wood, beliefs about the sanctity of the environment and the need to preserve some parts of it from the scourge of human rapacity. This fragment of forest is mostly deciduous, with the occasional pine or spruce, and it is exceedingly old. Massive oaks and maples shield the hazy undergrowth; young beeches grow in the spots left vacant by departed elms; clumps of bushes overhang the river’s shallow edges. Trails wend their way through the preserve, but they don’t get many visitors, even in late spring and early autumn when the weather is most appealing; the wood is just a little too distant from Arkham for a walk there to be pleasurable, the dirt and gravel trails are inhospitable to normal bikes, and there’s only one small parking lot, on the far side of the forest from the city. There are no good spots to fish, the mosquitoes are hell, and everyone knows someone who knows someone who got Lyme disease there. The one interesting attraction, an isolated cemetery last used in the late nineteenth century, is privately owned and surrounded by an ancient iron fence incongruously topped by barbed wire of modern manufacture; the gate is always locked, and the cemetery’s anonymous possessor has categorically refused all visitation requests. The many complaints lodged against this state of affairs by the Arkham Historical Society have accomplished nothing, and the Society’s appeals to those few inhabitants of the city known to have ancestors buried in the cemetery have been uniformly rebuffed, said inhabitants apparently not wishing to engage in any legal or social protest of their inability to visit their family members’ graves. This doesn’t mean anything bizarre, people say, anything special; that’s just how things are done in Arkham. You leave the past as it lies, and it will leave you to live as you please.
It was winter, early December, and snow was falling to top up the two or three inches that already covered the ground. Clark Corke had decided to take the scenic route to visit his parents; he, his wife Jean, and his son Sam were in a blue sedan cautiously making its way down the single two-lane road that cut through Edgewater Forest Preserve. Clark was at the wheel; Jean sat shotgun, and Sam was slumped in the back nursing a headache, seatbelt on but body twisted in a grotesque teenage slouch. The last snowplough had come through perhaps three hours before, so Clark was obliged to drive at reduced speed. He regretted his choice to take this particular road. He’d had the idea a few days back, before it had snowed—a nice winter drive, an inside look at the preserve in the off-season—and his stubbornness was such that he hadn’t considered changing his plan until after they’d reached the point at which such a change became more trouble than it was worth. It was alright, though. Certainly far from the biggest blunder he’d made on a car trip. Soon they’d be out of the forest and on the main road to Aylesbury, and his passengers’ sullen stares would turn to looks of relief.
“Dad, can I open my window?”
“Sure.”
The windshield wipers swept accumulated flakes from the glass in front of Clark’s eyes. He had them on the lowest setting, gaps of fifteen seconds; at least the trees, skeletal though most of them were, diluted the snowfall’s immediate strength. He shivered as a finger of winter chill reached him from the back, but he didn’t complain; cold air helped Sam fight his headaches, and Clark would rather endure the cold than stop the car so his son could get out and throw up. He sometimes wished his own father’s headaches hadn’t skipped a generation; he would’ve liked to be able to tell Sam that he understood his pain, that he knew what it was like to never be quite sure your body would allow you to have a normal, well-functioning day. Maybe in a couple decades, maybe when he was in his sixties, his body would develop an ailment comparable to his son’s. Then he would give his now-adult, now-independent son a call to say I finally understand, I’m finally like you. What an odd thing to look forward to, even though it was only a small part of him that looked forward to it, and then only in a small, sharply delimited way.
Sam was sixteen, and no one understood him. He read The Idiot and imagined the speeches of Ippolit Terentyev issuing from his own mouth. He wrote short sci-fi, submitted it to magazines, received rejections, and bemoaned his age’s inability to appreciate good art. He played violin; he was good, but not good enough to make a career of it, and he thought about this while high on THC in his room, listening to Sibelius’ second symphony on loop. He took midnight walks in the safer quarters of Arkham and squinted at the night sky, looking for the composer’s “terrifying creatures of eternal silence.” He thought about how he could take the world by storm if not for his headaches and his mediocrity, and wondered if perhaps one had caused the other. He shamelessly used his teachers’ knowledge of his physical ailment to push back due dates on distasteful assignments when he was in fact feeling just fine, then faced karmic retribution when headaches struck during experiences he genuinely wanted to enjoy. Like now. Visiting his grandparents. He was fond of them, particularly his grandpa, and could easily spend hours talking to them, but he’d probably spend most of this visit curled up in the guest bedroom with honey-sweetened black tea, waiting for the throbbing in his brain to subside. Curse it, curse it all. If a djinn came and offered him one wish, he wouldn’t say immortality, he wouldn’t say mind-blowing sex, he’d say no more fucking headaches.
His phone vibrated in his pocket. He felt too nauseated to check it, but he knew it was probably Megan texting him again. Didn’t she know that the girl was supposed to stay aloof to keep the guy interested? Couldn’t she tune into the psionic aether and divine that he was already feeling terrible, that he didn’t want to be reminded that he ought to be worrying about her as well? Not that the frequency of her texts really made any difference in his attitude towards her, not that him worrying about her was even remotely her fault, or at all a reasonable response to such a common, mundane, mediocre situation… The issue was that he liked her quite a lot, even fancied himself in love with her, but he’d never even kissed a girl and therefore had no idea how to act on his desires, unless you counted jerking off to fantasies of her that probably bore only a slight resemblance to actual human sexual practices. She acted shy and nervous around him and constantly seesawed between seeking and avoiding his company. His friends, such as they were, assured him this meant she was wild about him. But there were several empty spaces between these current facts and a more ideal state of affairs, missing links so to speak, blank spots that Sam didn’t know how to fill. Several times he had tried to bring a conversation with her circuitously round to some romantic objective, but each time she had seemed to shrink away a little—enough to put paid to that attempt, but not enough to rule out future attempts. Sam knew that he ought to simply wager it all and ask her out directly, even just try to kiss her despite not knowing how, but this entailed the possibility of straightforward rejection and the subsequent severance of all contact, which was absolutely terrifying. There was time, time enough now to remain languishing in a field of uncertainty, riding on an uncollapsed waveform. During winter break he would make up his mind to take some sort of decisive action; then he’d spring this action on her when they went back to school in January. Yes, that was what he would do. As good a plan as any.
As mediocre a plan as any?
But it wasn’t right for him to be so hard on himself during a headache, he reasoned. He had enough to deal with.
They were driving right alongside the river now. Sam was facing the other way, his aching head resting on the cool glass of the right-side backseat window, but he could tell because of the greater influx of light from the left. He couldn’t keep his eyes fully closed for too long; he knew from too-often-repeated experience that that would make his motion sickness worse. This did not make the light at all pleasant, though. Maybe he wouldn’t ask the djinn to get rid of his headaches, maybe he’d just ask him to knock the sun out of the—
WHUNK.
A feeling of weightlessness and inexplicably swift motion, coupled with a stomach-twisting wrench, snapped Sam out of his thoughts. Before he could grasp what was happening, an even worse impact hit him headfirst, cushioned partially and imprecisely by a sort of balloon that hadn’t been there a second before, the force travelling down his body, but up—up, because his legs were above his head, the car was upside-down and rocking, the sound of buckling metal reverberating in his ears, and an angry rush all about him, something colorless and frigid hissing through the edges of the door…
…water. They were in the river, and they’d made a great hole in the ice.
Sam tried to scream Help, but the voice that came out of his mouth was quite weak—he could barely hear himself over the riverflow. A sharp pain was lancing his neck, and his head—his headache hadn’t gone away, but he found he didn’t really care about it, because he was distracted by a frenetic buzzing that filled his body. He writhed against his seatbelt. The water wasn’t coming in terribly fast—his window hadn’t broken, and he guessed none of the other windows had broken—but before long it would submerge his head, and eventually—how deep were they? He couldn’t orient himself. The car wasn’t sinking, he assumed it was resting on the river bottom, and the light was still strong. Buzzing in his body, fuzz in his head. He was overlooking something obvious—what?
Right. Yes. The seatbelt had a buckle that had to be released. He found the buckle and unclasped it, then wriggled out of the belt and slumped into the freezing water that had already accumulated in the car. He managed to fight the fuzziness in his head enough to get to his hands and knees.
What now? Smash the glass, swim to safety? He screwed his eyes up and studied his window. Through it he could see the river’s surface—they had to be just barely submerged, right offshore in one of the river’s shallow parts. Lucky. But what in God’s name had happened?
He stuck his head between the two front seats and looked at his parents. Both were still buckled in, protected by airbags—but unconscious. Cold panic leaped in Sam’s throat, and he shoved his dad hard.
His dad’s eyes opened and struggled to focus. “Jean?”
“Dad,”—Sam managed a bit more volume this time—“we crashed, we’re in the river and water’s coming in. We have to get out before it fills the car.”
As Clark Corke gave a garbled reply—“get you out” were the three most distinguishable words—Sam heard the sound of shattering glass, and with it the sound of a tiny projectile embedding itself somewhere. Then water swept over his legs. His dad’s eyes went wide and clear, and he yelled “Out! Out! Leave us here!” Sam withdrew his head, turned—the back right-side window was gone, and the river was gushing in. He had seconds to decide what to do.
He went for the hole, grabbed the ragged-glass edges with his hands, pulled himself through, wriggled to the surface, and flopped onto the ice with an almighty desperate surge of exertion.
It was very, very cold out there, and very, very bright. He shook violently as, still lying curled on the frozen river, he pulled his phone from his pocket and hit the home button. It lit up—the wonders of modern technology. Home button again. Keypad. Nine—
A vicious kick sent the phone flying from Sam’s hand.
Then a hand grabbed the back of Sam’s shirt and dragged him to the river’s edge. Sam was too stunned, and too shocked with cold, to resist. There was blood on his hand where the boot had struck.
He looked up and saw a tall man dressed all in black.
“M-my p-parents are d-drowning,” Sam said.
The man crouched down in front of Sam and put a hand on his shoulder. The hand was warm—as the warmth pushed its way into Sam’s body, the violence of his shivering began to lessen.
“That’s part of the point,” said the man. “Today is the end of the Corkes.”
The voice was mellow yet steel-strong. Sam found that he could see the man’s other arm, his left arm—it hung uselessly straight down, broken in a dozen places, and blood dripped from it steadily.
“What’s… the other p-part of the p-point?”
“I’m hungry,” said the man. “And I want you specifically.”
A wide white space appeared in Sam’s mind. “What?”
“Especially since you proved yourself able to preserve your own life at whatever cost it took. You did very well today. You’re more worthy of me than most of my victims.”
There was a catch in Sam’s throat. “I don’t understand.”
“You will.” The man turned Sam’s head over, pushing his cheek into the snow. “You’ll have all the time you need to understand.”
Sam felt teeth bite down on the back of his neck. Then, between the teeth, came a frigid burning sensation, not quite cold, not quite heat, as if each affected skin cell were being individually shredded.
He cried out, thrashed, but the man’s hold was immovable. And slowly the freezing fire moved beneath Sam’s skin, deeper into his neck, and up—up towards his brain.