by J K Ishaya
"The features you are describing…” Howard's gaze moves uneasily to Kvasir. "Except for the black in the eyes, it sounds like you. “
"Yes,” Kvasir says. “He was one of my kind, at least partially, and something equally as transformed as Mr. Corvinus, only in a much different way."
"Nyarlathotep," I say, recapturing Howard's attention.
A muteness falls on the room, and even the little clock seems to tick sparingly.
"Nyar—” he mouths the rest of the name. "Sounds dreadful."
"You have no idea," I say. "So there I stood, discovering on my own something Malorix had not had any time to warn me about: that I was not as invincible as I thought, that I could be trapped with certain geometric and occult symbols, and this being knew what those devices were and how to use them. He spoke then, and his voice held a weird sort of overlap, like two voices with one speaking something else in a whisper, another overlapping in perfect Dacian that I understood. There was a silkiness to it, seductive and soothing to the ear.
"'I knew if I waited in the right place, you would return,' he said and gestured dismissively at Bielis' slumped form with its back opened up. ‘This unfortunate one was the ideal bait.'
"Then the cloaked figure stepped within the phosphorescent circle and examined me as I stood trembling, fighting the hold on me. A small smile played along his generous mouth as he ran a hand down the front of my arm over muscle and cord, all the way to my hand where he lifted one of my talons with the edge of his finger and the smile deepened. 'Malorix has brought me new potential.'
"To hear my maker's name jarred me, yet I still had no idea where it fit into all of this. Had he betrayed me, turned me over to this other dark being? Was this the god of our kind, the demon to whom I'd sworn myself when I renounced Zalmoxis?
"'Another warrior,' he said. 'And what is your story?' In a swift motion his hand rose and clamped the palm over my forehead as he stared me down and I couldn't take my eyes off of that damned glowing scarab jewel. A burst of agony swelled in my head and burned like a buried flame, and I could only gape and issue low, almost mewling whimpers, and then memories began to rush through me, one after the other, from the most immediate going backward in time. The recent, of course, were the most painful from my transformation back to Decebal's head on that platter, my capture, escaping Sarmizegetusa, the tower house burning.
"But then from before that came a rush of happier times, and I felt my eyes burn with tears and the red in them washed out and I felt for an instant as if I were a simple human man again, a warrior with a crooked back. There was Breslin giggling one moment and the next crying over her torn doll that only her mother could cure, Tsinna demanding my attention as he worked through his fighting stances, Bendis and me on our wedding day, and it kept going, ripping out every cherished moment back to my youth, to when my father had taught me to cope with my human deformity and first shown me my mother's grave and told me how I'd been found as an infant crying in the night. Then past that and back to when I dreamed of the steps and the last time I'd gazed at them with the hope of descending, before the winged black creature—which I now knew to be Malorix—appeared and terrified me with its slick, inky tentaculate protrusions that restrained me.
"Still, it did not stop, but beyond that memory, all grew hazier as he delved past when I was five into years so early I could not consciously recall them, until I heard what could only be my very first experiences, but I could see nothing. My eyes felt gummy and sealed shut but I could hear an infant screaming, and my entire body felt chilled, and I faintly heard my father's distant voice speaking, 'Who do you think she could be?'
“’Look at her clothing, she's some kind of nobility.’ This was my uncle Diegis, dead for years, but I recognized his voice. My consciousness, even in such a time of cerebral rape wanted to examine what I was hearing over that screaming baby, which was me.
“’Look at those eyes.’ This was Decebal again. 'Like steel and sapphire. So beautiful.’
“Then beyond those vague, dark memories of post birth terror and cold, something else loomed, but it seemed as beyond Nyarlathotep’s reach as much as mine. I recall a sense of being under water, perhaps a memory of the womb itself, and the sound of a distant voice shouting. A harsh, male voice. Then it was gone.
"All of this backward journey reversed, now ripping me forward in time and back through each recollection at sickening speed until I all but jolted as I realigned with my physical body and felt a lurch. A small vomit of blood came up in my mouth and spewed out, but my captor did not seem to mind when it sprayed on the front of his cloak and his sculpted chin.
"'Interesting,' he commented. 'Malorix clearly meant to keep you from me,' he said with a certain tone of satisfaction. I was dizzy, sick, but I understood this meant that Malorix had not betrayed me. 'He never spoke to you of your true potential, did he? He never intended to. He only hoped to abscond you away from here. From meeeee.’
"I only stood quivering, all of my monstrous accoutrements withdrawn. Talons and fangs retracted, the red serpent in my eyes replaced with dread. I was reduced back to human form without intending it.
"He swept back his cloak with his other hand and I saw a gleam of steel as a sword was withdrawn. It was exotic to me, neither gladius nor falx, the blade straight and etched with foreign characters down the center. 'Let me show you your potential, Zyraxes.'
"I may have managed to open my mouth, but no scream came out. I saw flame light reflect on the blade as it rose from his side and then made a horizontal arc through the air, swinging directly at my neck, and then my head came free of my body."
Chapter Twelve
Howard immediately stands to pace, a visible shake in his hands as he raises one to scratch his head while the other rubs absently at his mouth. To fathom my claims is nothing simple. How could such a thing happen and I still live? he wonders. And the name: Nyarlathotep. I know he’s heard it. When the night-gaunts snatched him from his bed and into the dream realm as a child, he heard this name whispered on the winds there as he was tossed about like a toy. And like me in my childhood, after the encounter with the leather-winged, black-skinned creature and its grabbing tendrils, he has chosen to suppress those experiences and that name. Kvasir and I watch and wait for his nerves to settle down again.
“I think now it is I who need air, gentlemen,” he says. He wants to go outside but I glance at Kvasir and give a quick head shake.
Not possible.
“I have an idea,” Kvasir proposes. “Let’s move into the parlor, shall we? Mr. Corvinus and I would be happy to help you relocate your mother to the comfort of her own bed chamber.”
That suggestion is slow to register with him, but after a moment Howard nods. “Yes, that would be good. It will be more comfortable in there.”
I suggest, mind to mind, that Kvasir be the one to lift Susan Lovecraft from the sofa and carry her, for I do not want to transfer the drying gore from my shirt to her dress. They head down the short hallway and into the room in question ahead of me. I listen to Howard bumble around, hovering to keep an eye on his mother while Kvasir transports her effortlessly and gently in his arms into the first room in the corridor. Howard follows with an oil lamp. I hear the lamp’s glass base clunk as it’s set down on a side table and covers rustle on the bed.
“It’s cold in here,” Howard says, his voice edged with a tremble. “Let me build a fire for her.” That is followed by the sound of a brass coal bin opening and closing with an unnerving screech in the hinges.
I linger in his room, looking at the desk and its contents until I find something that suits what I need. I pick up a receipt spike that protrudes from an ornately decorated cast iron base. I slide the small collection of scrappy receipts off and leave them on the desk next to the abandoned typewriter. The spike is the closest thing I can find to a weapon in this house. I bring it with me into the parlor and take a seat in one of the armed chairs which is far better than sitting on Howard’s little bed
.
After a few moments and much fuss, I hear them coming back down the hall, and Kvasir emerges first to look at me and give a nod that Howard seems calmer and ready to continue.
“How about I refresh the tea?” Kvasir says. “No-no, Howard, you sit. I can find my way around a kettle just fine.” He retrieves the tray from Howard’s room, hustles past us through the French doors and into the dining room attached to the parlor. From there he disappears into the kitchen tucked further back. He is, essentially, escaping for a moment to himself as the door to his mind shuts gently on me.
Howard, at a new loss for words, finds himself in the parlor alone with me. He sits down slowly where his mother previously dozed. The throw blanket lies rumpled beside him, his hand absently finding it and clenching. I can still see her warmth on it, smell her scent.
A loud clang sounds from the kitchen, and Howard winces, looks through the French doors, resists the urge to go check on the matter. He is beginning to truly understand what he has let into his house.
“He feels responsible,” I tell him.
“How so?”
“It is a long story, still, Howard,” I play with the receipt spike in my hands turning it over, tapping the tip or tracing the patterns in the base. “Perhaps you need to rest, and we shall continue another time?” A little part of me is hopeful that he’ll agree.
“Oh, um, no. I am fine to continue tonight. It is just the idea of you being beheaded.”
“Hard to believe, I know. Mr. Freysson and I dropped our illusion for you to see our true faces. A face is one thing, but this is what I am.” I position the sharp tip of the spike over the center of my spread palm and shove it through, all the way down to the base where I cup the decorated dome while the spike protrudes from the back of my hand.
Howard jumps in his seat and covers his mouth to stifle a yelp. Then his look of horror melts to fascination when he realizes that I did not cringe. I withdraw the instrument from my flesh with a wet slide and present the nearly bloodless stigmata that it has left. There is a little glisten of black ichor, but in seconds the puncture closes up. I lean forward and place the spike on the parlor table. It shows no trace at all of my blood.
“I told you, Howard, I cannot die, but that does not mean I cannot be trapped, controlled, or even possessed.” I sit back and steeple my fingers.
“Ah yes, within the occult circle—”
“I have told you this in complete trust that you will never find a way to exploit it yourself. You are an honorable man.” I've found among his memories many instances of his grandfather preaching to him about honor, and I know that they still carry weight.
He stares for a moment and then slowly nods before I continue. "How does it work? The occult circle? Mr. Freysson's influence on my mother was one thing, but what about this?"
"Same thing," I answer as I adjust my cuffs. "All symbols trap and store various energies," I explain. "Certain ones have different effects depending on the being. A circle such as the one that trapped me was designed with a combination of energies that, in the correct formula, affect my person for reasons that shall become apparent. All ritual 'magic' operates on the same premise, whether to trap or summon, or to open portals. It is indeed the same ancient technology that my companion spoke of, but on a grander scale than anesthetizing your mother."
"I see. It makes more sense to me, I suppose, to look at it that way." He ponders it a moment longer and then looks up. "Go on, Mr. Corvinus."
“I learned Nyarlathotep’s name when he touched my mind, just as he learned mine along with my entire past. He smugly took my head between his hands and looked down into my eyes, which could only stare back. I was still conscious but in strangely little pain other than the disorienting inability to feel the body that should have been attached to my neck. I could not speak at all, for that still requires the movement of breath over vocal cords and my trachea and lungs were separated, so my mouth only gaped senselessly. How the tables had turned on me, I could not comprehend. The night before, and earlier that day, I had thought myself the supreme predator, and now I learned how low on the food chain I truly was.
“Out of my periphery, I saw them enter the tent, slick white-skinned things hunched and hissing as they gathered near. I heard low, rumbling snarls and mewling noises, and Nyarlathotep, rather gently, placed my head in a dark pouch. I could feel the coarse fabric against my cheeks, while my hair gathered around my eyes or brushed my lips. He said something in another language far too guttural and impossible for my human mouth to have annunciated, and I heard skittering noises which, I believe had I a body at the time, would have sent chills through me.
“At this point I turned to thinking that I must be trapped in a nightmare, that it had begun somewhere around the siege of Sarmizegetusa and, as nightmares do, grown more bizarre and frightening in a space of hours, for dreams warp time in our sleep. It made more sense that I’d taken a head injury and gone into a coma to be caught in such a scenario as this. All I need do was wake up, but you cannot awaken from something that is real.
“I assume we left the camp the way I had entered, with my captor casting his own will and illusion upon the residents. I heard nothing of upset among the legion and I have no idea when they might have discovered Bielis’ body. I know not how long we travelled, for I was too discombobulated within the darkness of that sack. As for my own body, I sensed it nearby, bundled up and somehow conveyed along separately. I felt strange sensations of bubbling and crawling around the base of the stump that was my upper neck, but could do nothing to find out what they were, and after a time I passed out.
“When next I came to, I was on a floor, facing up into a dark, cavernous ceiling supported by tall columns of Cyclopean masonry, the tight-fit stones blackened with a gleaming ooze that dribbled down from crevices in the higher rock. I rolled my eyes as steeply as possible to take in all that I could. Firelight from sconces flickered on the columns catching a slithering iridescence.
“I was almost delirious at this point, but I conceived that my head was being pulled inch by inch over the floor, my hair trailing behind. I felt a stroke of panic that I might be stuck in this bodiless state forever, and then I noted a sense of crawling tendrils reaching from my stumped neck. Like roots finding fertile soil. I discerned them to be an extension of myself no less than fingers or toes, yet I had no real control over them. They were tactile, strong, and instinct, more than anything, drove them to keep reaching, and somewhere not far off, they met others reaching back. They grasped, joined, and pulled and I slid a little further, and then others melded together, creating a firm connection, and I found that head and body were communicating again a fragment at a time. This process continued, slowly associating consciousness with limb, with heart, with skin and bone, until I gasped as the two halves of my trachea sealed and my lungs expanded. I became aware of my bare back, still straight and aligned and lying upon grainy floor and my hands spread at my sides. Further down I could wiggle my toes and bend a knee. At last I was whole again, and I sat up weakly, touched my arms and then my face, raked back tangles of greasy hair and barely contained a cry of both relief and terror at what had just happened to me. My hands shook before me, and I was vaguely relieved to see that my father’s ring which I’d reclaimed from Bielis was still on my finger.”
Two familiar hands bearing the tea tray cross the path of my sight and sit the items down on the parlor table. “Tea,” Kvasir announces and then gives the receipt spike, sitting so randomly on the parlor table when it was not there before, a dubious glance.
Shall I take over here?
Not just yet. I can continue.
He proceeds to top off my cup and pour in cream and a heap of sugar before handing it to me and then preparing his own cup, but he takes no seat, choosing instead to hover, pacing slightly before the parlor's empty coal hearth. Howard watches all of this absently, as yet unaware that my story will soon become part of Kvasir’s.
“Once I was satisfied that
I was all in one piece again, I began to look around at my surroundings, first pausing to note that I was within another circle of more, and even stranger, geometric symbols that glowed with the same soft phosphorescence as the one that had first snared me. I could move within this one, but as I crawled, shaking, into a stance and approached its edge, I found an invisible barrier that pushed me back with a blunt force against my entire person. Corralled, I had little choice but to examine my prison, finding the circle tucked partway within a huge alcove in the cavern, framing me in as if on display. Since my bodiless experience had steeped me in fear and confusion, I felt the first stab of feral anger return along with the hunger burning in my belly and humming under my skin. The yearning for flesh and blood was tenfold, so it could be surmised that regeneration, or mending as it were, leeched my energies and raised the need for nourishment. As if to answer this, something plopped down beside me with a meaty smack and I spun to see that it was a human torso. I had a sparing glimpse of the thing that had dropped it there, white and slick as it streaked away, the sound of claws skittering and scratching on rock carrying through the cavern, up the wall and behind one of the columns.
