by Martha Wells
They laughed like carrion birds.
“So,” said Bohunk, “what you are, is totally and completely fucked.”
-11-
“But why?” I demanded, taking two more backward steps. I was almost hard up against the altar. Not the place I’d prefer to be, but the Nightgaunts had spread out to form a wide ring around me. “What do you want?”
“Here’s the thing about being part of the supernatural side of the universe,” said Bohunk. “Rituals. There’s all these goddamn rituals. Everything has to be complicated. Cthulhu, Nodens and all of those gods, man oh man do they have a hard-on for rituals. And, hey, it’s not like the Jews and Catholics and Scientologists and everyone else doesn’t get into the act, too. Everyone likes to make things complicated. No one can just believe and let it go. My people, the ogres? We got our thing, too. We can’t eat anyone who’s not an enemy. It’s stupid, but if we do it’s like having irritable bowel syndrome. I shit razor blades for a week.”
I said nothing because, really, what do you say to an ogre who’s complaining about problems with his colon?
“So, to understand the nature of the ritual you’re tied up in,” he continued, “you got to understand who the Nightgaunts are and what they do. Their whole shtick is protecting that mountain, Ngranek, on the isle of Oriab. Travelers from all kinds of worlds, including some unlucky cocksuckers from our world, keep trying to go there. Don’t ask why. Something to do with the living heart of their god and the sixteen sacred toadstools or some such shit. I don’t know. Every time they try to explain it, I just tune them out.”
“Mr. Bohunk, please,” said Boots. And that was weird because he no longer had a mouth. But I’d already given up trying to make sense of today. That ship sailed, caught fire, hit an iceberg and sank.
“Okay, okay,” said Bohunk. “Long story short, it’s important for there to be a doorway—something about the energetic lifeblood of the universe—but it’s supposed to be shut except under certain circumstances.”
“Like the planetary convergence?” I suggested.
“Like that. Only Bootsie lied to you. It’s during that convergence that the doorway can be shut. Or, shut properly, I guess.”
Boots nodded his confirmation of this.
“The Thule dickheads managed to get it open,” continued Bohunk. “Me and my boys were around and we fucked them up but good. They were delicious, too. We had a pig roast and my boy Denny made this barbecue sauce that—”
“Mr. Bohunk!” snapped Boots, his patience wearing thin.
“Right, right. Anyway, as far as the doorway, it was damage done. Fucking thing’s stuck open. And all sorts of things getting into the Dreamlands.”
I frowned and turned to look at the vault. “I don’t—”
“No, the doorway is—whaddya call it, Bootsie?”
“Pan-dimensional,” supplied the Nightgaunt. “Once open on this plane it opens on all planes. We have not been able to break the Thule spells. They used very powerful black magic. And that has forced us to use a dangerous and ancient spell. One that requires the willing sacrifice of a great champion of pure heart and great courage.”
“Which,” said Bohunk, giving me a big stage wink, “brings us to you.”
I said, “Um… willing? Sacrifice? Champion?”
“Yeah,” said Bohunk. “Bootsie tells me you took the job. Guess that’s obvious ’cause you’re here.”
“Pure heart?”
“Well, there’s always wiggle room,” said Bohunk, and the Nightgaunts tittered.
“No, let’s go back to the willing part. I agreed to a job, I never agreed to sacrifice anything.”
“You did,” said Boots. “You gave your word and you sealed the bargain with your own blood. There is no greater bond in this or any world. It is a blood bargain.”
“Bullshit. You guys can take your bargain and your bag of tricks and shove them up your asses. Provided you have asses.”
“They don’t, actually,” said Bohunk. “Weird, I know. And kind of disgusting. My point is that you are screwed, Hunter. Your blood is on the vault door, and the door is the relic. So… sucks to be you.”
“And I’m just supposed to stretch out on the altar and let you cut my throat?”
Boots said, “No, Mr. Hunter, we expected you to fight us. You are, after all, a champion. And because you have a certain reputation for ferocity. Because you are a lycanthrope your blood and your soul energy will help us seal the doorway across all of the infinite worlds. You have a magnificent soul and it shines like a sun for those who can see it. All of that energy, that purity of purpose, that honesty and integrity, the ferocity that has earned you the reputation for being a true champion for the helpless, for the innocent… my oh my, that is a degree of spiritual force greater than anything we have used in ten thousand millennia. It is an honor to accept your sacrifice. You humble us.”
“You,” I said, “can go fuck yourself. I quit.”
“You can’t,” he said, sounding almost sorry. “You gave your word.”
“My word doesn’t mean shit,” I lied.
“You shed your blood to seal the deal.”
“I cut my finger on a splinter. Which, by the way, was a cheap shot and a sneaky piece of bullshit.”
“Nevertheless, a deal is a deal, and any deal made here on the altar is sealed across all of time and space.”
“Save the Doctor Who bullcrap for someone who gives a rat’s hairy balls.”
“Ah, I’m so sorry you feel this way,” said Boots. “But it is to be expected. It is a rare thing indeed for a person’s soul force to be in alignment with their outer personality. But, no matter, we will help you live up to your agreement. We have asked Mr. Bohunk to assist us in completing the final part of the ritual.”
“He can try.”
“Oh, it’s a done deal,” Bohunk assured me, and all the Nightgaunts nodded. Their wings fluttered and creaked like leather. “And, for the record, sport, it’s more than just you getting your throat cut. Nah. We got to cut your eyes out, cut your balls off. The more pain you’re in, the more you suffer, the more noble your sacrifice is. That’s bigger energy. Sucks for you but great for what Bootsie and his crew need. Great for the universe, I suppose.”
“You’re going to cut me up?” I said, feeling the blood drain from my face.
“Sure. There’s a whole lot of cutting on today’s program, and because you’re a werewolf you’ll actually live through almost all of it. Sucks, but there it is. We got silver chains, though, so…” He let it hang.
I glanced at the iron rings on the altar.
It was all there. Twelve Nightgaunts and one ogre. And me. Medium-sized guy who could become a medium-sized wolf.
As odds go, mine blew.
-12-
“You’re going to have to earn it,” I said, putting a little bit of the wolf’s growl in my voice.
Israel Bohunk contrived not to faint from terror. “Yeah,” he said, “that’s why I’m here. You know, ogre and all.”
“Never fought an ogre,” I said, putting my hands in my pockets and trying to look like I was calm, cool and collected. “Didn’t even believe in them until five minutes ago.”
“Life’s full of surprises,” he said.
“Yes it is. You ever fight a werewolf before?” I asked.
“Nope, but I heard you guys taste great.”
He laughed, I smiled. My heart was racing.
I asked, “You’re not afraid I might cut your balls off?”
“Not really. My skin’s as hard as granite. You’d break your little doggy nails. Sorry, sport, but this is how it ends.”
“I didn’t know ogres were that tough. Claw proof? Knife proof, too?”
“Sure. Bullets, too. They just bounce off. Not that it matters to you,” he said. “From what I heard you don’t even carry a gun.”
“I’m thinking of taking it up,” I told him.
And I drew the stolen .32 and shot him in his left eye.
-13-
Here’s the thing…
I don’t care how tough you are or how strong you are. I don’t care if your skin is made of rocks or you’re wearing a suit of armor. That’s all well and good but I’ve found that a bullet in the brainpan will do ’er for just about everyone.
And eyes? Go on and tell me what kind of creature, natural or supernatural, has bulletproof eyes. You want to know how many?
Not one.
Not one fucking thing on earth or in any dimension you care to name.
The bullet punched through Bohunk’s eye but it couldn’t break through whatever the hell his skull was made of. So, instead, it bounced all over inside his skull and turned his brain to Swiss cheese.
Boo-fucking-hoo.
Bohunk fell backward against one of the Nightgaunts and dragged him down. The rest of them, including Oliver Boots, stood there and stared at their hired muscle. Blood leaked like tears from the burst eyeball.
Then Boots looked at me. Or… turned his face to me. Without his disguise he didn’t have eyes. Or a mouth. Or anything.
I shot him in the face. Three times.
As it turns out, Nightgaunts aren’t bulletproof at all. Not even a little bit.
The bullets blew out the back of his skull and splattered the creatures behind him. One of the bullets clipped the top of another Nightgaunt’s head and blew a quarter pound of brains across the floor.
By then the others were beginning to shake off their shock.
They came at me, tearing the air with their claws, their barbed tails whipping, wings lifting them so they could dive-bomb me.
I emptied the .32 and then let it drop because the hand holding it was no longer shaped for that sort of thing. No proper trigger finger, no opposable thumb. Just claws and fur.
Distantly, as if off to one side of my mind, I could hear my clothes rip as my body changed. There was pain and there was blood. There always is. But there was also a lot of rage.
No. Let’s call it by the right word.
There was hate.
Pure animal hate.
They came at me and tried to kill Sam Hunter the man. They tried to complete their sacrifice. To tear me apart. To use me, body and soul, to close the door. They tried to rip me apart and use me. They tried to destroy the man who had accepted the role of their champion.
But that man was gone.
Now it was only the wolf.
And, my oh my, the wolf was pissed.
-14-
As it turns out, Nightgaunts taste pretty good.
Like chicken.
Nightgaunts
The land of dreams is no less essential to us than our waking landscape. We wander through both worlds confused, uncertain, fearful, distracted by glittering prizes, allured by false hopes, led astray by vanity and arrogance. In dreams we see, hear, touch, smell, taste, speak and remember, just as we do while awake. One third of our lives is given over to sleep, and much of that time is spent in dreams. How could something that occupies so much of our thought and emotion be unimportant?
The creatures of dreams are as real to us as the beasts in the field, the birds in the trees, the fish in the sea. They give us joy. They cause us sorrow. And if they choose, they end our lives. For those who die in dreams also die in the flesh. Just as there are no beauties so fine as the beauties of a dream, there are no horrors so keen as those that inhabit our nightmares.
One such species of horror is known as the nightgaunt due to its extreme thinness. It is so thin that it appears to be cut from a length of black cloth that gives back no reflection. The body of the nightgaunt shows itself only as a winged outline of shadow with inward-curved horns, a forked tail, clawed fingers, and blank faces that have no features.
The creatures do not speak or make any sound. They delight in causing fear and come to those who slumber in large flocks on their leathern wings, chiefly to young children or even infants soon after they fall asleep. Night after night they come to terrify the young child, and thereby reap the greatest bounty of terror, for the anticipation of the coming fear magnifies its force.
Some sages assert that they are nourished by blood, but how can this be when they have no mouths? No, the nightgaunts are sustained by the emotion of fear, which is the strongest and purest of human emotions. The children so afflicted abhor sleep and do their best to stay awake, but it is the nature of the very young to sleep in spite of themselves, and when their heavy eyelids close at last, the nightgaunts come.
Their thinness allows them to slip through the smallest crack at the window frame or beneath a door. They enter the chamber of the sleeping child in their numbers, as many as two score of them at a time, and snatch the child from his bed, stifling his screams with their paws. They grab him by the flesh of the belly, and their fingers produce a strange sensation that subdues the child’s resistance. It is both a tickling and a crawling, as though worms squirmed in the child’s flesh.
The black skins of the nightgaunts have a revolting smooth texture to the touch that is like the slickness on the belly of a frog. With their long clawed fingers they lift the child high above their heads and carry him out the opened window and into the starry night air, bearing the child high into the heavens on their silent, bat-like black wings. These abductions they accomplish with such skill and stealth that the mothers never wake.
Far above the distant mountains in the land of Thok they carry him. To magnify the terror of the child, that is both their joy and nourishment, the nightgaunts toss him back and forth between them through the whistling, star-shot darkness. They pretend to drop him and then catch him up at the last instant. Around and around the flying flock, from one to the next they throw the screaming child, who is too high above the ground for any below to hear his cries.
At last, after they have extracted the full amount of his terror, and the child is exhausted, they let him fall from their grasp. For miles he tumbles down through the starry blackness, the sharp peaks of the mountains below looming ever nearer. The child knows with certainty that should he fail to wake before he strikes those peaks, he will surely die, and usually he is able to wake himself in time.
It is not the purpose of the nightgaunts to kill, but to terrify. They know that most children will wake before they strike the ground. But sometimes it happens that a child does not wake up, and then he is found in his bed in the morning by his mother, cold and still and dead. Such inexplicable deaths of young children in their beds are not uncommon, but the cause of death is seldom guessed.
It is said that the nightgaunts worship hoary Nodens, an ancient god about whom little is known. It may be that this god rules over dreamless sleep. Nodens is titled Lord of the Abyss and it is whispered of this primal being that he defies the power of the old ones, even that of Nyarlathotep.
The nightgaunts dwell in the Dreamlands, and make their dens in caves near the mountain Ngranek. They can only intrude on the waking world at the margin between sleep and wakefulness, when we lie half in one world and half in the other. At these times they may sometimes be glimpsed in the gloom with our open eyes.
The fear they inspire at these moments is intense, for that is the fundamental aspect of their nature. No man, regardless of his courage, can look upon them unmoved by fear. They exist to terrify. They embody nightmare. They are the tormentors of our childhood, and they are always with us even when we cease to be aware of them in our dreams.
In the Mad Mountains
Joe R. Lansdale
Slept, awoke, slept, awoke, miserable life.
—Franz Kafka
Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.
—Philip K. Dick
The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear. And the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.
—H.P. Lovecraft
The moon was bright. The sea was black. The waves rolled and the bodies rolled with it. The dead ones and the live ones, screaming and dying, begging
and pleading, praying and crying to the unconcerned sea.
Behind them the great ship tipped up as if to give a final display of its former magnificence, its bow parting the night-waters like a knife through chocolate, pointing its stern to the sky, slipping slowly beneath the cold waves, breaking in half as it rode down into the bottomless sea. Boilers hissed, and the steam coughed up a great white cloud. The cloud pinned itself against the moon-bright sky, then faded like a fleeting dream.
The lifeboats bobbed and the survivors in the water swam for them, called to them. One of the boats, Number Three, stuffed full of human misery and taking on water, tried to rescue more survivors, and when it did it tipped, ejected two of its riders, then righted itself again. A man in nightclothes, and a woman wearing a fur coat, fell out. The coat took on water, grew heavy, and dragged her down. A shark rose up close to the boat with its mouth wide open, its teeth gleaming as if polished by rags. Its eyes rolled back in ecstasy, and then the man was in its jaws. The shark’s teeth snapped together and blood blew wide and into the boat, along with a soft bed slipper. The shark took half of the man down under, the other half of him bobbed, and then another shark drove up from below and bit the other half, carried it down and away into Davy Jones’ Locker.
Those that had swam for it, those remaining near Lifeboat Number Three, were taken by the sharks. The water grew thick with fins and an oily film of blood, the sounds of cries cut short. Then a wave caught Lifeboat Number Three and those still in it, pushed it forward, leaving the other lifeboats and the struggling swimmers near them far behind, bobbing like fishing corks.
There was a great strike of lightning in the distance, splitting what had been a clear sky with an electric crack of fire. When it flashed, those in Lifeboat Number Three saw a great iceberg, a cold but beaconing mass; something solid, waiting in the distance, lying jagged and white against the tumbling sea. Far beyond was an irregular rise of what appeared to be mountains. Out of the formerly clear night sky came a dark cloud, wide and thick as all creation. It sacked the moon. For the occupants in Lifeboat Number Three there was a sensation of being wrapped in black cotton.
