by J K Ishaya
“‘Let me help you become,’ she whispered, her sweet breath ghosting on my cheek.
“I was on that precipice again, feeling the substance beneath my skin crawl and moan and call to me voraciously, but then two hands came out of the shadows from behind her. It was less than a second that I saw them grip the sides of her head and give a strong, if simple, flick to the side. Her neck snapped and the eyes that had been staring deep into mine only a moment ago went dim, blue opals dulling to a plain, ordinary gray. I next witnessed her face immediately aging with a few lines deepening around her eyes, along the corners of her mouth. The soft flush of her cheeks deteriorated, and a few grays slid through her hair. In seconds she was the forty-something of her true age and my head cleared of her enchantment. The hands lowered her body away, while the haze of her hold on me faded and my head cleared. The shaking and rumblings in some other part of the mountain bled back into my hearing, and a new face came into focus.
“Malorix’s lips were curled back into a snarl and he looked as if ready to spit on her. ‘That is enough of that,’ he growled. ‘Bitch.’
“My relief was almost painful, especially after the disturbing way in which he had vanished from the Dreamlands while in mid-air. He smelled of a fresh kill no less than I did, and I guessed he had also picked off one of the hooded followers. ’You got in,’ I stated the obvious with a chest-rending breath.
“‘You woke up,’ he said with relief of his own. Then he added, as if he could not resist at least some small sarcasm, ‘And already in trouble again. You were one kiss away from humping her.’ He nudged the body with the toe of a boot. ‘Now… your friends are here, apparently.’ Upon this statement the ground and walls shook with greater force, and granite dust rained from cracks in the vault. ‘Their queen is keeping Nyarlathotep busy,’ he explained, ‘which should give us plenty of diversion to get out.’ He turned and gestured to the passage on the left. ‘I found a way in through a vent that goes up through the rock. It comes out higher on the mountain side, but you will smell fresh air and pine on the drafts. If we get separated, follow that and when you are out, you climb upward. I will meet you on the mountain’s summit at sunrise, where and when Nyarlathotep would not dare follow.’
“I wanted to ask thousands of questions again. This Borean queen I had only heard of had me curious, and I also wished I might help their battle however I could. When the next tremble in the mountain shook down more debris, I lifted an ear to determine from which direction it came.
“Malorix practically snapped his fingers in my face to shake me to reality. I glared at him for that, but he lowered his voice to suit a more dire warning. ‘The Boreans can take care of themselves.’
“‘But one of them is already dead,’ I argued.
“‘And more of them will die, still, over the expanse of this war. They are well aware of that. You and I must stay away from Nyarlathotep as much as possible. You understand this, yes?’
“I stared down at Amarisa’s body and nodded vacantly. The pupils in her now dull, gray eyes were blown open into deep, black wells.
“‘She is not completely dead,’ Malorix reminded me. ‘She is a Dreamer, remember? Even now she resurrects in the Dreamlands for us to hunt her down a second time.’
“This reminded me of the young man I had killed in Dylath-Leen, the one who was a rapist and killer himself, who could no longer venture there to sate his warped desires. It seemed I had two new missions, one on each side of the steps, but first there was the matter of escaping the mountain.
“Much as I wanted to confront Nyarlathotep, Malorix was right. To do so would only put either of us at greater risk of succumbing to Azathoth if capture happened again. I hated it. Hated feeling so cowardly. He gave me a gesture to follow him, and we departed through the left passage, starting at a stealthy jog but then picking up the pace until we were at our full speed. In that environment, infested as it was with filth and darkness, it was inevitable that we would run into a swarm of n’gai.
“They came in droves down the walls from unknown crevasses, claws clicking, first emitting their strange mewling noises that then rose into screeches as they summoned more of their kind to address our presence. We stopped in our tracks, and I felt my skin crawl beneath in reaction. Already Malorix’s hands were extending into razor-sharp claws as he stared intently up at them. ‘There may be many,’ he told me calmly, ‘but there is no challenge here.’
“Then he took a running leap straight into the thickest clot of them, all spindly white arms and legs and lean, ribbed bodies. The din that rose was abrasive to the ears as they clawed back at him. His wounds opened and healed in seconds, far faster than mine. Bounding from one side of the crevasse to the other, he slashed out at those in his mid-air path and in seconds not one but two, then three, bodies fell to the stone floor in front of me, a head missing from one, another gutted, another torn in two with its upper half flopping around. I smelled their foul blood and excrement and looked up to see how Malorix utilized his fighting skills with the natural weapons Nyarlathotep had given him. Although the n’gai opened gashes on his arms, or bit at him with tearing force, he recovered instantly and reacted with the fiercest violence he could inflict. I truly understood his edict that he would use everything in his power against the dark one, an expression for all of the pain he had been through and the threat to his very identity. As other n’gai slipped around him and made toward me, I finally launched myself into the fray.
“The rest was chaos… instinct… rage.
“My senses being so restored as they were, I found them reaching greater heights as every noise that reverberated in the cavern pulsed out images in my mind. Behind my eyes, a complete three-hundred-and-eighty-degree psychical vision formed of each n’gai springing at me before I had even turned to actually see it. In that fragment of time, my instincts mapped out an almost automated pattern of attack that unfolded without any complicated thought or least hesitation. I was already slashing with my own claws, then as another attempted to leap upon me from behind, I thrust out my other hand, rigid in alignment with my wrist, fingers pressed together into a nice, neat jagged poll upon which the beast impaled itself. I pulled my hand free along with a splatter of gore and shredded milky skin and spun to take out the next one.
“Their bodies fell around us with the slapping sound of meat and splatters and the cavern reeked of their putrescence. When I had felled my last one, the silence was deafening. Before me, Malorix dropped down into a kneel with coiled muscles, waiting to see if more of them skittered out of the cracks above. I stood in awe staring at him, then down at myself and my blood-stained hands, and upon the heaps of ghastly bodies at what we had done.
“His head was bowed for a moment as he listened for any tell-tale scratches, but when none arose, he looked up at me through the veil of his hair and a peculiar intensity developed in his eyes, which were in their serpentine state with a crimson shimmer catching in the remaining torchlight along the walls. At first, I thought his gaze was purely aimed at me, but as he rose and pushed back the loose locks around his face, I realized that he was focused not on me but just above my head and beyond. A deep furrow formed on his brow and his eyes glazed as he began to simply wander toward me.
“‘What is it?’ I asked as he continued past, purely distracted. My gaze only followed him at first, but then lifted to squint at what consumed his attention. The archway in the rock appeared so natural that I had not noticed it before, or that there was darkness beyond it that even my vision had to account for. What appeared to be a single, solid slab of a massive door was set back deep within the alcove. It was at least twenty feet high and upon its surface was a series of arcane symbols unlike any I had seen before including those within the occult circles that had held me prisoner. These were harsh and lacking symmetry, not chiseled or carved carefully so much as slashed into the rock and leaving smooth, glassy grooves with a sheen that looked almost slimy in the dim light.
“Something
about it disturbed me, but even worse was how he approached it and ran his hand over the surface. I watched his fingers, still long and tipped with bloody claws, spread and trace a few of the slash lines with a discomfiting intimacy, and then gradually the claws withdrew, and his most human appearance emerged again.
“’I hear…’ he said under his breath. This did not sound like it was directed at me, or oddly enough, that he was speaking to himself attempting to solve some conundrum. ‘I hear you,’ he said louder and began to search the door and the more immediate symbols near its bottom. ‘I hear you.’ With each repeat, his voice lifted from its rasp and into more urgency.
“‘Malorix?’ I said, approaching. ‘What is it?’ I watched him scrabble around, tracing lines, probing eagerly for something, until finally he found it at the very center of one of the symbols where all lines met, and the slashes appeared to run much deeper and darker than the others. ‘What do you hear?’ I asked, to receive no answer. When he looked at me again, all traces of red were gone from his eyes, replaced by warm brown and a most troubled look. ‘Malorix, we should go,’ I said, trying to sound firmer.
“He did not heed me at all but turned back to the door, and without any discussion on the matter, pressed several fingertips directly into the symbol’s framed middle.
“‘Wait!’ I hissed and rushed forward to try to stop him. ‘You do not know what is in there!’ But I was too late. The section of rock depressed, and from deep within the crevices came a grind of stone and an audible click. We both stepped back and listened as more grinding sounded from within, and then the door began to rise. The very bottom edge lifted out of a long, wide groove that provided a sort of sealed frame along that edge. Within the first inch of that seal breaking, a gust of foul smelling air escaped, nothing as distinct as decay of any kind, but almost… oily… acrid… sour. It climbed up into our noses and packed in, overwhelming any other scent that might serve as a warning of some entity approaching.
“The huge slab continued to slide up, revealing that the tall grooves in which its sides were fitted held old, dusty ropes and a system of rusted metal pulleys which were gradually dropping massive counter weights, also rusty but still very solid. In the deepest crevices, trickles of water, filtering in from the mountain, gleamed and had left mold stains that packed into the tiny cracks. I did not like the sound of those ropes, which were long saturated with the damp and also covered in mold. They creaked unstably, thick though they were and certainly they had once been very strong, but now they were long forgotten and strained by that weight and were not fit to hold for too long. The pulleys ground unnervingly with rust against rust, but once the slab was lifted high enough to simply duck under it, Malorix was already entering, though he did not step ahead without caution. I paused to stare after him, making out merely another long chamber of stone at first, and there were openings, like those in the greater chamber outside, where I imagined anything might be lurking. But why, I wondered, was this long hall divided off by such an impressive tablet of stone? As I fully stepped inside with him, I found walls inset with stone shelves and the floors covered in chips of broken glass and pottery, strange apparatuses that looked to have chunks and pipes of metal and some other, unidentifiable material that might have been leather. Most of it was cluttered against the walls, piles of old matter that no longer had a name except for the odd scatter of human bones. A femur here. A piece of cranium there. The disconnected but still puzzled bones of a human hand lay in a manner as if its owner had been reaching for something when life was terminated. Malorix’s boots crunched softly on some of the glass as he had immediately begun to approach four shapes that sat some fifty feet into the chamber.
“They were altars, or at least that was the way they were structured at perhaps three by nine feet on their top stones, while their sides were ornamented with strangely organic patterns in black onyx that twined around their bases. There was no dust on them. No dust at all, but there were old chains, which terminated in open shackles, strewn across them and left to deteriorate like the mechanisms in the door. Malorix stared emptily at them for a long time, and when new rumblings stirred from that other battle fought elsewhere within the mountain, I thought I heard the ropes creaking again and my nerves crawled with anxiousness. I tried to gently implore him to come away. ‘Listen,’ I said, ‘the door is going to give, and is that a draft I feel, the one you said for me to follow?’ Of course, there was no draft, not in this portentous place which continued to hold that stench. Any fresh air at all would have been a palpable relief.
“From where he stood with that glassy stare in his eyes, he finally reached out and his mind barely touched mine. He was acknowledging that I needed an explanation, but it did not come in clear words but a set of images that gave me a start. There was a view point of laying on one of those stones, along with the sense of being unable to move and looking up at the vault above as several n’gai crawled like a cluster of aphids. A sense of being bound overcame me, and then my minds eye saw them, the long black tendrils, pulsing with a dark essence no human mind could have ever comprehended, which speared downward and penetrated flesh and artery and siphoned that substance into me… into him. The view tilted from the ceiling and the n’gai to find another figure laying on the neighboring stone block where more of these vile devices were at work.
“‘Gods,’ I whispered and then I remembered what he had told me back in the Dreamlands, on the road to Ilarnek. ‘This is where it started.’
“Malorix turned a mournful gaze upon me, his eyes rimmed with moisture and redness, hopeless. The reeking air in here suddenly felt as if it were clinging to my skin with the filminess of spider webs, and I thought I heard a shifting sound in the furthest shadows, a slithering and sliding. Malorix heard it, too, for he perked up and his attention was once more pulled away from me, from escape, as he began to slowly walk toward the back of the long chamber toward the noises.
“No, I was sending to him, not deeper into this hole. But on he went, and I followed, reason overridden by curiosity. Words left me then when I saw what was lurking in the corners back there, partially tucked into some of the wall’s openings that might have been more small passages or simply alcoves. They were splayed against the walls and along the floor, clinging like slick, black vines, lumps of different surfaces and organic textures but with little form to them. But then I did see some form in one of them. There was a distinct outline of a torso with a lean hollow where a belly should be and above this was the protrusion of black ribs covered in a vague layer of muscle, and above that a recess for a gaunt neck, and then at last a face. It was that of a man, one side distinctly chiseled with a cheek bone that sloped down to a square chin, a brow line that still held fine black hairs, and a socket in which a closed eye lid rested. The other side was little more than tumorous masses that melded into the whole along with the rest of this poor soul’s body.
“Next to that… dare I say it? Abomination. Yes, this was certainly something too unnatural, too mutated and warped beyond comprehension, that I would call it that. Next to that abomination was another, their edges almost touching, and it also held near its center the subtle outline of a partially absorbed human man. Next to it, the third one had no human element showing at all but for two close hollows that looked like they might be for eyes. Within the deeper crevices of their non-shapes, boils and blisters rose and fell as if breathing, and I felt for a moment as if I might vomit up my earlier meal. And still there was more to analyze, for among them was a great central cavity that looked as if it had once held something. Its edges were torn, leathery shreds around an almost womb-like, mandorla of a borehole, a place from which a fourth individual had been plucked, leaving a hollow that appeared to have dried out compared to the tacky, gleaming masses around it.
“And Malorix… he was still staring long and hard at the faces until he finally shuddered and whispered to that closest to him. ‘Croisis…’
“In that moment, I recalled that Nyarlathote
p, when he’d had me trapped in that circle, had let something slip about his other experiments, and that they had been failures, but Malorix had been the one triumph, pulled from his cocoon into a world of untapped potential.
“He was looking at the remains of that cocoon along with his comrades in arms. They had been long since abandoned in this gross chamber, poor creatures no longer human and anything but whole in the same way as Malorix or myself. The infusion of Azathoth’s essence had not merged with them in a balance that would allow them to walk amongst men unnoticed but spilled out like a chaotic stew of malignancy and repugnance.
“I could no longer sense what Malorix was going through for he closed off all thought as he looked at that one with only one eye, and for the longest moment I waited, and I recalled what it had felt to see my own kinsmen go down in that last battle before my capture. I left him to it despite my concern about the heavy door and the ropes and how they stretched and strained the more the mountain buckled. If the ropes did not hold, we would be trapped in here with these sad, repellant remnants, and there would be no way out.
“Then to my horror, the eye opened—it was a very blue, deceptively human eye—and stared back at Malorix.”
Chapter Twenty-Eight
“They were conscious?” Howard says, nearly breathless, and I detect a slight green cast emerging on his face.
Across from me, Kvasir clasps his hands and steeples his fingers, touching them to his lips while his eyes remain on the parlor table and the tray of empty cups and cold teapot. He continues to visualize all of this along with me, waiting to interject his own details.
“Conscious, yes,” I say, nodding. “Conscious… insane… and angry. How else would you feel if your body had been utterly defiled and disfigured and then abandoned as a failure?
