by JG Faherty
How bitter a pill for me to swallow, that my only option for survival lay in the tentacles of the very monster I’d set out to destroy.
But who should I focus my efforts on? Ben, who’d already lied to me? Or the inspector himself, and hope that I’d earned enough goodwill with him that he’d overlook the murder of an innocent civilian? Neither seemed likely to believe me. Ben wanted Flora dead, and Flannery had as much as admitted I’d be arrested.
Perhaps if I could convince them Flora had a disease, a madness, that I could cure her…yes! That was it. A long shot at best, but I was desperate enough to try anything, to postpone the inevitable and pray for a miracle.
By then, the approaching mob had drawn near enough for me to make out individual shapes behind the bobbing lanterns and bright electric torches. Flannery, his massive bulk unmistakable despite the shadows, walked ahead of his men. An equally large man strode with him. Ben Olmstead.
When they were twenty feet away, the group came to a halt. Several of them had weapons in hand. Flannery and Ben continued on, until they halved the distance between us.
“She didn’t mean it,” I said. “She’s not fully recovered yet. She just needs some help. I can fix her. Ben, you saw her. She’s not like the others. She’s human, as human as you or I.”
“She killed a man, Gilman,” replied Flannery. His gruff voice held a note of compassion, which gave me some hope. On the other hand, Ben’s next words carried no emotion other than fury.
“And nearly killed Callie.”
“But she didn’t.”
“No thanks to you, or that monster you created.”
A low growl sounded to my right. Flora. I reached out to take her hand but she pulled away. In the light of the torches, she looked once again a corpse, deathly pale and eyes sunken into two bottomless wells. I gave a silent curse. She’d earn no points with Flannery or his men looking like that. I had to change their minds, and quickly, before some fool got spooked and fired his gun.
“She’s not a monster. We’ve seen real monsters. In Innsmouth and down here,” I reminded them. “Creatures from the stars, demons hiding within human shells. Flora is none of those. Put her in a hospital if you must, and let me finish what I’ve started. Think about what that would mean. The illnesses I could cure.”
“You’re a bloody lunatic, Henry.” Ben shook his fist, and his light trembled. “If you think anyone will let that abomination live another day, you’d best think again.”
Flora leaped forward with a feral howl. Moving faster than any of us expected, she threw herself onto Ben with a mad fury. Even though he was more than twice her size, the violence of her attack sent him to the ground. His light rolled away and his screams joined her animal snarls as they fought. Flannery pulled his gun and tried to aim. I rushed toward them, calling for Flora to stop.
Ben’s shouts changed to cries of pain. She had her hands on his neck and her face buried against his shoulder. I remembered the corpse in the alley, his throat torn away.
“No!” I grabbed Flora’s arms and pulled with all my strength. She didn’t budge, her muscles hard as stone and her teeth locked into Ben’s flesh in the manner of a savage dog.
Someone kicked me in the side and I fell, the bruises and aches of my previous struggles waking up again as I gasped for air. I attempted to get to my knees but a heavy foot came down on my back, pinning me in place.
A gun went off. I craned my neck to see Flannery standing over Flora. He fired again. Flora’s body twitched but she still held on. Flannery pulled the trigger twice more, the reports dull to my now-deafened ears.
Flora bucked and twisted. Blood flew from her mouth and she fell onto her back.
“Flora.” I may have shouted or just whispered; my lungs ached and my ears rang too much to tell. The weight holding me in place released and I crawled to her, sobs racking my chest.
“Flora.” This time I know I spoke in hushed tones as I ran my hands through her sodden hair. Dark stains covered her chest. I put my head down to listen for a breath and she opened her eyes.
“Henry.” I had to strain to hear her. “It hurts, my love. It hurts so much.”
Her voice trailed off, leaving me with two final words.
“The…anger.”
One of her fingers touched my arm and then her hand fell away. Even in the murky, wavering light of the torches I saw the glaze of death come across her eyes.
“Damn you, Flannery.” I stood up and shoved him. “Look at her. All of you. Look at her. She’s not like those others. She was human.”
Flannery shook his head. “Aye, she was. But that makes her even more of a monster, don’t it?”
Something inside me snapped at his words. I charged him blindly, my fists swinging, a primitive growl tearing from my throat. I would kill him for—
He stepped aside and clubbed me with his pistol. The blow caught the side of my head and staggered me. A gun went off and hot fire burned my arm. Agony carved across my ribs and then the instinct to survive took hold. I turned and ran, hunched over like a common thief. More gunfire. Angry wasps flew past my ears. A hammer strike in my leg sent me to my knees.
Only there was no ground to stop me.
I tumbled off the edge into space, with no idea if I was heading toward water or rocks. Wind rushed past my ears, drowning out all other noises. I tried to lift my arms, protect myself, but everything happened too fast.
I struck face-first, flat on my belly.
The impact drove the breath from my lungs and white stars filled my vision. Every part of my body cried out, skin and bones screaming as if beaten with red-hot pokers. And then icy cold enveloped me, washing away the hurt, numbing it. The frigid waters of the river soothed me and at the same time siphoned my energy away, leaving me helpless and limp.
My head bobbed to the surface and I coughed bitter water. I heard voices, saw lights, before I sank once more. My body drifted, then stopped, blocked by a hard, rough surface. I clung to it with the last dregs of my strength and lifted my face above the water to suck in welcome air.
“—can’t see a damned thing,” a distant voice said.
“I put at least two into him.” This one familiar. Flannery? “If he ain’t dead, he soon will be. Let him sink. Good riddance. Crazy bastard’s food for the fish now. Just like his father.”
“What about—”
I lost the rest as my tenuous hold gave way and I slipped down again. I felt as much as heard a heavy splash near me and I clawed my way back to the surface.
“—spend eternity together, just like they wanted.”
Water seeped into my mouth and I tried to keep my head up but my limbs refused to work. My fingers, frozen and weak, relaxed their grip and I slid down, once more at the mercy of the currents. A deep ache awoke in my leg and another in my side. Icy talons dug into me, gripping my lungs and heart and squeezing tight.
A gray shape drifted past, spinning slowly in the currents. Flora. Her bone-white face stared at me from scant inches away, a reminder that I’d failed her not once, but three times.
“I’m sorry,” I said, as she disappeared into the eternal dark. Water poured into my mouth and lungs, but I no longer cared. I didn’t even struggle. A heavy lassitude gripped me in frigid arms and I gave in. This was it. The end. I was going to die just as my father had, adrift in an unnamed river until I reached the bottom or came to rest atop the body of the terrible star beast that lay at the root of all my troubles.
No, not her. Him. My father’s face appeared in my mind, his sardonic lips twisted up in a supercilious grin.
He was the cause, just as I’d always known. And in the end his insanity infected me. I tried to stop him but instead I became him. A desperate man ruining his life to bring back the woman he loved. How ironic. Flannery was right all along, the crazy apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.
My descent came to a stop. Numb, barely conscious, I didn’t feel the bottom of the river but I sensed the lack of motion.
Faces appeared before me. My mother, still alive and happy, ready to serenade me with a bedtime song or take me on long walks through the park. Ben, his eyes alight with mischief above his thick beard. My best friend despite our differences, and I wished things had ended differently for us. Scott, quiet yet confident, the bard to Ben’s ruffian. Sometimes we’d get together without the others, just to sip brandy and enjoy a game of chess. Two men of higher class enjoying an evening the way true gentlemen should. Our secret, even to the grave. Callie, her delicate features the opposite of her brother’s, a china doll whose strength lay hidden on the inside. So beautiful, and I cherished our time together despite my later rejections of her advances.
Flora. The one true love of my life, and too late I’d found out I was hers. How I would miss her laughter, the way she’d whisper a ribald joke to us so that none of the other patrons could hear her indecorous humor, how she’d touch my hand as she delivered a beer. And outside of work, when the four or five of us would go on picnics, attend shows if we had the money, or simply walk along the river. If only I’d taken her from the hospital and left town when I had the chance. We could have gone far enough away to live long and happy lives before my father’s world domination came to be.
But I’d had to play the hero. And—
A sharp sting broke through my fading consciousness. My leg, where I’d been shot. Another in my arm. Then more of them, uncomfortable enough that I opened my eyes.
And beheld the face of my nightmares.
The mother-creature’s massive, alien eyes stared at me from only a few yards away. Several of her tentacles held me in a loathsome embrace. The hellish scene illuminated by hundreds of tiny glowing lights that darted back and forth. One of them came to a halt in front of me: a miniature demon, a squid-thing with the arms and legs of a man, eight eel-like appendages, and skin that shined with a vile yellow luminescence.
It moved closer and stared at me.
With my father’s altered, inhuman face.
Something pierced my chest and filled my veins with acid. The red-hot fire spread throughout my body as if hell itself had opened inside me. I screamed for release, my cries trapped in my head because water filled my lungs. The agony intensified, expanded, devoured me, until finally the gods bestowed their mercy.
They let me die.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Death was not what I expected.
Instead of eternal darkness or the pearly gates of Heaven, I found myself in my childhood bedroom, tucked under my linens, my mother standing over me. She favored me with a familiar half smile, the one that always let me know she found humor in something I’d done.
“Mother.” She was deceased; she’d crossed that divide many years ago. I knew that. Just as I knew my own miserable life and unfair death…and yet, here I was. A boy again. What kind of afterlife was this? Were the mystics of India correct after all with their talk of reincarnation?
Did that mean I was doomed to repeat my cursed existence all over again?
“Henry! For goodness’ sake. What have you got there?” She reached down and retrieved a book from beneath my pillow.
Embarrassment warmed my cheeks. I remembered this particular event well. I’d tucked my schoolbooks under there hoping the knowledge within them might pass to my head while I slept.
“Maybe it will help me learn,” I said. Even to my young ears, it sounded silly. My older self, more observant, noticed my mother’s struggle to control her laughter.
“Did it work?” she asked. I frowned. There didn’t seem to be anything new in my brain. What lessons had I been trying to conquer back then?
“Of course not.” My father strode into the room, young and virile and not yet consumed by a fatal desire to play God. “You can’t expect ink to pass through paper, pillow, and skull with information intact. It must be a direct line.”
He sat down on the edge of my bed.
“No, you died. I killed you, in the cavern.” I tried to back away but my child-body ignored me. The same way my parents paid no attention to my words.
My father took a long syringe from his jacket pocket and held it up. Thick black liquid filled the glass tube.
“This,” he said, wiggling the syringe, “is how to learn.”
He plunged the needle into my chest. Pain filled my body and my body went rigid. I cried out, and again no one paid me any heed. My father emptied the dark fluid into me and then drew back. A single drop of red blood decorated the tip of the shiny steel needle.
“It hurts, but so does anything worth doing. You’re young and healthy. You’ll come around much faster than I did.”
“Make it stop!” The words echoed in my skull but my mouth couldn’t move.
“Now you will know,” my mother said. Another voice echoed her, a deep, resonant rumble that shook the bed. “Now you will know.”
I tried to move but my body remained paralyzed. My parents stood and joined hands. My vision played tricks on me; for a moment I saw multiple arms on both of them and gray shadows hovering around their bodies. Their eyes turned yellow. Their shapes melted together, grew larger.
Then I was alone.
Pitch black surrounded me. I drifted in perpetual night, with no concept of up or down, no sense of time passing. Tiny lights appeared, pinpricks of dazzling yellow all around me. Stars? Had I risen to the heavens?
Strange words filled my head, in languages I didn’t recognize. Aldebaran, Fomalhaut, Nyil-yath Rho, Ptharg, Rigel. As each one appeared in my mind, one of the yellow lights brightened momentarily.
Thoughts came to me as well. Some of them long and detailed, like school lessons or reading passages. Others short, in the manner of snippets of conversation overheard in a crowded room. I tried to concentrate on them but they disappeared too fast, leaving weird sensations in their wake, as when you can almost but not quite remember something important.
The lights swirled faster around me, faster, became a dervish of glowing sparks, sucking more and more of the points into itself. After a moment, I joined them, an unfelt force lifting me ever so gently toward some destination I could not see.
Up I went, my body weightless, my mind awhirl.
Up.
Up….
* * *
I broke the surface and found myself in a different world than the one I’d left.
The water no longer seemed chill, but refreshing. To either side the banks of the river were clearly visible, narrow muddy flats that quickly gave way to vertical walls stretching up. Far above them, the cavern’s ceiling was a dim gray dome with gigantic wounds in it from the explosions we’d initiated. A flash of light caught my eye and I looked down.
I floated in a sea of dancing stars.
The sparks of yellow had followed me from my dream – or was it a hallucination? A glimpse of the afterlife? – into the real world. Hundreds of them darted and danced around me. Only now I saw them for what they truly were. My father’s children.
My brothers and sisters.
I gathered one in my cupped hands and held it up. Although its mouth didn’t move and no expression showed on its miniature face, I sensed approval from it, an acceptance of us as family. Its extra appendages twirled and swayed with an unearthly grace.
As did my own.
From my back, just above my waist, sprouted two new extremities, each several feet long and powerfully muscled. I flexed one and it responded instantly, whipping through the water and stretching to three times its length before returning to its previous size.
I returned my half brother to the water and in the glow of my new family I inspected the rest of my body. My hands remained mostly normal, except for a lengthening of the fingers and the short, black claws that had replaced my nails. My
feet had grown long and wide, with webbing that made swimming an ease.
A few kicks brought me to shore. I climbed out of the water and shed the tattered remains of my clothes. My tentacles retracted to about the length of my forearm, ready should I need them but small enough to hide beneath clothing. I took a deep breath, filling my lungs with the briny sea air. Until that moment, I hadn’t even realized I’d been breathing while submerged. I touched fingers to my neck, felt the slits of gills.
Mother did this. Even without all the knowledge she’d passed on to me, I’d have known the truth. Just as my father before me, I’d been saved, made not just whole again but better than before. Healed, changed.
I’d become a child of the stars.
’Fhalma.
Mother, in her own tongue. The tongue of the ancients, the gods. Not her name, but her title.
She’d bestowed a magical gift upon me, but I had no way to thank her.
She was gone, well and truly dead this time. I knew that right away. She’d sacrificed herself, expended the last of her essence to ensure my survival. But she still existed in the metaphysical sense, would live on forever in me and her other children. The ones sired by my father.
And all the ones I would one day bring forth into the world.
Thinking of Father reminded me of his failed attempt to initiate the subjugation of the human race. I saw his plans so clearly now, his grand strategy to complete Mother’s mission here on Earth. And I understood where he went wrong. For now I also knew Mother’s purpose on our planet. It wasn’t just to enslave mankind and build a home for a new race of beings, as my father had stated.
