Games Creatures Play

by Charlaine Harris

  And so he had become what he was, the vague whiff of corruption that on first sniff smelled like a raccoon had died somewhere behind the walls, that on second sniff led those who perceived him to think that the unfortunate corpse must have been something bigger than a raccoon, on third sniff produced nausea, and on fourth sniff overwhelming cosmic horror.

  Okay, so it was a more conceptual thing, which didn’t really work for everybody, but he had it down cold.

  The bottom line is that he was used to subtlety, and well acquainted with hiding. He knew that in any game of hide-and-seek, actual locations placed too little trust in the seeking spirit of humanity. Man’s very business was spreading its foul taint from one pole to another. Given a surprisingly short head start, the abominable ape had sought out and colonized the most inhospitable regions on the face of any given planet. He had defied all common sense and built cities on swamps, cities in earthquake zones, cities in places where there was no water and no food. He had walked across frozen wastelands, barely escaped, and returned with peg legs to replace limbs lost to hypothermia. (Then gone back.) There was no point in building a bloody tomb, as N’loghthl had done. No matter how obscure the clues, Man would get there within a generation.

  So The Septic Breath Of All Existing Foulness hid himself in obscure innuendo.

  In a play written by a madman, and only performed twice for kings who immediately slaughtered the actors for their effrontery, he was the foul expression that suddenly passed over the features of a lovely ingenue, which for one heartbeat made her look less than human.

  In a deadly plague that ravaged the brothels of a merchant city known as Kar-En-Nur, he was a random string of senseless adjectives that appeared well into the delirium of all sufferers, seconds before they expired.

  Following a baffling fit of madness that overcame a much-beloved priest known for his infinite kindness, he was the precise pattern of blood spatter on the walls behind the mound of worshippers who had arrived, first thing Sunday morning, to seek that kindly figure’s blessings for the upcoming harvest.

  He was the vinegary taste of cheap wine.

  He was every horrid circumstance that had ever taken a perfect day and caused it to turn black and brittle on the edges; the thunderstorm that rained down on picnics; the sudden gastric upset that prevented consummation on wedding nights; the way noses wrinkled when an awful stench rolled in from the sea and nobody could explain why.

  He played fair. He absolutely did. All of these clues, and uncounted thousands of others, could if placed together in the proper order and considered with the correct degree of madness while the stars gathered in precise alignment, all come together to suggest a certain fatal suggestion in the mind of a human being. That suggestion would be enough to establish the premise of a certain malignant intelligence behind it all, and that premise would be awe-inspiring enough to imply that the intelligence might be contacted and petitioned, and that implication would be sufficiently irksome to linger, and the nightmares that resulted would be traumatic enough to rip a portal in the barrier between what cannot be and what unfortunately is, and that portal would disgorge a book, and that book once translated would provide an incantation, and . . . well. You get the rest.

  This was, of course, a rather serpentine way to go about it, but that was the very point of the game, after all.

  So The Septic Breath Of All Existing Foulness curled up in his lair, and burbled, and spewed, and farted, and generally made the air around himself noxious, which was as unpleasant to him as it would be to any of us, but that was the nature he had chosen, which has a lot to say about thinking through all the ramifications of one’s life choices before one makes them.

  He waited. He slept. He played solitaire. He lost track of time. Then he heard the incantation spoken, muffled by the dimensional barriers but still fully clear to his ears, and he manifested on our plane.

  Dripping acidic saliva, he said, “Hello.”

  The philosopher who had accidentally summoned him looked up, paled, and said, “Shit.”

  • • •

  The two brothers whose hiding places had proven inferior drowned their sorrows in a place that would make no sense to us, but which we might as well imagine to be a sleazy dive with watered-down drinks and waitresses in dire need of mustache waxing.

  It wasn’t precisely that, of course. Again, we can only perceive these phenomena safely by recasting them in the terms our minds can process without shattering. Suffice it to say that it served the same function such an establishment fulfills on our plane of existence, in that it catered to beings who needed a place sufficiently squalid and disreputable to indulge their worst paroxysms of self-loathing; and considering that given how profane and vile their activities managed to be even when things were going well for them, it must have been a despicable dive indeed. You might want to imagine a corner booth with roaches skittering across the sticky table, even if N’loghthl and The Septic Breath Of All Existing Foulness might have found that particular ambience downright pleasant. In any event, this was not a good place. It was considerably worse than Trenton.

  N’Loghthl threw back his drink, too morose to take pleasure in the way the rightful owner of that beverage blackened and boiled in the process. “He’s gonna be intolerable.”

  “He’s intolerable already,” pointed out The Septic Breath Of All Existing Foulness. “Being intolerable is what we do.”

  “True. But you know what I mean. The longer he remains hidden, and thus proves he designed his hiding place more cleverly than ourselves, the more arrogant and superior he will prove to be when he slithers forth and discovers just how badly he defeated us. As much as I treasure the thought of millennia free of his infernal snottiness, we have to sabotage him. The sooner we lead some mortal fool to his lair, the less ammunition we leave him with, to trumpet his greatness when he finally does rise again.”

  The Septic Breath Of All Existing Foulness drew himself back, like an affronted pony. “You’re suggesting we cheat.”

  “Why, yes.”

  The Septic Breath Of All Existing Foulness gave that all due consideration, which means in practice that he saw the sense of it right away. “Very well. But we shall honor the spirit of the game, in that it must still be a mortal worm who resurrects him. It shall only be our pleasure to . . . shall we say, goose the odds, to lead the fool to where {Eternal Despair} hides.”

  “Agreed,” said N’loghthl.

  They shook obscene appendages, and plans were made.

  • • •

  Not long afterward, on yet another Earth congenial to Man, Professor Artis De Glough stood at a lectern in front of a packed lecture hall, peering at a student body that was there, largely, to laugh at him.

  De Glough was one of those odd specimens who accrue around certain universities, not out of any great level of academic achievement, but more in the manner that cat hair or lint accumulates in the corner of rooms.

  He had been accepted as an undergraduate because of a college essay that was passed from one member of the faculty to another in awe, because it blew entire zeppelins’ worth of smoke at the question of his own qualifications and ultimately collapsed upon itself in a heap of nonsensical sesquipedalian verbiage. The deciding vote had been cast by the dean of students himself, who fervently declared, “We have to enroll this guy.” Saner heads never prevailed. De Glough then had proceeded directly from a very odd and demented time as a student (acquiring passing grades in large part only because his theses were so impenetrable and insane that the faculty frequently passed him only out of curiosity over what he was going to do next) to a very long and notorious time as professor (where he somehow achieved tenure in large part because nobody in the administration wanted to be responsible for how spectacularly unprepared he would be for nonuniversity employment).

  He was, in a very real sense, the institution’s pet, and though his duties were la
rgely limited to laboring in his dim basement office on the three thick volumes on Elder Gods he produced yearly, he was by contract required to give a single three-hour lecture annually, and attending at least one of his incoherent presentations was considered such a rite of passage for undergraduates that they always packed the university’s largest hall, jockeying for seats from which they could observe him with the proper degree of dismay and incredulity.

  He wiped the beaded sweat from a brow like parchment, and wrapped up this year’s contribution.

  “. . . beings,” he emphasized, pointing an index finger, “incalculable in power, malevolent in intent, gazing upon all the poor achievements of our civilization with pitiless orbs capable of piercing the gossamer veils that reduce the abyss between our world and theirs to the translucent planes layered in a manner that resembled the phenomenon of pentimento on oil paintings.”

  As he paused for effect, not a single rustle could be heard among the hundreds in attendance. He peered up from his prepared text, and a few of the more nearby members of his audience imagined that they could see the dust of his subterranean office space puff from between his withered lips like clouds.

  “Thank you.”

  Some of the attendees had to elbow others who had fallen asleep, but once everybody was roused De Glough received the usual standing ovation.

  There were, as usual, no questions, which was a good thing, as questions might have provided impetus for another three-hour lecture. De Glough was left standing at the base of the stadium-shaped lecture hall, trying to align his yellowing lecture notes for better insertion into his briefcase, the only briefcase he had ever used, which had a broken brass lock and was held together by bungee cords. The dust on his spectacles was so thick that his magnified eyes looked like tiny fish trembling at the bottom of twin pools of pus.

  “Excuse me? Professor Dee Gluff?”

  De Glough looked up and saw something that he had almost never encountered at any of his lectures: sincere unfeigned fascination, shorn of obvious irony and spawned from no force other than actual intellectual appreciation. It had been years since he had seen such a thing, and he would have been stunned by it even had it not come from two young ladies of alabaster skin and spectacular pulchritude, each more beautiful than the other.

  This was, of course, an impossible formulation. The phrase “each more beautiful than the other” was one he’d heard before in reference to other groupings of young ladies, and had indeed appreciated as hyperbolic poetry, but he’d dismissed it as a mathematical impossibility since no constant, X, here defined as the measurable degree of one’s beauty, could be both greater than and less than Y, here defined as the measurable degree of the other’s beauty, simultaneously. In no rational algebra is X both > and < Y. It’s a logical impossibility. But once he allowed his gaze to not only flicker from one bright face to the other, but also return for a fresh measurement, he saw that their mutual gloriousness functioned as a feedback loop, wherein X added the value of Y to itself and Y then did the same, ad infinitum. He was witnessing an aesthetic asymptotic curve, increasing slope as it accelerated toward the immeasurable ultimate.

  Despite a suddenly dry throat, he managed, “Not Dee Gluff. De Glough.”

  Icon of Pulchritude Number One blinked prettily. “Excuse me?”

  “Not Dee but Day. Not Gluff but Glow. De Glough.”

  Her limpid eyes widened. “Your name is pronounced ‘Day-Glo’?”

  “Correct.”

  “I’m so sorry.”

  Having lived with it since grade school, Professor De Glough was even sorrier. “I deeply appreciate that. How may I help you?”

  The two visions of loveliness glanced sideways at one another, then peered back at him, each instant a perfect heartbreak on a scale De Glough had not experienced since acquiring a stepsister in adolescence.

  This much you need to know about Art De Glough: he was by most of the standards of academia as well as everyday life an absolute lunatic. Driven by obscure ancient texts reeking of bygone crackpottery and redolent of more mouse piss than actual wisdom, he clung to theories about silly things like incomprehensible Elder Gods slumbering into dark places while awaiting their opportunity to slither forth and topple civilization. Every single book on his home shelf was bound with brass hinges and could only be opened with the proper key. He used the word squamous in everyday conversation, which is one good reason why he rarely had any. But he was also a romantic at heart, vulnerable to the infinite charms of a dazzling smile beneath a pair of radiant eyes.

  Nor was this mere lust, the familiar hunger many pedants in tweed feel for the needier maidens among the student body, who have earned a historical reputation at such institutions for their shared misapprehension that the profound and deeply wise figure at the base of the lecture hall is oft-times a good place to find instruction in matters more intimate and life-changing than anything to be found in the course syllabus. Though not exactly a man of this world, as all of his practical knowledge was limited to the forgotten lore of other spheres entirely, De Glough had always been aware of such activities among his fellow faculty members, and had always prudishly disapproved. No, he had always yearned for true love. He had always dreamed of his Juliet. But the skills required to meet her (let alone win her) were as far beyond him as the operating specs of the Large Hadron Collider were beyond a naked mole rat.

  He was a romantic, a knight in dust and tweed. There was absolutely no chance of either of these two young ladies requesting a favor that he would not have granted, out of sheer misplaced gallantry.

  He was, however, totally gobsmacked when the one on the right said, “We believe we can help you.”

  • • •

  The conversation changed venues to a small but comfortable off-campus apartment that boggled the Professor not just because of its capacity to retain sunlight on every surface even as a torrential electrical storm raged just outside its bay windows, but also by accoutrements that, despite his lifelong inexperience, struck De Glough as quintessentially, indeed almost ludicrously, female: among them shelves lined with candles of every conceivable shade and aroma, a silk-shrouded four-high-poster bed piled to Himalayan altitudes with tasseled pillows, and a small menagerie of stuffed animals, some of which bore valentine-shaped hearts. It was in gestalt a virtual tsunami of estrogen, piling high in the shallows and rising to terrifying heights before crashing down to plow through any recalcitrant testosterone on land.

  Somewhere along the way formal introductions had been completed, and the two ladies had provided their names. The one with hair like scarlet fire was named Tammi N’loghthl, a sobriquet she thrice had to repeat for his disbelieving ears before she lowered her splendid lids demurely and explained that she was one-twentieth Cherokee and that it was an ancestral word meaning She Who Dances Among The Crystal Waters.

  De Glough found this unlikely but was not inclined to question it.

  The one whose raven locks set off a brilliantly white smile—and who had just the faintest taste of bad breath, a possible testament to a tobacco habit not yet in direct evidence—had introduced herself as Septima Fowl. He found that just as unlikely but was unwilling to question it either.

  The ladies, who had both slipped into sheer silk camisoles and now knelt side by side on the bed licking their lips and finding obscure reasons to arch their backs and thrust their secondary sexual characteristics forward, told him that they’d just shared a vacation in Guatemala where Tammi had found a medallion they now wanted the good Professor to examine.

  He managed to hide any disappointment he might have felt over this being all about a dusty old artifact, and removed the magnifying spectacles from his jacket pocket.

  One short examination later, he said, “Interesting.”

  “How so?” asked Tammi N’loghthl.

  “These markings around the rim? I know these runes. They come from a very anci
ent language native to a trans-Lemurian civilization predating what is normally considered recorded history. Indeed, there’s strong disagreement over whether that civilization or even the alphabet ever really existed, as most authorities take the position that the cave markings providing us what little we know of its alphabet was just the claw gouges left by a dying rodent as it suffered its final convulsions from food poisoning. I have argued that since the markings comprise hundreds of figures repeated in predictable combinations, this hypothesis only makes sense if it also makes sense to posit a small army of dying rodents, perishing in unison and with identical convulsions in what amounts to a kind of mortality conga line. The archaeological establishment, naturally, took this as a delightful and wholly logical explanation, rejecting my intended sarcasm and with it my insistence than an actual alphabet is involved.”

  Septima Fowl shuddered, not out of fear. “What’s it say?”

  “The language itself has never been translated, unfortunately, but we can divine some clues to the medallion’s significance from the bas-relief carving on this side, in which some kind of tentacled monster is depicted showering a priest with gold coins while flames as high as the sky leap from the city shown in the backdrop. The obverse, which looks like a network of rivers feeding together toward an ocean coastline, is clearly a primitive map, and this skull symbol at the place where those rivers converge is clearly a destination. I would presume that the medallion is in a sense an advertisement, offering a vivid come-on of the offered rewards as inducement toward following the directions in the small print.”