Thanks to your meddling, the kingdoms of men shall endure naught but woe. Dick will see to it.
Verily, King Dick represented an existential threat to peasants and paupers everywhere his scabrous hand extended. Cruel beyond the usual measure, even for a mortal tyrant who were forced to pack every conceivable iniquity into their flea-span lives, the king would happily usher in a new dark age of fire and destruction and political whoredom.
“You’re welcome,” Neck said, drunk on the vile curds and his own rank fatalism. “Consider it a favor. Down with primates, eh?”
Don’t presume me any favors. Perhaps “you” bear these primates enmity. I rather enjoy their antics. Joad’s altar emanated a suggestive slurp.
Easy for a god older than the mountains to adopt a sanguine view. It had presided when creation was a soupy mess that spanned pole to pole. It had known worms and mollusks and trilobites as supplicants. It would persist for eons after other lifeforms gave way to cockroaches scurrying beneath a reddening sun. Meanwhile, the blight known as mankind spread across the countenance of the earth, virulent as mold through the meat of an overripe peach. Men slew Those Who Came Before or drove them into the low caverns where neither celestial light nor rain were ever felt.
The Ur, such as Neck, risked much to walk abroad. His mostly extinct kind did so only by the forbearance of lords of men. Ur perforce served human princes and kings as advisors and executioners, and, alas, toadies.
You are despised, it is true, the wooden god said. Those who know their history fear you. Those who know you fear you. Hate you. Even Geld. Especially Geld. Especially Dick.
“If they only knew how little they know,” Neck said to the altar, to himself. A coal ignited in his belly; dull and dim, then rapidly brightening to the incandescent heat of a torturer’s best iron. His eyes teared and for the first time in epochs, he heard the north wind sighing through the reeds of his distant home estuary. He smelled the brine of tidal water and he smelled green bird shit.
The altar fattened on liquid darkness and his misery. Long had Neck harbored greedy phantoms of inconsolable yearning and pitiless regret. Long and longer had he suffered guilt and self-reproach like perpetual festering wounds.
When you were voiding your bowels in Eyebolt Passage this lovely morn, did you perchance hearken the clink of a mostly dissolved vial as it vented from your nether port and rolled into the gutter?
“I fancied Bob carried a bottle of scent. My innards smell quite pleasant, I trow.”
Bob did NOT carry a bottle of scent. Bob carried a vial of rare and deadly poison called Sanguine Dream Eater, several drops of which he intended to spice your curds at the first chance.
Few natural poisons or venoms upon the gods’ good earth could affect the constitution of iron-gutted Neck. He was, so far as he had reason to believe by dint of brutal experience, immune to the worst effects of every foul, toxic material devised by man or nature except ennui. Indeed, when aroused, he exuded a toxic slime capable of inducing a hypnogogic state, nausea, and death. Victims reported an orgy of phantasmal imagery prior to their demise.
“Who would provide Bob such a rare potion for fell purpose?”
Someone who wishes to send you home. Someone wise enough to know you don’t poison an Ur-toad, nay THE Ur-toad; you poison reality itself. The ultimate trip! My guess? A king or his seneschal.
“It was a rhetorical question.” Neck understood precisely what had befallen him—he’d been commanded to destroy Sneaky Bob and leave no trace. The seneschal, knowing full well the manner in which Neck typically assayed the disappearance of his victims, would snip two loose ends for the price of one. “Are vivid … hallucinations … the first stage?” Neck waved his paw and his claws briefly multiplied.
Time is a ring. You will meet the Terrible Shadow on High once more. I am sorry it has come to this.
“That makes two of us. Tell me what I must do, O hopping god.” Though it sounded familiar, Neck couldn’t remember the precise connotation of the Terrible Shadow on High. The phrase smacked of mystical gobbledygook used to frighten peasants. “Mighty Joad? Hello?”
The altar spoke no more, although a strong reek of bog remained in the garret. Neck vomited a steaming pile of curds. He lighted a candle and blearily contemplated the mess with the concentration of a haruspex.
A distant screech resounded; and again, closer. Green light seeped through the window. Shadows dissolved. The gaseous swampy stench thickened and the ceiling boards creaked. He looked up into the annihilating center of the universe.
~
A plethora of horrors crept forth to mingle with gentlefolk during the Month of the Dead. Costumes, greasepaint glamour, and expectations concealed the nature of these entities. First, Neck had entered the Jackdaw Tavern, his hideous form unremarked by neither proprietor nor patrons. Sometime later, five Men of the Flat Affect arrived, accompanied by a young woman. The men were likewise treated with affable diffidence despite their most unwholesome physiognomies. Common folk scarcely recognized them for what they truly were, particularly in broad daylight. The White Ones tended to lurk at the twilight margins; given to haunting lakeside cabins, abandoned asylums, and rural knolls popular with lust-crazed teenagers.
None could authoritatively derive the origin of these creatures. Rumors abounded: They had died, as mortal men usually do, then were reassembled and resurrected by the gods of death; they were mortal men, perfectly alive, but enslaved by enchanted masks; or they were an immortal servitor species marooned when their star-faring ship crashed on Earth and now emerged from crevices at the bidding of eminent black magicians such as Julie V, Satan’s own bitch, and Jon Foot, erstwhile warlock to the Imperial Court. Whatever the truth of their provenance, Men of the Flat Affect, or White Ones, resembled typical men, except for visages sickly pale as clabbered milk, an unnerving rictus, and shambling gait that covered more ground than an untutored observer might warrant.
The Pale Society, as scholars designated their plurality, was divided between the Ecstatics, whose evil grins permanently curved unto their ears, and the Stoics, who were blank and cold as the very snows. Men of the Flat Affect spoke solely to lure victims from sanctuary and into darkness. They possessed no scrutable motivations save a love of sadism and murder.
This cruelty consisted of three Ecstatics and two Stoics, each yoked in servitude to the aforementioned woman, Delia Labrador. Delia wore a woolen cloak and a gemstone-encrusted domino mask. Her lips were blacked with ash. She sat at a table near the hearth, her scaly sandals propped most cavalierly. The White Ones loomed around her, their eyes gleaming with dispassionate malice.
Delia inquired of the proprietor whether he’d seen anyone interesting. She sought a man of superior bulk and rude countenance. A man who smelled of alkaline and the blood caked on his boots.
The proprietor pointed directly overhead and confessed he’d rented a cell to precisely such an enormous brute. Positively frightful, positively feculent.
“Did this gentleman perchance wear the mask and garb of Joad the Inimical, dread god of toads and a thousand slithering beasts?”
“As you say, lass.”
“I am infinitely more experienced than these rosy cheeks suggest,” she said. “Your bearing is that of a soldier. A footman from the minor tarot.”
“Many days loafing and a few hogsheads of beer ago, yeah.”
“Grace me with a soldier’s appraisal. What did you make of your squatty guest? Is he a warrior? Would he strike fear in your heart on a field of battle?”
“Perhaps, ma’am, as a backstabbing scout. He’s awful light-footed for a man of his bulk. Yeah, come to think of it, he trod softly as Slaughin’s own shadow.”
“Thank you, innkeeper. Sleep well and dream a red dream of butchery in the name of your old king.” She smiled. “Oh, and my apologies for the once and future mess.”
The proprietor’s g
aze shifted from the girl to her entourage and back again. He sidled away in the manner of a fighting crab.
Delia nodded to the Stoics who immediately lurched in tandem up the rickety stairs. White Ones typically perambulated as if directed by an amateur puppeteer’s hand. She massaged her temples and awaited the inevitable outcry. This was the essence of her professional existence—auguries and dowsing to track prey; the casting of wards and charms; the deployment of her killers; support where necessary, although the White Ones tended to be a fire and forget proposition. Sic them upon a victim and profit.
She’d received the commission to eradicate Neck the Violator earlier that morning via a dead letter drop. The commission, labeled an emergency, did not enumerate Neck’s offenses (many of which were common knowledge to denizens of the city’s underworld) or whom longed for his death (it would’ve required ten men and a boy to tote such a scroll!), nor did Delia give a rotten fig. Neck represented an exorbitantly lucrative contract, and nothing more. Ur beasts were fearsome, but few living creatures could withstand the attentions of the White Ones. The cruelty she’d brought were exceptionally formidable and would make short work of the toad, his reputation notwithstanding.
For an exquisitely pregnant interval, nothing perceptible happened upstairs. Then, blood welled from ceiling planks and dripped onto the table, spattering her sandals. The Ecstatics cocked their heads and regarded this phenomenon with intense diffidence.
Time passed and more blood dripped, but the Stoics did not return.
“We’d best see what’s keeping your brethren,” Delia said with strained nonchalance. In an abundance of caution, she donned three extra murder rings, each set with a death’s head gemstone attuned to a particular medium of slaughter. These stones complemented the settings of her bejeweled belt and the master death’s head. Power swelled in her middle; power crackled in her delicate fists. The servitors proceeded her, naturally. Each of them was armed with a skinning knife, cleaver, or mallet. Rusty, jagged, and lethal.
Once, at least seventy or eighty years ago, a wealthy, albeit naïve, patron inquired how a nice girl like Delia became a black magician. She lacked the marks of discernment as popularized in literature—she wasn’t a hag nor a be-goateed warlock. Her supple rosy flesh was un-scarified. Neither of her shapely ankles was attached to a hoof.
Delia said, A toad resided in our family garden. Beastly, malevolent creature. It ate sparrows that flew too near. I was a child and believed in the fairytale of kissing frogs as a method to disenchant cursed princes. Much too late, did I recall that the tale made no mention of toads. Our tongues intertwined and its viscid bile burned my core. Light and purity were seared to crisps. The rest is the rest.
That same patron then asked how she’d fallen in with the Men of the Flat Affect.
Simple. A cruelty of their ilk raped and murdered me, unaware that this violation transpired according to my own design. As such matters predictably follow, I arose via true resurrection and now own their souls forevermore.
The inquisitive patron made no further inquiries.
Ascending the stairs these many years later, she could be forgiven in indulging a morbid notion that her story had come full circle. The bitter taste in her mouth sharpened and a thread of drool unraveled along her chin. The fingernails of her left hand blackened as the murder rings sparked and sizzled.
~
Upstairs, a short, narrow passage extended too far and at a peculiar, canted angle, as though Delia and her entourage had entered the hold of a foundering ship. She glanced over her shoulder; the stairwell fumed with an aqueous green glow. Her breath caught. Her reactions lagged heartbeats behind the languid unfolding of events. She’d experienced variations of this nightmare on numerous occasions—a pitiful insect trapped in a glob of stiffening amber while a scarcely imaginable doom approached to snuff her life.
The second door on the left was ajar. Its opening brimmed with unnatural darkness. Stars and planets and capes of celestial dust could’ve swooped through this slice of void, so deep, dark, and cold. No glints of stellar fire winked from within, however.
Delia had studied eldritch portals in the Eleven Grimoires of Revulsion, Compulsion, and Repulsion. Such ruptures contravened physical laws of material reality and spanned immense distances as causeways between worlds, between galaxies. Some wormholes cored even farther, crossing into the Great Dark where flesh and brain represented provender for The Sleeping Dread. In either case, to cross the threshold was to court severe peril.
The Ecstatics flew off their feet and into the void; minnows yanked by the hook and line of a cosmic fisherman. She initiated a sign of greater warding. Too little, too late. A terrible force like constricting iron bands crushed her arms against her sides and shot her at velocity into the bottomless pit. Frigid wind shrilled. Her tears froze against her cheeks.
She comforted herself with a mantra.
I have known death and resurrection. And she fell, blinded in the darkness.
I have supped the black milk of the Gorgon and uttered her Profane Ululations. And she fell.
I have bent the will of the White Ones to my own. And she fell.
Julie V kissed my sandal. And she fell.
Jon Foot is my bitch. And she fell.
Delia had memorized twenty-three Greater and thirty-nine Minor Signs of Celestial Malice. Six names of demon kings quivered the tip of her tongue. None of these could save her, for she sensed her patrons were beyond communion. Consumed with mindless fear she could utter naught but an inchoate cry.
The sensation of plummeting ceased, instantly, seamlessly. She caught her balance, opened her eyes, and beheld the bland confines of a typical inn chamber, albeit marred by a pool of coagulating blood and the missing street-side wall which gave way to a panorama of slimy, towering mandrake and giant ferns (instead of shit-filled gutters and shit-spattered buildings). Mist oozed over beds of variegated moss. Birds warbled and chattered. Insects whirred in endless, stinging hunger; they clouded the surface of a sluggish river. She inhaled the rank humidity, tasting ancient bark and hints of spoilage. Here was a Verdant Hell of hermit philosophers—a reeking, fecund everglade, primeval as the fang of a dinosaur.
This everglade did not reside in any civilized region of the Empire. Civilization, so-called, was loath to suffer the existence of a man-eating garden within its confines. She beheld no sign of her erstwhile companions who might protect her against lurking predatory fauna. Had they dissolved during transit, or (scant difference) vanished into the gullet of a prehistoric reptile? Whence the sticky pool of blood? Thinking more clearly by the moment, she decided that moving away from the scene might be prudent, as scavengers and carnivores alike were certain to converge.
Delia walked parallel to the river, traversing hummocks and half-submerged logs, avoiding quicksand and fetid pools swarming with sickeningly large mosquitos. The fates of her entourage became apparent, by and by. She spied the mangled corpse of a Stoic depending from the boughs of a mangrove tree. A crocodile lazily chomped on the smirking remains of an Ecstatic. Bits of the others lay scattered from hell to breakfast. Likely sufficient disparate pieces to reassemble her slaves into grisly patchworks given a fortnight or so. Their kind was nigh indestructible, although they could be severely inconvenienced by the usual methods. Unlike the White Ones, she would not regenerate if reduced to a spool of guts and remnant fingers. She moved a trifle faster.
The white disk of a sun hung motionless behind its veil of clouds. Reality distorted here; time moved as slowly as the blood within the terrible lizards who drowsed in the reeds. In due course she emerged to behold a delta. Brackish water slopped near her toes. The water curved away into a milky haze, its expanse dappled by the breeze. Several crocodiles (more enormous than the specimen who’d eaten her death slave) lazed upon the delta; bloated logs decorating the tidal grounds of a ruined mansion.
“Neck has imbibed a
dose of Sanguine Dream Eater.” She picked a gnat from her teeth with a knifelike thumbnail. “That is the only explanation. It is also the worst explanation.” Where she’d landed was no more important than when. Dream Eater came in a dozen flavors, each more esoteric than the last. All varieties were capable of damaging the imbiber and his or her personal reality, but as a bonus effect, Sanguine Dream Eater scorched holes in the very fabric of space and time as it existed within the dreamer. Thus, the wormhole and this prehistoric jungle destination. She’d gone backward in time thousands, perhaps tens-of-thousands of years. The poison’s nature also predicated a dreadful intimacy—the surroundings would undoubtedly bear personal relevance to Neck. No one ever truly escaped his or her provenance.
“The great toad spawned here,” she said. “Eons gone by, he frolicked in this stew as a merry polliwog. Not a twatting care in the world. Thanks to his carnivorous predilections, here I tarry.”
Do you not recognize your own home? She snapped her head around and saw nothing but tall grass. Either her inner demons whispered in a chorus, or the Dark Powers spoke to her on the wind. She regarded the ruins and their guardian lizards. Many years had passed and the mansion’s dereliction was severe, so she but slowly twigged to the voice’s insinuation that this was her childhood abode.
You penetrated the membrane, her inner demons said. Your blood, your marrow, your animating force comingled with Walther Neck’s effluvium—and not for the first time! Behold his Paradise and Purgatory for it is your very own—
“Enough.” Delia made a ward against malignant genius loci and supernatural possession and silenced the voice. She slashed a thick sapling with her flinty nails, and it toppled. She forged the narrow delta channel, probing ahead with her impromptu staff. The nearest albino crocodiles caught wind of her scent and hastily flopped into the water.
Such a luxurious mansion in its heyday. She wandered its marshy halls, ceiling open to the heavens. Father had been a moderately wealthy freeman. He and Mother protested the policies of someone a bit too high up the food chain, organized a peasant rebellion (really a glorified work slowdown), and were branded dissident traitors for their pains. Father lost his estate prior to his execution. The aggrieved nobility shipped Mother north as a trained slave. She placed Delia in the care of a distant relative; her final, desperate act. The relative, a strange, bloody-minded woman, was an occultist who’d endured the tutelage of several grand masters and was found wanting. However, the occultist recognized Delia’s aptitude regarding the dark arts. The child’s course was set.
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