“Use the second floor computer room. Follow the trail.”
She clapped her hands and a fiery trail appeared at my feet. It appeared before me as I walked and vanished behind. I was in. Thank Heaven (or whatever) for Hell’s bureaucracy.
The computer room was empty, which was a lucky break for me. The last thing I needed was some junior demon trying to ingratiate himself by chinwagging me. I sat down at a terminal and started typing. The keyboard burned even my callused mitts. I gritted my teeth against the pain and started hacking my way through Hell’s firewall.
I had to wait until I died before I learned anything about computers. Turned out I had a talent for worming my way past security baffles, which was probably one reason Sir Robert kept me around. Sure wasn’t my sunny disposition.
Had to make this fast. I had only gotten this far because of a bold frontal assault against an incompetent bureaucracy. Sooner or later some geeky demon in IT (Infernal Technology) would find out what I was doing. Get trapped in Hell and the consequences are, quite literally, worse than death.
According to the flaming characters on the screen, the Messenger was here, deep in the bowels of the building, but his information was still intact. When security flagged my channel, I switched to the transportation banks, which informed me of the rooftop landing pad. Some junior geek in IT was starting to chase me down, but I was still safe for the moment. As safe as I could be under the circumstances. I headed for the elevators.
A top-heavy bureaucracy makes everyone mind his own business, and Hell’s was more top-heavy than the S.S. Poseidon. The few slave-clerks and inquisitorial demons who glanced my way received the evilest eye I could manage.
The twenty-seventh sub-floor was bad. Slime on the walls. Scorpions skittering about. Mashed dung everywhere. Couldn’t walk anywhere without stepping on something or someone. Demons with strange sexual desires leered at everyone. All in all, everybody’s nightmares come true. Fortunately everybody assumed I had a reason for being there.
It was not a place for idle sightseeing. I had to move fast or I’d be moving in permanently. A Cyclops carrying a Thompson machinegun stood outside the Messenger’s cell. He was about seven feet tall.
“What you want?” he grunted.
“Your sandal is unlaced,” I told him, pointing at his feet.
The best thing about simple tricks is that they always work on simple people, and this Cyclops was one of the simplest. He looked down, I kicked him hard in the crotch, and all seven feet of reeking meat hit the stinking floor. I gave him a couple good ones across the chops to keep him down, then jimmied the door.
The Messenger was quite a pretty boy. So, what else is new? They don’t make ugly angels. Even Heaven has its prejudices. The brightness of his robe dispelled the shadows. His halo was like gold under arc lamps. His many wings shimmered like peacock feathers. And, of course, blonde hair and blue eyes. A real pretty boy.
The Messenger looked at me quizzically. “Have you run out of demons?”
“Tom Reynolds, Celestial Intelligence Service,” I said. “Let’s blow this popsicle stand.”
“My name is Michael.”
“Yeah, that’s great,” I pulled him out. “Let’s get out of here.”
The Cyclops groaned. At that moment a siren loud enough to wake the dead, so to speak, shrilled through the building. The geek in IT had finally figured it out.
Michael was fast, keeping right with me. The best thing about a monstrous building like Inquisitory Central is that it has a thousand elevators and ten times as many stairwells. I chose a spiral stairway that promised roof access. The only thing barring our escape were the legions of Hell streaming down. I pointed upward.
“Think you can manage the two of us, Michael?”
He nodded and I took back everything I ever thought or said about the intelligence of Messengers. He grabbed me. I hung on. His wings roared like all the waterfalls of the world. We sped up the center of the stairwell. Hands and claws and tentacles and appendages I’d rather not think about grabbed at us. The roof hatch came up fast. I shot the lock off and closed my eyes. We burst through. A couple of mechanics bending over the hatch were propelled over the edge of the building. No loss.
Pursuit was still a few minutes back.
“Wait here, Michael,” I said.
I ambled across the roof, which was as vast as LAX. The alarm was still going strong. Demons and lost souls were standing around, wondering what in Hell was going on. I walked confidently toward the nearest aircraft, a sleek, bat-winged job with underslung hyperthrusters. Some technologists find Hell a dream come true, if they can withstand the fringe benefits. A saurian demon stood next to the plane.
“The damn thing ready yet?” I demanded.
“Yes . . . yes, sir,” it stammered.
Whip marks still glowed across its pebbled skin, and I almost regretted knocking it out. Almost. I signaled Michael out of hiding. He came on the wing. I strapped myself in. Michael looked at the hellish craft dubiously and shuddered.
“You think you can fly out on your own?”
He climbed in and settled uncomfortably into the second seat. The wings made it cramped. I lowered the canopy and started the engines. Sulphur billowed. Damned souls rushed at us. I slammed the accelerator forward and yanked back on the stick. We were up and away.
The borders would be too well guarded by now. If we went out that way, or tried to, we would encounter all the squadrons of the Infernal Air Corps. I wheeled the plane over the seemingly endless nightmare of Dis and headed deeper into Hell.
Beyond Dis, the landscape went from bad to worse. At the edge of the River Phlegethon, I dipped my wings to a lone centaur. I’d always considered they’d got a bum rap, along with all the other Mythologicals. I buzzed the Wood of Suicides and fought the convection currents over the Abominable Sands.
Pursuit was coming up fast. Aft weapons evened the scored, but not by much. We swooped over the Great Barrier. It was all I could do to keep from being slammed into the wall. Some of the flyboys behind me didn’t make it. Luck was not with Goering’s finest.
Flack burst around us. I was glad Captain Eddy had been my flying teacher.
We roared over the rings and pits of Lower Hell. Startled demons momentarily ceased torturing lost souls. The damned looked up. That’s right, I thought. Look up from the muck. You’re there only as long as you have no hope.
The air was getting cold.
Two bat-winged vipers fired at us. I banked, looped, and came up behind one of them firing. It crashed into the snow. The other one let loose with its cannons and stitched our fuselage. I pulled a maneuver that turned us over and taught Michael new things about fling I cracked our canopy against the other plane’s. It dived to get away, then I blasted it from the leaden sky.
The big guys in the Well of the Giants took half-hearted swings at us. They had stopped caring about things a long time ago. A shimmering ice field stretched before us. The violence of our passage raised geysers of ice crystals.
Then, in the gloomy distance, I saw Him.
Even after all these years, Dante was required reading. Smart cookie, that Italian poet. Right on the button. Still works in our Cartographic Service. I’d have to send him a note of thanks. If we got out. We still had a long haul ahead of us.
Lucifer towered from the ice, a physical representation of Him. Half was buried in the ice; the other half towered sullenly.
I pulled up at the last minute, skimming Lucifer’s body. We passed one of Satan’s faces. After all these aeons, he still had a Judas stuck in his teeth. And there were frozen tears.
More planes were coming at us, firing.
As we passed the center of Hell’s gravity, I looped the plane and we headed down, straight on the path to Purgatory.
We rushed toward the ice fissures.
I hit the hyperthrusters.
Call it bad luck. Call it whatever you want, but one of those pursuing bastards got our right wing.
&
nbsp; The plane fought me, and I fought back.
Smoke filled the cockpit as we entered the fissure. The plane started to break up, but we were beyond Hell’s reach. I saw stars. Real stars. Then blackness reached out and engulfed me. Crazily, as unconsciousness claimed me, I thought that pretty-boy Michael was probably getting his pretty wings all sooty. Death sucks.
I awoke an eternity later. Light surrounded me. I’d been here before. This was where new souls came for reorientation and battered souls came to be straightened out.
Sir Robert visited me later.
The aircraft, he told me broke up completely, but Michael took over once free of Hell’s bonds. He flew Heavenward, keeping me from falling back to Hell. All right, I owned the Messenger one.
Everything was right with the Universe again, according to Sir Robert. And Heaven was getting some concessions.
Even Bran was getting his comeuppance. A fatal heart attack during his murder of my corporeal brought him to an early judgment. Stress, the doctors said, but I wonder if the Old Man did not have a hand in it somewhere.
Sir Robert patted my shoulder. I had done a satisfactory job, he said. I was an adequate agent, despite my many and obvious faults. For him it was high praise.
Fine. Made me glow inside. But when I get back to my office, I’m hitting that bottle of hooch…if Sir Robert hasn’t found it first.
HP Lovecraft died thinking he had not accomplished much in his too-short of a life. Yes, he had published quite a few stories in magazines that, for the most part, he looked down on, and he was celebrated by his friends, but I think he realized the pond in which he seemed such a big frog was the tiniest puddle imaginable. While he regretted never having published a “real” (hardcover) book, I think he was more concerned that he had never done anything that matter, that would make a difference in literature over the decades. He was wrong. In the eight decades since his death, the number of people touched by his corpus of work and his cosmic visions have become legion in all areas of literary and creative endeavor. Despite persistent and pernicious efforts by race-baiters and literary deconstructionists, Lovecraft’s influence upon society continues to expand with each passing year. Who knows? The Young Man from Providence might even survive civilization as we know it.
Nighttime
A Tale of the Cthulhu Mythos
The sullen somber tolling of the ancient stone bell in the heart of town rolled over ancient Xicath.
The huge bronze sun was hard against the Western Sea, and the bloodiness of the twilight sky was fast surrendering to deep violet and the first stars of evening.
The encroaching darkness seemed first to surround the town, then flow inward, gathering most quickly in the twisting alleys and beneath bridges where oily currents raced.
I pulled closed the Library’s enormous doors and secured the chains and massive lock, hurrying in the fading light because I was late in closing. Very late.
It was not good to be so far from home at the fall of darkness, but I had been absorbed in reading the heretical book I had discovered. So fascinated, one might even say ensorcelled, was I by this tome found hidden in a long-disused and forgotten portion of the Library that I had not heard the peals of the warning bell until almost its final tolling.
I hurried down the stairs, only pausing, as was my custom, at the twin stone sphinxes that kept steadfast vigil over the Library, even when monstrous evil stalked the streets of Xicath. The loyal beasts were much weathered by acid rain and bore the claw-marks of the things that oft came out of the sea or up from the earth or down from the stars. They were centuries old, like everything else in our spawn-beleaguered town.
I gazed into the narrow, sinuous streets, where high-peaked houses overleaned so much that roof edges touched in places. Those houses would admit no caller after dark, not once family worship had started, not that anyone would be so foolish to be abroad after the setting of the sun.
No one but the town Librarian, not only foolishly late but now full of dangerous doubts.
I considered returning to the Library’s haven, cowering through the long night, but I held fast, my left hand resting on one sphinx’s paw. It was only darkness, I told myself, but I had to fight thirty years of ingrained fear, had to withstand generations of dread taboo. This was the night, when beast-gods came from Outside to stalk the streets of Xicath. The signs of the entities were all around us. The reality of the beast-gods was not doubted by anyone. Belief dwelt in the hearts of those who had faith.
I had no faith.
My heart was hollow.
My faith had flown while reading the accursed book.
My name is Matthew the Librarian. I am Keeper of the town’s Sacred Books, as was my father before me, from whom I assumed the mantle the day he was torn apart by a Hound of Tindalos after stepping around a blind corner. The books are all those which survived the Great Conflagration that overtook the Earth in what was then called the Twenty-first Century, when the stars were right and the Great Old Ones returned to reclaim dominion.
My ancestors came out of the desolation to the east with other survivors. With the ancient books as their guide, they constructed Xicath between the wasteland and the Western Sea. The books helped them to understand the truth behind the facade of apparent reality and bring order from chaos.
But now I was full of doubts.
Trembling, I moved away from the Library. This was the first time I had walked the nighttime streets of Xicath since, as a doubting child of six, I had tested the terrors of darkness. My father had told me that I nearly lost my life to the beast-gods from Outside and at that time I had no reason to doubt him.
My footfalls against the moist pavement and the whispering of the wind were the only obvious sounds in this town of several thousand souls. If anyone knew I was abroad, there was no sign of it. The faithful were all shut up in their homes, praying for the return of the sun or celebrating secret rites of darkness. Flames leaped and flickered behind leadened bull’s-eye windows.
Despite my tarnished beliefs, I, too, wished I were home, behind that heavy wooden door protected by the Elder Sign carved generations ago.
Dark clouds rolled between me and the stars. It seemed that I heard the slow flapping of leathern wings in the vastness above me, but I knew it had to be naught but my imagination—if the book I had discovered did indeed contain truths.
I paused at the edge of Derleth Park. It was quicker to cut across that blackness, but the powers of evil would be stronger there. I no longer believed, I reminded myself. I pushed through the shrubbery and crossed the common.
Away on the other side of the Park I saw the great stone bell. It was unattended now, of course. Its carven surface was not plainly visible, for which I was glad. Despite my newfound apostasy, I did not need to be graphically reminded of the terrors from Outside.
Beyond the bell was the Temple of the Master. There, I could have sought solace from the night. I almost did. The murmurings of the priests and acolytes inside, invoking the powers of the Elder Gods, sounded like soft rain on autumn pavements. But I continued toward my home, on the far side of Xicath.
Prior to my discovery of that iconoclastic diary I had believed totally in the words of the Master and the writings of his followers. I had to. I was the Librarian. I knew the old legends better than even the priests and inquisitors who nightly ensure the welfare of the inhabitants of Xicath.
I had learned all the stories of childhood, how the Master, the Great Lovecraft, had had visions of the world to come, had seen the advent of the beast-gods from Outside and the Final War destined to engulf all the nations of earth. To prepare his followers, He wrote parables telling what the beast-gods were like, where they had come from, and what they wanted. After the Master departed this mortal sphere, sending His mind into the great vastnesses in a metallic cylinder borne by His winged servants, His prophets and apostles gathered at Arkham House to continue His mission. After the Great Fire and the Dawn of the beast-gods, the survivors journey
ed across the Poisoned Lands and founded Xicath at the edge of the Western Sea, fashioning the town in the likeness of the Master’s words.
But now I asked: Were the stories merely stories?
Winds rushed down from the upper reaches of the air and shook trees defiantly. The dreaded Windwalker instantly sprang to mind for I had seen victims of Ithaqua, lone travelers and animals taken by the fiend of the North Winds, their shattered and frozen bodies. Or was there another explanation?
I hurried through empty streets. I crossed the stone bridge that spanned the river which tradition had renamed Miskatonic. I heard gibbering and chattering sounds from under the bridge.
The river flowed into the Western Sea, where the Deep Ones dwelled and where, somewhere beyond sight, the House of Cthulhu had risen from the depths, when the stars were right. So the legends claimed, legends which derived from the Sacred Books under my care, legends which might be nothing more than legends.
The baying of a Hound sounded as from a great distance.
Leathern wings flapped above me.
The ground seemed to undulate beneath my faltering feet, as if the chambered Earth were being disturbed by the sinuous passage of some monstrous Burrower Beneath.
My tortured mind could withstand no more.
I ran.
The cold panic which seized me blotted out all but the dreadful terrors overtaking me. I blindly ran, yearning for the asylum of my protected home. Rhythmic sounds slapped wetly behind me. In my befuddled mind I saw batrachian horrors. Fervently and maniacally, I chanted the Names of Power and whispered charms in the guttural prehuman language of the Elder Times. I think I sang incoherently. I believe I went a little mad.
I had been foolish to doubt, because of a single blasphemous tome, the veracity of the Sacred Books!
No doubts remained.
The diary I had discovered that morning in the old chamber, hidden in the secret drawer of a centuries old desk, was obviously false. It was sacrilege. Nothing but lies!
Beneath Strange Stars Page 24
