Cthulhurotica by Cody Goodfellow, Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Jennifer Brozek, Ahimsa Kerp, Carrie Cuinn, Gabrielle Harbowy, Don Pizarro, Madison Woods, Richard Baron, Juan Miguel Marin, Maria Mitchell, Mae Empson, Nathan Crowder, KV Taylor, Andrew Scearce, Constella Espj, Leon J. West, Travis King, Steven J. Searce, Clint Collins, Matthew Marovich, Gary Mark Bernstein, Kirsten Brown, Kenneth Hite, Justin Everett Page B

time you have left, I will whisper the secrets of the universe to you, the crazed babbling of flute-accompanied Azathoth, how Helios watches – a Cyclopean eye in a body of stars, how sleeping Oceanus dreams – the tentacled oozing leviathan, and how if both their eyes opened at once, the world itself would cease to be. I can show you things you would indeed find remarkable.”
    He nodded mutely, afraid to contradict her, and, despite the last surrendering protest of his reason, absolutely curious and as absolutely smitten with her as he had been from the first day he saw her. “Shall we still go to Syracuse?” he asked after a moment. “Shall I see Scylla?”
    Circe smiled, and she answered directly into his mind, no longer exerting the effort to twitch the skin and its mouth muscles in accompanying pantomime. “That foolish nymph slit her own throat centuries ago in her blind rage, but I saved her skin. I can be Scylla for you right now if you’d like. The possibilities, with so many nether mouths, are an adventure that might consume several days of exploration.”
    He lifted the lid of the chest himself, and looked at her with an eager smile. “I do like to explore. But, remember I am an old man, wife. Be gentle with me.”
    They were not seen for several days.
    When they sailed for Syracuse, they looked out over the side of the ship at the dark surface of the water, his arm protectively encircling her, and he tried to imagine the strange shapes that slithered and slept and oozed beneath its depths. He shivered a bit, and was glad that the ship was as large as it was, and as well fortified against storm and rock as it could be.
    She felt him shiver. “You have nothing to fear from the others while you are with me,” she whispered.
    “Because they are … our family?”
    “And because they can no longer abide the sound of barking dogs. The racket is fearsome carried under water. I have warned them off before, Scylla-skinned, and the lesson is now well learned.”
    “What is there yet to see, in Syracuse and beyond?” he asked, realizing that the ship had little to fear from Scylla while she stood tucked beneath his arm. “Is there still a whirlpool, a Charbydis, to fear, in the Strait of Messina? Do we have a reason to sail through the strait and beyond?”
    “There is still Charbydis, and as to what she is, I’ll let you see for yourself. But, as to what lies beyond the strait, if you remember your Homer, you will recall that my own isle lies beyond, Aeaea. There I have a house and cave, my eternal home, where I retire between the lifetimes that I choose to live skin-stolen. I’d like you to see it. I’d like to remember us there, wrapped in each other’s arms and other appendages, as I wait there in the centuries to come, immortal and alone.”
     
    And this was what captured Dennis’s imagination, as he set aside the translation and its mad tale of the witch and the old Ionian philosopher-scientist. How many lives had she lived since, and in what skins? How long had she waited, alone?
    Most scholars agreed that Aeaea was no longer an isle, but a peninsula off the Italian coast, in the salt marshes, in a place now called Mount Circeo on Cape Circaeum, bearing her name. Surely others had searched these spaces, and the caves there and on the nearby island of Ponza. But, he felt compelled to search as well.
    Dennis left behind his scholarship, his father, the comforts of the city and its technologies, and all that he had been taught about skepticism and reason. He tattooed the back of his hand with the Orphic egg (a silver egg wrapped in a serpentine tentacle) in the hopes that it formed some kind of mark of initiation.
    Eventually he found a cave that others had overlooked, or, perhaps more likely, he was permitted to see that which had been veiled to others. He found the grotto, and the beautiful woman reclining within.
    As he approached, seeing only her top half, he did not know if this was her