THE TOWER OF ZHAAL
Cthulhu Armageddon, Vol. 2
By C. T. Phipps
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Meet the Author
C.T. Phipps is a lifelong student of horror, science fiction, and fantasy. An avid tabletop gamer, he discovered this passion led him to write and turned him into a lifelong geek. He is a regular blogger and also a reviewer for The Bookie Monster.
Bibliography
The Rules of Supervillainy (Supervillainy Saga #1)
The Games of Supervillainy (Supervillainy Saga #2)
The Secrets of Supervillainy (Supervillainy Saga #3)
The Kingdom of Supervillany (Supervillainy Saga #4)
Esoterrorism (Red Room, Vol. 1)
Eldritch Ops (Red Room, Vol. 2)
Agent G: Infiltrator
Cthulhu Armageddon (Cthulhu Armageddon, Vol. 1)
The Tower of Zhaal (Cthulhu Armageddon, Vol. 2)
Lucifer’s Star
Straight Outta Fangton
Wraith Knight
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THE TOWER OF ZHAAL
Table of Contents
Foreword
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Foreword
The Magnificent Seven versus Cthulhu. That was perhaps the best or worst idea for a book I’d had in years. It was, of course, one of the many ideas I’d pondered while thinking about whether I should write a sequel to Cthulhu Armageddon. Response was excellent to that not-so-eldritch tome about a cursed soldier and his companions versus the cosmic horrors of a post-apocalypse world. The question was whether I should write a sequel.
The best Lovecraftian fiction, except for maybe Titus Crow’s adventures, has all been standalone material. This is because most protagonists go insane, die, or become unimaginable horrors who are in no position to continue their journey down the Chthonian hole to the Nameless City.
Then I realized that Jessica, John, and Mercury’s story wasn’t quite done yet.
I also needed Cthulhu to show up.
When I last left them, John had just learned that he had something unmentionable in his lineage that was destined to turn him into a monster, Mercury had discovered a talent for witchcraft, and Jessica was trapped in a dream from which she might never wake up. It was suitable as a downer ending, but I wanted to know what happened next, and since I, the author, was interested, I decided I might as well share it with you. I ended up sketching out a veritable cornucopia of ideas related to the post-apocalypse mythos Weird West. I also wanted to write about those other anti-heroes and protagonists the world might have produced. As for Cthulhu showing up, that was more a specialized preference of mine. Old Bat Wings was a presence in Cthulhu Armageddon but never actually made an appearance. Instead, like Sauron in The Lord of the Rings, he just loomed as a figure symbolizing everything that had gone wrong on Earth.
Screw that.
I admit, part of my desire for the Dreamer in R’lyeh to show up spawned from the archetypal tabletop Call of Cthulhu campaign. In the Shadows of Yog-Sothoth, The Masks of Nyarlathotep, and a few others, preventing the rise of a Lovecraftian horror is the goal of the protagonists. It’s a classic task that has been duplicated by the Ghostbusters, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and the Justice League. I wanted to give that sort of quest to my characters and see how they dealt with it since H.P. Lovecraft himself had penned it as the basis for The Dunwich Horror (ironically, NOT, the literary Call of Cthulhu).
There was just one small problem. In the world of Cthulhu Armageddon, the Great Old Ones are already awake. That was sort of the premise of my world, that they’d gotten free and wrecked the place. What was my hypothetical Great Old One going to do? Burn the ashes? Knock over what few ruined skyscrapers remained?
But what if the cultists had a different reason for wanting to awaken the last of the sleeping Great Old Ones? What if that reason was a good one? To find out what that is, I give you The Tower of Zhaal. Cthulhu will show up in it.
Just don’t expect him on the first page.
Chapter One
The stars were not right. This fact was burned into the minds of every human being living on the ruin we called planet Earth. Once, the stars were white pinpricks of light against a black sky. They were comforting guides to astronomers, lovers, and sailors. The little dots of light hinted at vistas that humanity might one day visit. Those are not the stars of tonight’s world. The stars I’d grown up with, which hung above me this evening, were red, orange, and yellow burning orbs that pulsated and hummed with eldritch energies. Sometimes the night sky was black, other times white, and others still colors not meant for human eyes.
Billions of years ago, the alien gods known as the Great Old Ones descended from the sky to claim our still primordial world as their own. Entering an epoch-long hibernation, they and their servant races slept as the world evolved around them. A dozen sentient races lived
, and went extinct before the rise of humanity. In the Twenty-First century, the Great Old Ones had reclaimed the Earth and humanity was reduced to small tribes, scattered towns, and bandit gangs.
It was like the Old West Reborn, though I supposed it was a New East given we lived in the ruins of Massachusetts. Every year, it seemed humanity drifted closer and closer to extinction with no end in sight. The stars were the most visible sign of the Great Old Ones’ presence, altering the very fabric of the universe with as causal a thing as a thought. Was it possible to survive in such a place where light, which should not have reached our world from distant solar systems for millions of years, now changed every second? I couldn’t say. It was a heavy set of thoughts for a caravan guard.
“Booth?” a voice called at my side. I stared up into the endless void above me. We were lying on rocky Earth in dusty plains far to the north of the city we called our home.
“Yes, Mercury?”
Mercury Halsey was one of my few remaining comforts. A short flame-haired woman of mixed Japanese and Caucasian descent, she had a thin, angular face with skin just recently weather-beaten from the sun. Mercury was not the sort of person one expected to survive in the harshness of the Wasteland. Appearances could be deceiving, though, and in Mercury’s case she was silk hiding steel.
Though she looked like either a merchant or scholar, Mercury was the former chief torturer for the recently overthrown New Arkham government. As a scientist, she’d been made to use her knowledge of healing to torment instead. In the end, she’d revolted and fled with me into the Wasteland. We’d been traveling together for almost a year and had become lovers—a development expected by everyone but me.
Mercury lay on a sleep roll beside me, her small body tucked under the blankets. I took a moment to admire it and wish we weren’t currently celibate thanks to my “condition.” Behind us, there were beaten-down carts and composite cars made from a hundred different vehicles being used to haul freight and drive cattle from Kingsport to New Arkham.
Creatures the locals called horses, but were a wide variety of strange mutated animals of a quad or hexahedral nature, also rode as part of the caravan. Dozens of humans were asleep or standing watch around us, a mixture of workers and guards like myself. Mercury was the caravan’s medic. The two of us had been intent on changing the world, but we’d somehow ended up becoming traders instead.
“What are you thinking about?” Mercury asked. Though we were resting, she wore rough denim and goggles around her neck. Given the potential dangers of the Wasteland, we had to sleep lightly and wake instantly, ready for action at any given moment.
“The stars,” I admitted.
Mercury looked up. “Yeah, I suppose they are pretty tonight.”
I snorted. If there was one survival advantage evolution had granted humanity over the many Extra Biological Entities (or E.B.E.s, as the Remnant used to call them), it was the ability to normalize the inexplicable. Six-and-a-half billion humans had died in the Rising and the survivors had learned to share their world with all manner of strange creatures—many of which had lived beside us all along.
The surviving humans still hated the Deep Ones, ghouls, mutants, and Serpent Men of the world, but their existence no longer drove an otherwise rational man to madness. Even now, a century later, we were still scraping by with all the divisions that had existed before. The members of the Morgan Trading Company were more afraid of Dunwych tribals or human raiders than they were of monsters robbing them.
“The stars are beautiful,” I admitted, smiling. “I’ve been looking at them for hours.”
“Can’t sleep?”
“I don’t sleep much anymore. Sometimes I go for weeks at a time without rest.” I was speaking literally.
“Don’t let the others hear that,” Mercury whispered, looking over at my right arm. “They might take it the wrong way.”
“I’ll bear that in mind.”
I flexed my right hand, feeling the immense, terrible power within it. It was bound in bandages and cloth wrappings, long sleeves as well as gloves hiding its true nature. Arcane glyphs from the Necronomicon and Book of Eibon had been branded into my flesh while juju beads bought from Dunwych mystics were spun around the hideous black chitin that covered everything from my fingertips to my arm socket. On my right shoulder, spreading alien poison through my veins, was the Hand of Nyarlathotep. It was a scar in the shape of a human hand that often glowed with an ethereal white light.
The Hand of Nyarlathotep was a symbol of being “touched” by one of the Other Gods. I had only suspicions as to how I’d acquired it, but it now defined my life. Once, I thought the strange marking had been killing me, but time had revealed it portended a more insidious fate. I was becoming something other than human.
A stronger man would have taken his own life by now, but years of serving as a soldier had left me with a tenacious desire to live. The runes and beads kept the infection at bay, albeit poorly, and I’d gotten to live a few more months with my lover. Mercury could turn her attention away from the horror within me and love me regardless. Even so, she’d terminated her pregnancy last month lest she gave birth to a monster.
“How are the spells holding up?” Mercury asked, her voice uneasy.
“Not well,” I answered, more frustrated than scared now. “They slowed its progress in the beginning but I’m not sure they’re doing anything now.”
“We could try amputating it again.”
“No.”
“John—”
“It isn’t a matter of me not wanting to be a cripple. I tried cutting off my arm with the help of a tribal warrior during the trip through the Bloch Passage, but I awoke days later covered in blood and no idea how I got there. My arm had regrown and the amount of mutated flesh had doubled.” I didn’t tell Mercury that I’d awoken with blood in my mouth and a full stomach.
“I wondered what happened on that trip,” Mercury said, reaching over to place her hand on my shoulder. “I can judge the current rate of progression and give you a rough estimate if you want but—”
“How long do I have?”
Mercury touched my right and I shifted from her. Not only because it was my cursed one but also because of how her touch felt. It was electric and excited the dark alien parts of my brain that wanted to make her my mate in a way antithetical to human love.
“You have perhaps another two or three months until the change reaches your heart.” Mercury’s expertise with E.B.E.s and mutation had allowed me to get an accurate measurement of my condition. “After that, I don’t think it will stop. It will accelerate and consume your entire body. From there, you will no longer be John Henry Booth. You will be—”
“What?” I asked, daring her to say monster.
“I don’t know.” Mercury looked away.
I didn’t want to encourage her to try and cheer me up about my condition. There was too much scientist in her still. I felt like a specimen under her microscope some nights, a creature that might survive the end days yet carry some spark of humanity. Despite this, I loved her and tolerated her eccentricities. After all, Mercury was one of the few people I trusted enough to share my torn feelings with—just not all of them.
There was a part of me that I kept from her, a part of me, a repressed and hidden part that wanted to be changed. While I no longer slept much, I still dreamed. Azathoth, Azathoth, Azathoth. The relentless repeating of the Blind Idiot God’s name was a constant in the back of my mind now. Outside the ordered universe was an amorphous blight of nethermost confusion that blasphemed and bubbled at the center of all infinity.
Surrounding it was a court of nameless otherworldly priests, bards, and courtiers of descriptions that defied conventional reason. Their hideous chanting paid homage to the End of Everything and called to me to join them in an eternal dance of nightmarish joy. I wanted to join their revelry. To be free of this dead, dusty world of causal violence and hopeless nights so I could stop caring that every day seemed to bring us clo
ser to oblivion.
But then I wouldn’t love Mercury. I wouldn’t love anything at all. Not my daughters, my son, or my squad mates living and dead.
Monsters didn’t love.
Only humans did.
“So what are we going to do?” Mercury asked, perhaps sensing my increasing ambivalence. There were times I’d seen her stand over me, thinking I was asleep, perhaps contemplating ending my life as a form of mercy. Her hesitation made me happy, but I wasn’t sure if it was the right emotion to feel.
“I don’t know,” I said, taking a deep breath.
“We need to make a final decision before the decision is made for us. Assuming we haven’t made the decision already by waiting this long.”
“I know,” I said, the bitterness in my voice harsh and thick.
I looked over to the other caravan crew to make sure no one was listening. Those who weren’t asleep weren’t close enough to hear, a fact I found relieving. Mercury hadn’t been exaggerating about the mutant burnings. I’d seen hundreds of them killed over my four decades of life, mostly at my hands.
Was the alien blood in my veins polluting my mind? Were the visions warping my will? Would a rational, uncorrupted John Henry Booth have hesitated to kill himself if it meant saving the world from one more predator? I just didn’t know anymore.
“Will you remember me if you change?” Mercury asked. “Us? Anything?”
“Nothing could make me forget you,” I lied to her.
“I can’t kill you.” Mercury’s blue eyes blinked in the darkness. “I’ve wanted to at times, even prepared the instruments, but I can’t. I’m as addicted to you as you are to me.”
It would have been a shocking revelation coming from anyone but her. Mercury had planned for killing every member of this caravan, should they turn on us, when we’d taken this job—and all our previous employers. It was a quality I liked about her. I’d already lost friends to my impending metamorphosis. Jessica O’Reilly, a woman I’d grown up with, had turned on me and tried to kill me. I still found myself wondering if she hadn’t been the sane one among us some nights.
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