Neil Gaiman & Caitlin R. Kiernan & Laird Barron by The Book of Cthulhu Page A

understand what we mean by associational painting?” she demanded. “Let me tell you. We select an initial idea by aleatory means.”
    “Eh?” Ingels said, scribbling.
    “Based on chance. We use the I Ching, like John Cage. The American composer, he originated it. Once we have the idea we silently associate from it until each of us has an idea they feel they must communicate. This exhibition is based on six initial ideas. You can see the diversity.”
    “Indeed,” Ingels said. “When I said eh I was being an average reader of our paper, you understand. Listen, the one that particularly interested me was number 22. I’d like to know how that came about.”
    “That’s mine,” one young man said, leaping up as if it were House.
    “The point of our method,” Annabel Pringle said, gazing at the painter, “is to erase all the associational steps from your mind, leaving only the image you paint. Of course Clive here wouldn’t remember what led up to that painting.”
    “No, of course,” Ingels said numbly. “It doesn’t matter. Thank you. Thanks all very much.” He hurried downstairs, past a sodden clown, and into the street. In fact it didn’t matter. A memory had torn its way through his insomnia. For the second time that day he realised why something had looked familiar, but this time more disturbingly. Decades ago he had himself dreamed the city in the painting.
    II
    Ingels switched off the television. As the point of light dwindled into darkness it touched off the image in him of a gleam shooting away into space. Then he saw that the light hadn’t sunk into darkness but into Hilary’s reflection, leaning forward from the cane rocking-chair next to him, about to speak. “Give me fifteen minutes,” he said, scribbling notes for his review.
    The programme had shown the perturbations which the wandering planet had caused in the orbits of Pluto, Neptune and Uranus, and had begun and ended by pointing out that the planet was now swinging away from the Solar System; its effect on Earth’s orbit would be negligible. Photographs from the space-probe were promised within days. Despite its cold scientific clarity (Ingels wrote) and perhaps without meaning to, the programme managed to communicate a sense of foreboding, of the intrusion into and interference with our familiar skies. “Not to me it didn’t,” Hilary said, reading over his shoulder.
    “That’s sad,” he said. “I was going to tell you about my dreams.”
    “Don’t if I wouldn’t understand them either. Aren’t I allowed to criticise now?”
    “Sorry. Let’s start again. Just let me tell you a few of the things that have happened to me. I was thinking of them all today. Some of them even you’ll have to admit are strange. Make some coffee and I’ll tell you about them.”
    When she’d brought the coffee he waited until she sat forward, ready to be engrossed, long soft black hooks of hair angling for her jawbone. “I used to dream a lot when I was young,” he said. “Not your average childhood dream, if there is such a thing. There was one I remember, about these enormous clouds of matter floating in outer space, forming very slowly into something. I mean very slowly … I woke up long before they got there, yet while I was dreaming I knew whatever it was would have a face, and that made me very anxious to wake up. Then there was another where I was being carried through a kind of network of light, on and on across intersections for what felt like days, until I ended up on the edge of this gigantic web of paths of light. And I was fighting to stop myself going in, because I knew that hiding behind the light there was something old and dark and shapeless, something dried-up and evil that I couldn’t make out. I could hear it rustling like an old dry spider. You know what I suddenly realised that web was? My brain, I’d been chasing along my nervous system to my brain. Well, leave that one to the psychologists. But there were odd