by Martha Wells
“I’ll die, yes.” Jacoby took a deep breath. “But if he’s wrong we’re losing what is perhaps the most important discovery in human history.” He knew exactly what to say to bring home his point. “And this way, if nothing happens, you can send someone back to tow the ship in.”
Harrington pondered for a moment, drew a deep breath, and then departed. Jacoby never saw him again.
For two nights there was nothing. With the rest of the crew gone, Jacoby spent his time studying the stone figures and looking over his notes. He lamented the loss of all the translations that the archaeologists from Miskatonic had documented and the lack of whatever knowledge or equipment must be required to open or communicate with whatever consciousness resided within the cylinder.
One by one he lugged them up to the deck, wanting to breathe in the open. Wanting the signal to be clear.
When the Northern Lights shone, he found a new and wondrous gift. The cylinder was of a metal he could not identify and when he touched it his senses seemed sharper than before. Contact with that odd metal made his fingers tingle, but it also altered his perceptions. Colors were different. He could see an energy that moved through the ship, stirred by breezes he could not feel, but painting every surface in the boat itself. This, he suspected, was the “taint” of which Ivers had spoken. He could even see it within his own flesh, moving, seeping deeper and deeper into his very essence.
The chest, the stones, even the cylinder itself all looked different when the lights above and the metal he touched worked their influences together. The stone figures were so much larger than they first appeared. He studied them the longest, caressing their surfaces, tracing the carved lines, first while holding the cylinder in his free hand, and then without it. When seen with his special sight they were several times larger and they vibrated, humming and moving, much of their substance hidden from the world by a differing frequency. Colors that could not be seen by the naked eye or felt by the unsuspecting flesh were there to be explored, dazzling in their complexities.
When his hands left the cylinder the world was once more a bleak and dismal place. Whatever the metal of the cylinder, he found its influence extraordinary. Looking at the stars while touching it let him see the same magnificent spectrum of forms he knew in his dreams, though they were made faint and weakened by distance. The presence of the cylinder kept him warm, so that the Arctic wind could not harm him. He felt the cold, but his body felt heated from within.
When he slept, which was quite often, he dreamed of the creatures he’d seen before, their iridescent shells gleaming and their magnificent wings unfurling, spanning impossible space.
In one of his dreams a voice whispered softly, “Not all can fly between the stars. Those who are here seek out other ways to bring their brethren to them. There are places where tunnels have been carved through the fabric of the universe.”
On that occasion he awoke to find that he had rested his head against the cylinder in his fitful sleep.
At the end of the third day, as the sun was setting, the storms came in and shook the Burleson the way a dog shakes a favored toy. Jacoby lay across the cylinder and the stones to make certain they would not be swept overboard. He held on to the base of a funnel and prayed he would not get sick again. What little he’d consumed, mostly broth and canned fruit, had stayed inside him for a change and he didn’t know that he would survive another bout of nausea.
And he had to survive. He had to be here when they arrived.
As a young man he had been dedicated to his faith in Christ, and in the Christian god. The war had ended that for him, but now, oddly, he began to have a new hope, a new belief. Was it possible that men had misinterpreted what they had seen in the past? Was it possible that the angels he had heard so much about as a child might be something different? The creatures in his dreams did not look like the angels his parents and pastor had spoken of, but they came from the heavens and took a few fortunate souls with them from time to time.
Was it possible?
There was only one way to know.
The Mi-Go arrived with the quieting of the storm. As the wind died down, he detected a great humming noise, like a hornet buzzing past his ear, but so much greater in volume that he felt the sound in his chest and behind his eyes.
Was there fear in his heart at the sound? Yes, but also a thrill that ran through him, body and mind alike. Body and soul.
“Are you there?” he cried. “Are you real?”
He received no answer. Jacoby called out several times, searching the night-darkened deck before he finally saw movement.
They appeared to him in stages. Perhaps his mind would not allow more, perhaps they emerged from one of the tunnels in the cosmos that the voice had spoken of in his dreams. The shapes were larger than he expected, half hidden in the gloom of the dying storm and revealed best by the now-distant strobes of lightning, moving off.
The warmth surged inside of him, drying the freezing rain on his skin. The frost on the deck melted beneath his feet. He stood and gazed at them, enrapt, and he listened.
The sounds were closer, but softer now and Jacoby saw the closest of the
angels!
Mi-Go from behind as it looked down upon the chest that was not ivory, and upon the contents it had held, which were on display, there on the deck of the ship. One angel’s limb became clear to his eyes. As it moved, other parts swam into focus, as if only certain facets of the thing existed in the world of his human senses at any one time. It shifted again and he saw that limb. The gray, multi-jointed appendage ended in three small claws, which held open the lid of the chest.
It shifted again, and his mind vaulted, trying to contain an inner scream of denial. Though the Mi-Go was real and present, it did not match the beauty of the beast he had seen in his dreams. This nightmare was malformed, with truncated wings that flapped softly as it compensated for the waves that still rocked the ship. The grace and beauty he had seen were gone, replaced by a loathsome shape, some kind of man-sized crustacean with thick, ungainly legs and a series of long, curving barbs that jutted from the sides of its abdomen. Six legs, each ending in a claw, save the two at the front that ended in heavy pincers capable of cutting a man in half.
It released the lid of the chest, turning to look again upon the treasures that had been drawn from it.
“No!” Jacoby cried, and he dove toward them.
Did he reach for that cylinder, desperate for a weapon, or simply to deprive this disappointing, faded angel of its prize? Jacoby did not know. But the moment he touched the cylinder, he realized his error. His senses opened up and he saw, once more, the iridescent glory he had seen in his dreams.
How could he have doubted?
Surely the eyes of mere mortals were not enough. With the cylinder’s influence his vision was clearer. The carapace was more graceful when seen properly and the blunt wings that he’d seen fluttering were far greater, moving with soft ripples and causing an undulation in the unusual energies he only saw when he was in contact with his prize.
Jacoby saw them all, then. Touching the cylinder, he saw how many of the Mi-Go were with him. Though he should have been terrified, he rejoiced.
“I think I have waited all of my life to see you. To know you.”
He spoke aloud, though barely aware of the fact.
The closest of the Mi-Go spoke back, perhaps only in his mind. It asked him to explain himself… his presence. The voice echoed within him, a symphony of noises made by the wings that only existed in the aether. He suspected that if he let go of his prize he would have heard only more of the horrific buzzing noises. He dared not let go, just in case the effect faded and was lost forever.
“I know you are leaving here. I know you came for the stones, for your history, and perhaps for this.” He rubbed his hand over the surface of the cylinder. “But please, please take me with you. I need to know, you see. I need to understand the world out there, among the stars.”
The Mi-Go nearest
him—the first he had seen—turned to look at him more closely. The different antennae and slithering tendrils that covered its head shifted and studied him slowly, absorbing the details of him. The massive claws clicked and clattered softly as it observed him.
The voice was still distorted, but Jacoby listened through the unsettling reverberations and focused as intently as he ever had.
We cannot carry you easily, the voice said. There is no way to know if you would survive without the protection of the cylinder. We are made to breathe between the stars and you are not.
“It doesn’t matter,” he said. “I’m dying already. I can feel that. Please, take me with you. Let me see as you see, if only for a moment.”
The Mi-Go made noises that he could not decipher and the others, the ones that had already gathered up the stone carvings and returned them to the chest, responded.
They agreed.
Jacoby exulted, his heart full of a joy he had never known possible.
The nightmares he’d seen would surely never have been able to fly with the malformed, stunted wings on their gray backs, but the Mi-Go, the vibrant, vital
angels
creatures before him with their vast wings moving through the aether and beyond, were a different story.
He closed his eyes and felt those iridescent claws latch onto him, surround and embrace him. The wings of the Mi-Go sang and the one who had spoken rose softly from the ship and took him with it, lifted him through the barriers of the mortal world.
The clouds were alive. They hummed with their own song and that sonata joined briefly with the rapturous sound of angel wings. Above him the Northern Lights painted the skies and the universe itself, stretching so much farther than he’d ever imagined. Those lights, those magnificent shifting colors so far beyond the human spectrum, extended into the depths of eternity.
Jacoby wept. The cold that he had thought he would never feel again returned and grew worse. The ice that formed on his skin should have had him screaming in agony but it didn’t hurt, not really.
Nor would it ever.
He was in the presence of angels.
The Mi-Go
Countless ages ago, before mankind arose from the mire, an alien warrior race came from the most distant reaches of the stars to settle themselves on the outermost world of the planetary spheres. This world is so distant, it cannot be seen in the night sky, but it exists midway between the sphere of Saturn and the sphere of the fixed stars. For know this—there are other crystalline spheres beyond that of Saturn, but because of their vast remoteness, our eyes are not keen enough to perceive them.
In appearance these creatures are monstrous and bear scant resemblance to any living thing on this terrestrial globe, unless it be the lobster, for they possess great claws on their hands and feet that cause terrible injuries to those they attack, but also other pairs of limbs more subtle for holding and carrying objects. Their wings are small and droop like wilted leaves. Countless feelers cover the ringed segments of their oblong heads. A kind of gray fungus grows over the hard shells of their bodies and gives them a whitish appearance in the moonlight, for they never show themselves beneath the rays of the sun.
This warrior race flourished upon the world they chose to call Yuggoth long before the creation of man, and there it would probably have remained, but that frozen globe was deficient in a mineral necessary to their survival, so they flew on their wings through the cold and darkness between the planets to our earth, which has this mineral in abundance. Here, they began to dig their mines.
The Elder Things, who already inhabited this world, contested the presence of these warriors. After long ages of constant war, the Mi-Go were driven off and returned to their own world. But they left behind small groups of their scientists, who hid themselves where their mines were dug, in remote ranges of hills or mountains.
The race of mankind was shaped by the Elder Things as a cosmic joke and acquired its wisdom as the ages passed, and all the while the spies of this warrior race from Yuggoth watched and recorded our progress. They are still here, watching us and waiting for the return of their armies.
In the mountains that rise far to the east of Asia Minor they are sometimes seen as they cross the snows. The men of the mountains call these creatures the Mi-Go in their own language. Their misshapen shapes make them seem hulking and clumsy beings, but this is an illusion, for they can move with swiftness when required to do so. The footprints they leave behind in the snow are strangely elongated.
So alien are these beings to our region of the cosmos that when they die from some violent mishap such as a fall from a high place, their bodies quickly decompose and melt into the air like ice beneath the sun. It is for this reason that no corpses of these creatures have ever been displayed, and why their very existence is no more than a legend whispered in the remote wild regions of the world.
It is said that these creatures worship Yog-Sothoth, Shub-Niggurath, and Nyarlathotep as their gods, and they hold sacred certain signs that appear on the moon of Yuggoth as it is viewed from their world. In the sciences they are unmatched in wisdom, except by the Great Race of Yith that can span time and has access to all the knowledge of eternity. They are especially expert in surgery and in their manipulations of the bodies of living things.
One matter is agreed upon by the chroniclers who write of these beings—the Mi-Go are unsurpassed in the pursuit of war, and in the making of terrible weapons of destruction. Should the armies of the Mi-Go return to this earthly sphere, the puny armies of men could not stand against them, but would be swept away as a child sweeps away its toys when it is bored of play. Mankind would become the slaves of this race, for they regard us as no more than beasts of burden to be used for their benefit.
All down the ages, small enclaves of the Mi-Go have hidden among us and marked our progress in the arts and sciences. They are able to disguise themselves so that they can walk among us. They also make pacts with certain men, who supply them with what they need and act as their covert agents. In this way, nothing we do remains hidden from their scrutiny, and no man is beyond their reach should they decide he poses a threat to their concealment. Those they cannot subvert with gold, they assassinate. So it has been from the dawn of human history, and so it will remain until the armies of the Mi-Go return from Yuggoth to conquer our world.
Dream a Little Dream of Me
A Sam Hunter Adventure
Jonathan Maberry
-1-
Some people are weird and some are so weird they abuse the privilege.
This guy was a classic example.
Oliver Boots was the kind of person they invented the word ‘geek’ for. Nearly seven feet tall but I doubted he weighed two hundred pounds. With narrow shoulders and narrower hips that made him look like a regular-sized person who’d been pulled on until he was all stretched out. Long, lugubrious face, huge brown eyes, and a beaky nose. Nothing about him was balanced. His nostrils were too big and his eyes too wide-set. Swollen lower lip beneath an almost nonexistent upper one. Lots of gums, tiny teeth. Hair that did not seem to understand the logic of the whole combing process, mostly black but streaked with brown. His complexion was strange. I know a lot of black guys, and I’ve seen every shade of skin from pale like Larry Wilmore to a true African skin tone that’s so dark brown it really does look black. This guy was blacker than that. Funny thing is, I wasn’t at all convinced he was African or even of African descent. He looked painted or dyed. Like some old Vaudeville guy wearing blackface. Talk about off-putting. I almost dismissed him as one of those fruitcakes who wants to be black but isn’t and goes about it the wrong way.
The more I looked at him, the less I thought that was the case.
I have a really good sense of smell. Better than yours unless you’re like me. I can smell makeup and most of the time I can name the brand. Cover Girl doesn’t, for example, smell anything like Maybelline. When a client comes in I let my senses tell me as much or sometimes more than the person
says about themselves. But I couldn’t smell makeup. I could smell skin and blood. And I could tell you that he used tea-tree oil shampoo and Camay soap and had just a hint of Polo Blue spritzed on. I could smell salmon almondine on his breath and the gin brand from his last martini. Boodles. Very nice. What I could not smell, however, was the dye he used to turn his skin black. Not dark brown. Black.
Like I said, this guy was rocking the weird thing way over to the edge.
Understand, I’m not the kind of social misfit who usually stares at people—unless they’re Claire over at Nick’s Taproom, because you have to stare at Claire. I mean, c’mon!—but it was hard as hell not to gawp at Mr. Boots.
Even that. Boots. What kind of last name is that? It’s a noun.
When he came into my office he had to duck under the doorframe. And after I waved him to a chair he sat down in a way that reminded me of one of those wooden clothes hanger things that someone folded wrong.
Even without the fraudulent black skin, tell me you wouldn’t stare.
So, yeah, I stared. A bit.
He gave me the kind of look that said he was used to it, accepted it as a matter of course, and was waiting for the point where we got past it so we could get down to business. He had a neat trick for refocusing my attention, too. He placed a brown leather briefcase on the corner of my desk, popped the locks, positioned it so that when he opened it I couldn’t see what was inside, and removed a yellow interoffice mail envelope that was intriguingly thick. He then placed this on the blotter at an exact distance between us. It drew my gaze from his Black-Hole-of-Calcutta nostrils and brought me to point like a hunting dog.
“Ten thousand dollars,” he said.
“Hello,” I said.
“Twenties, fifties and hundreds.”
“Three of my favorite flavors.”
