Herbert West watched as Jehovah jumped without question into the corpse pile in the back of the car, and Herbert entered the cab, slamming the door behind him.
They were several miles down the road before he even realized that he had started the car and hit the gas, and the road behind him was clear of pursuers.
They drove many more miles before Herbert finally stopped to let Jehovah in, and they sat in silence, watching the flames, which were still visible in the darkening sky.
This, of course, wasn’t the first time that Herbert West and Jehovah stood by and watched something burn, but it was the first time that the fire was meant for them…
The Key to What the Locksmith Saw
White sea foam receded from black sands, revealing a thick, blue sea star a full eight feet across. The star lay motionless for a moment, causing Herbert West to ponder its current status, as he always did, due to his unhealthy obsession with the dead. As if to throw him off the scent, it began to flourish, first wiggling the tips of its arms, then pulling them up, touching each of the ten points together, in effect forming a ball, and using hidden pseudopodia, it rolled itself back into the sea.
How interesting, he thought to himself.
Of all the places Dr. West and Jehovah had visited, the ocean seemed the most unchanged. The things that came out of it, however, were another matter…
Further down the beach, mutant crabs were tending their corpse gardens, but they paid the two no mind, just as West ignored the temptations of the sea-bloated corpses the over-sized crustaceans had buried in the sand. As unhealthy as his obsession was, he knew that some dead didn’t deserve the right of resurrection.
Silence had ruled the morning, but it was decided that they would explore an outcropping of rocks just beyond the corpse fields, but their plans were delayed when one of the corpses pulled itself free from its tomb, stood, and shook the sand from his grey suit. He looked them over (which, given his condition, was rather invasive) and spoke in very clear, very proper English.
“Do you have a key?” the strange man said.
“I’m sorry?” Herbert West replied.
“I said, good sir…do you have a key?” he repeated through a gleaming, Cheshire grin. His grey suit was in fairly good repair considering he had been buried up to his neck in sand, and his skin was mottled, the predominant colour being blue. His hair was an unruly mop of varying lengths, but his most striking feature was his third eye, which looked like painted stone pushed into soft clay.
“Who wants to know?” Jehovah piped up, agitation in his voice.
“My name,” the man replied, “is Mr. Smith, and this,” he said, pointing to a large brass lock hanging from around his neck, “is my lock, for which I need a key.”
The lock was old and tarnished, round at the bottom with two humps at the top where the shackle rested; a cover on a swivel obscured the key hole.
“I’m sorry, but we don’t have your key,” Herbert said. “We’ve only just met you.”
“That matters not, as any key will do. Any key will open the door,” the man said.
“I don’t think so, stranger,” Herbert replied. “We haven’t a key for your lock, and I’m sorry, but we must be going. Our vehicle has left us stranded, and we must find fuel.”
The Cheshire grin widened.
“Ah, but if you have a car, then you must…have a key,” the man noted. “One that will, I have no doubt, open the door.”
“Look, he already told you,” Jehovah cut in, “we don’t have your damned key.”
“I mean you no harm, I assure you,” Mr. Smith said, slightly taken aback by the outburst. He held out his blue palms as if to show them that he was unarmed. “I only wish to show you what is contained behind the door.”
“What door? You have a lock hanging around your neck, and we can plainly see that your ugly ass is the only thing behind it,” Jehovah said, obviously frustrated.
Herbert West cut in, “It’s OK, Jehovah, let’s humor him. Besides, he’s aroused my curiosity.”
And with that, Herbert West went about fishing in one of his many pockets, and after a moment, he procured a key ring with only three keys on it. He proffered them to the blue man and took a step back from him.
“Yes,” said Mr. Smith, the grin threatening to slit his head in half, “I think these will do nicely. Thank you for your trust, our reward will be most enjoyable.”
The blue man looked over the keys and fingered the largest one, then, pushing aside the cover and exposing the key hole, he inserted the key. It slipped in easily, and turned with a click.
“What do you mean our reward…?” Herbert started, but was cut off by the oddest of occurrences.
The two of them were back in their El Camino, staring out the window at the empty highway that lay before them.
“What just happened, Herbert?” Jehovah said, sitting in the passenger seat, his paws on the dashboard. “One minute we are talking to this three-eyed freak, the next we are back where we started.”
Herbert West looked about the cabin of the car and noticed nothing out of place. Everything was as they left it. He turned and looked out the back window. His equipment and corpses were still there, piled high.
“I don’t know,” he replied. “Could we have been sharing a dream? Perhaps we dozed off and our surroundings influenced our dream state.”
“Check your pocket,” Jehovah said, smelling bullshit. “If we were dreaming, your keys should be in your pants pocket.”
“You are correct,” Herbert said and went searching. “And as you suspected, my keys are…”
Gone, just like their car, and again they stood in front of the blue stranger, who was removing the key and closing the lock. His grin had diminished some, and his third eye was watering and in terrible need of blinking, something that looked out of the question.
“What did you do to us?” Jehovah said. “How in the hell did you do that?”
“I did nothing,” the man said. “I merely opened the lock; your key did the rest.”
“We were back in our car, which is miles from here. How? Drugs? Mind control?” Herbert asked.
Again the blue man put out his hands, palms outstretched, then he picked a second key and...
Click.
A room and all its contents washed in like a wave. It was Herbert’s turn to act surprised, as they were somewhere that Jehovah had never been. They were standing just inside the door of a sparsely-furnished room that Herbert West seemed to recognize, but at the same time, could not believe his eyes.
“Where are we, Herbert?” Jehovah asked, not waiting for a reply. “This is your place, isn’t it?”
“Was it the dead that gave it away?” Herbert replied, obviously referring to several moth-eaten corpses that lay upon hospital issue examination tables. “Yes, Jehovah, this is my old home in Arkham. I haven’t been here since the night everything changed.”
“The place looks like you, Herbert; all business. Where do you sleep?” Jehovah asked. “There’s only this one room.”
“The dead,” Herbert said, “sleep here, and I,” he continued, pointing at an empty examination table, “sleep there.”
“I should have guessed,” Jehovah replied. “So how, Herbert? It’s obviously not a dream, so what’s going on?”
“I just don’t know, Jehovah. A dimensional rift? Teleportation? Illusions?” he replied, and as if to test his theory, he turned and picked up a hat off the coat rack just inside the door. It felt real enough.
“It seems,” he said, “that we are really here, and that this place still exists, just as I left it.”
Without another word, he turned, opened the door and walked down a narrow hall, oddly absent of any other doors, save for the one at the end that had been ripped from its hinges. He continued through the opening, Jehovah following. They descended a set of stairs and entered a basement, which contained a second, more elaborate lab full of various scientific apparatuses. Several small windows illuminat
ed the room with sunlight, revealing a large wall covered with drywall, and on that wall were years and years of notations, calculations and one seemingly endless equation.
“My lab,” Herbert said, mostly to himself. “This is where I perfected my re-agent. I just keep the corpses upstairs because I enjoy the company.”
“Over there I…”
Click.
The Cheshire grin had all but evaporated, the third eye intensely focused and watering profusely.
“Your reaction tells me that you were not ready to leave that place,” the man said. “If only I could let you stay longer, but such things are not possible. To leave you there would change things. Alter the flow of time, change the past, erase the future.”
Herbert and Jehovah began to speak in unison, but before they could, the blue man turned the last key.
Click.
There was no shock in Herbert West’s reaction, as by this time he knew where he was going and what he would see. Jehovah, on the other hand, was still in awe of the process.
“Miskatonic University…my old classroom. Most likely on the night of the change, no doubt. You being here does change things, Jehovah. I haven’t even met you yet. I haven’t…made you.” Now Herbert seemed to be enjoying himself.
He entered the classroom and walked around. Everything was as he left it that night long ago. The corpse he had been studying not as fresh, but still viable. The bottle of re-agent he left behind glowing, beckoning. He had returned to grab his notes, his bag, but he had forgotten that one bottle. He picked it up, turned it over in his hand, the fluorescent green liquid with its godly powers his sole claim to fame in a world devoid of people to appreciate his accomplishment.
“Let’s look about town, shall we?” Herbert said. “At least as long as he lets us. I don’t think we’ll cause too much harm. If I remember correctly, the chaos of the night I departed should mask our trail.
“I remember that last night vividly. Something happened to me, and I ended up…” he paused, “somewhere else.”
Jehovah realized at this point that he was just along for the ride, and he turned and followed Herbert out of the classroom and down the echoing halls towards the immense wooden doors that led…
…out into a cosmic-fueled apocalypse.
Broken bodies were piled high, robed figures carrying and dragging more to be added. Creatures—some on the ground, some in the air—screeched and skittered. In the distance, an immense blue flame rose into the sky, creating a swirling vortex.
“That’s where I went,” Herbert said.
Click.
The blue man stared at them, his grin long gone, his face drenched from the watering eye that dominated his face.
“Damn you!” Herbert shouted at him. “Send me back! I wasn’t finished yet. Who are you to decide how long I can stay?”
The blue man took a step back, then said, “It’s quit simple. The keys may be yours, but the lock is mine. And whoever possesses the lock…holds the key.”
He turned, paused for a moment, then began walking away.
“Hold it,” Herbert said, Jehovah standing at his feet. “I want to see more.”
“But that, my friend, was your last key, so our time together is done,” the blue man said. “So I bid you both good day.”
“I must see more!” Herbert said, flames in his voice. “Something happened to me back there, something that I don’t quite understand.”
The blue man stopped, turned, his Cheshire grin as big as ever.
“Why, good sir, do you feel that this is about you? Don’t you get it?” He said, anger rising in his throat. “I don’t care where you were or what happened to you there. All I care about is finding my key so I can get back to whence I came.
“You see,” he continued, “I lost my key long ago; so long, in fact, that I’ve forgotten now what it looks like, but I will know it when I find it. Then I will open my door, break this lock, and never look back.
“So again, I bid you both good day,” and he left them standing as he strolled through the corpse gardens and out of sight.
They stood for a moment in silence; Herbert had unknowingly removed the bottle of re-agent from his pocket, proving that this was no hallucination, no illusion. He wondered what he had changed by taking it, but that mattered very little, so without a word, he began walking, Jehovah trying to catch up.
“Where are we going now, Herbert?” he asked.
“In search of keys,” Herbert replied. “I must have more keys…”
The Ashen Valley of Reidr Skegg
A half-dozen snowcapped concrete domes, each the size of a small cottage, formed a line disappearing into the countryside. Nature was doing its best to reclaim them, but man’s hand was still evident. Beneath the snow, the domes were close to crumbling, the metal hardware rusted, the red and yellow paint warning of danger faded, cracked, and peeled. Several military-issue signs—probably forbidding trespass—were rusted through and illegible.
Herbert West and Jehovah found themselves here because their car had run out of fuel, and when the vehicle came to rest on the side of a lonely post-clean-and-sweep highway, they grabbed what they could carry—which in Jehovah’s case was very little—and hid the rest. Then they set out on foot, until they came to a bridge that had become a mangled claw of steel and concrete. Their options then were to enter the woods or go back the way they came, so they cautiously wandered into the weed-choked wilderness, and after a time found themselves in a vast clearing, staring at the domes.
It was Dr. West who broke the silence…
“Those are abandoned missile silos,” he said. “They’ve probably been empty for decades.”
“I’ve heard,” he continued, “that the more accessible silos were turned into housing for the rich and paranoid.”
“Speaking of paranoid; it’s getting late, Herbert,” Jehovah said. “Maybe we could stay in one tonight?”
“That’s not possible, my friend, as there is no way to open them now,” Herbert replied. “Those are solid concrete, and surely the generators died long ago. Besides, I don’t want to be trapped in one of those things when something comes knocking.”
“We’ll set up camp in the woods, just like we have in the past. It’s worked out OK so far,” he said, a slight smile on his face.
So they moved on…
Not wanting to get caught out in the open, they continued. They were just past the third dome when they both heard a very audible click. They looked at one another for a short time, then quickly picked up speed, but Jehovah was having trouble moving in the snow, so they were barely to the fourth dome when five of the caps opened in a rush of smoke and concrete dust. What came out of those domes made Dr. West pause and Jehovah yelp out loud.
Gigantic red worms, silent and lethargic, pushed and pulsed their ways out of the silos and into the night air. Their skin was bright red and pockmarked; long, raw gashes caused by the friction of the concrete silo covered their otherwise featureless bodies.
“Giant deep sea tube worms! How is that possible?” Herbert exclaimed, wonder and fascination in his voice. “They must be over 100 feet tall!”
Four of the five fell to the ground with a great thud before they could fully extend, but the fifth one kept rising, high enough to eclipse the setting sun, then it extended a fiery plum from its open end and caressed the air with it.
Jehovah and Dr. West stood silently, broken only once by the doctor’s scientific declaration, as they were trapped between the worms: four to their left, and one to their right.
The four that had fallen were already trying to retract, the sound of their skin on the concrete like sandpaper on wood. All this was being done in otherwise silence, save for the wind in the trees and the howls of unnatural things roused by the shaking ground from the fallen worms.
“They don’t belong here, Jehovah,” Hebert said. “They’re invertebrates. Underwater, they live in tubes, the water supporting their fragile bodies. They feed through a
symbiotic relationship with bacteria that live inside the host.”
“Well, we don’t belong here either, and I’d like to leave,” Jehovah said matter-of-factly.
The fully-extended worm wavered but stood tall, the others pulling closer and closer to their holes. Several more had extended their plums and were dragging them uselessly across the ground.
“They can’t see us; probably don’t even know we are here,” Herbert said. “We should be able to just walk away.”
And walk away they did, but not before Dr. West walked right up to one of the worms and sliced a huge chunk of flesh from the closest worm. He deposited the sample in a plastic bag and dropped it into one of his coat’s many pockets.
“The deep sea is a treasure trove of untapped medical discoveries,” he said. “You never know what these creatures have hiding down their ‘sleeves.’”
The worm didn’t seem to notice his transgression, and not a single worm contested their exit. Two had reentered their holes, two were sliding closer, and the fifth extended worm finally crashed to the ground, taking out several trees and causing Jehovah and Dr. West to both jump from the aftershock.
Still they made no noise…
“That was close. We could have been flattened,” Jehovah said when they stopped a safe distance away.
“How do they close the lids, Herbert?” Jehovah asked.
“They don’t,” he replied. “They’re not from here, Jehovah; they appeared here from somewhere else. From some deep, crushing sea, where they have no predators; nothing but them and the darkness.”
“Whatever—whoever—has caused this, all of this,” he said with a wave of his hands, “they have brought many unnatural things to our world, some of them with little hope for survival.”
“Well, I don’t think anyone will miss them,” Jehovah said. “We should set up camp, don’t you think?”
“Not yet. I think we should put some distance between us and those worms. They might not be a danger to us, but they could have attracted something else that is,” he replied, then turned and moved on.
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