“All right there, squire?” I ask, but only a plume of thick, acrid smoke comes out. Beneath its scum-soaked raincoat, the vessel is sizzling and popping in places. There’s a whoomphing noise, as the vessel’s hair burst into flame.
“What the hell’s going on back there?” the tram driver is shouting, barely heard over the bag lady’s keening. Nardi leaps from his seat, releases the fire extinguisher and douses me with the stuff with practiced ease. The tram-driver slams on the brakes and my vessel is flung down on the hardwood paneling. Nardi drags the still-smoking mess that I inhabit outside.
“… you goddamn idiot!” he’s screaming, even as he’s dragging me across the pavement, lifts me up to his shoulder and tosses me into the rain-soaked mess inside a nearby garbage can. I splash into the water and linger for a while, against the soft bedding of discarded diapers, before I pull myself out. “Nerea? You okay?”
“Right as rain.” I manage, spitting a mouthful of Wrigley’s wrappers. “I got him.”
“You got the kid? Goddamn it, did you …”
“Don’t worry. I didn’t go through any of the usual channels. He’s safe, for now.” Before Nardi has a chance to bark out his usual battery of questions, I sputter “Washington West. I think he got into the trunk.”
I can see the color draining from Nardi’s face in a second flat. He bites the inside of his cheek, just as he drags me out of the dumpster and into the street. The tram driver mumbles something as we pass him by, and I give him a slap on the shoulder. We run the rest of the way, toward the Haitian quarter of Arkham, the densely-packed slum that sticks like a thorn to the side of the new land of opportunity. Above us, the clouds rumble as they run together, cumuli pregnant with rain. There’s a storm brewing over the city, unseasonal and laden with unspeakable things that prod at the edges of the universe, looking for a way in. Nardi is visibly shaking.
“It’s not your fault, Frank.” I remind him for the hundredth time this night. Nardi’s the archetypal messiah-complex bloke, constantly blaming himself over every single thing that’s ever happened. “You couldn’t have known.”
“I put it in the trunk. That thing from Antarctica, I put it there. Whatever happens, it’s … are you smiling?”
“I’m sorry Frank, it’s just … it’s uncanny, you know?”
“Really appreciate this, Nerea. Kicking me while I’m down.”
“What were you thinking, for Christ’s sake?” I ask him, just as we turn the corner into Washington, our subconscious tuned to the vibrations that are seeping into the material world. We’re reaching synchronicity now, Frank and I. “Don’t you people have a vault for this stuff? A hole in the ground you can chuck them into and forget about them forever would do!”
“Knight wanted to examine the thing, cross-reference it against a series of data that he dredged up from some Pnakotic thing or another. He thought the artifact was probably intended for data storage. Religious texts, to be exact.”
“He’s half-right, I’ll give him that. Our people back home had verified that the Pentacle City natives-that’s what the Service calls them—did not have clearly defined outlines on religion and technology. They considered their gods to be cosmological constants and they worked their science around them.”
“Can’t say I blame them. Their gods seem to be of the meddling variety,” Nardi says, and from the look in his eye I can tell he’s speaking from personal experience.
“This wasn’t worship, Frank. The natives didn’t pay obeisance to their gods, not in the way we do. If anything, their entire philosophy revolved around excluding their deities from the everyday process by any means necessary. They treated them the way we used to treat nuclear weapons, as a last-ditch effort to get out of a hopeless situation. Think of going to church as the equivalent to Mutually Assured Destruction.”
“So the kid’s got his hands on … what? A gamma-powered Bible? How is he even supposed to read it?” Nardi asks, exasperated, just as we enter the Haitian district. He stops, dead in his tracks when he finally sees the kid.
“No, Frank. The Bible reads itself.” I manage, as we watch Donnie Kiernan, the hopeless little junkie, hovering in mid-air, howling like a madman as the bleeding tear in reality is making him unravel. The thing from the trunk attaches to his arm, sending up strands of obsidian along the veins in his body, assimilating his flesh into his own. The boy’s screams reach a horrific crescendo, ascend into a falsetto of epic proportions that makes my vessel’s fillings come loose. Even with my current unaugmented vision, I can see the things that crawl into the world from the corners: mouths with miles-long tongues and clicking teeth. An ill wind blows through the opening, smelling strongly of alkaline and the hungry void of space. Across the street, men and women are screaming as they watch their homes become perverted by the touch of God, struggling to pry open doors that no longer open into their familiar surroundings. The pavement slithers around us like a great armored snake. A rain of teeth clatters across the rooftops of Arkham. Nardi pulls out his trusty service revolver, aims at the boy and pops a couple of shots, uselessly. The bullets curve, their kinetic energy consumed by the hungry God-mouth.
“What is this?” Nardi howls. “What the hell kind of God is that?”
“The Mesopotamians called it Tiamat, Mother Night. The Summerians called it Asag, the Primeval Horror. The name we call it, Asag-Thoth, means Terrible Knowing.” Nardi looks at me, puzzled. His service revolver hangs useless in his hands. “It’s the God, Frank. The idiot, all-knowing Sultan at the center of all things. I’m calling it in.”
Nardi’s fist slams into the vessel’s temple. It doesn’t hurt, but it sends me reeling, enough to break my focus. His calloused hands grasp my raincoat, drag me across the street just as something I can’t quite see smashes into the asphalt, leaving a long indentation into the ground. An invisible appendage slithers across the face of Arkham, smashes into a house and retreats back into the maw, a bounty of screaming innocents in its unseen grip. It pops them into its hole-mouth like they were candy, chews them slowly. Donnie is whimpering uselessly, as it makes him watch.
“How do we stop it?” Nardi hisses at me as soon as we’re in the relative safety of a back alley, huddling next to a half-dozen horrified people just off their night shifts.
“Frank, it’s God. We can’t just …”
“How. Do we. Stop it?”
“Most of them can’t exist in our corner of reality. Something to do with how the laws in our space-time operate. Conditions here just aren’t right for them to anchor themselves on Earth. This is only a temporary manifestation for it.”
“Okay, so it’s got a little bubble that it calls home, right? How do we pop it, Nerea?”
“Not from outside, that’s for sure. We need to get in there and …” I stop, when I notice the glint in Nardi’s eye. “Frank, don’t be an idiot. You can’t hope to survive in there, never mind for long enough to actually stop the channeling.”
“Just tell me what I need to do.”
“Frank! It’s outer bloody space in there! The entire thing is probably as hot as the heart of a quasar! You’ll be evaporated long before it has a chance to chew you up! We need people for this, Frank! Lots of them,” I say and Nardi stops, poring it over. Behind us, down Washington Avenue, an invisible scythe-blade carves chunks out of the Haitian district, tearing apartment blocks apart like they were made of cardboard. The wind blows south, carrying with it the smell of human offal and a spray of what could be battery acid. Nardi catches a whiff of it and that martyr look melts away from his face, replaced by the cold certainty I’ve come to know and fear, lately.
“We’ve got more than enough people, from where I’m standing.” he says, finally. My eyes glance at the horrified slobs, struggling for a hiding place behind the dumpsters, cursing at the police over their poor phone receptions.
“Frank, I’m not going to use the living. Not for this, not in a million years.”
“How many people do you think thi
s thing has eaten, while we’re stuck here? There must be near to two thousand people living in this district. How many do you think haven’t been popped into its mouth?” he says. I’m struggling with the words, when he finally blurts out: “Can you use those bodies, Nerea? To get into the bubble?”
Vessel-hopping. Now there’s a doozy. Hadn’t even crossed my mind until now and not just because it’s dangerous. The recently dead don’t just make for poor vessels because of rigor mortis setting in. Sometimes, the spirit lingers in the flesh after a particularly violent death, unable to come to grips with it. It fights back against you, viciously. If you’re not careful, it could take a chunk out of you with it to the other side and then where would you be? Trying to hop from one recently dead body into another is the closest thing a dead rootwoman can come to suicide, but the alternative is either letting a nuclear monstrosity run loose in Arkham or to bring in my people—and they won’t leave Arkham in a hurry, either. They’ll pick this place apart, riding on the gratitude of the mayor and the people from Miskatonic, prod and poke the city in every place they shouldn’t to sate their eternal curiosity, and when they finally set off the big one, they are just going to pack up and leave Arkham to rot.
“I’m going to need a couple of things,” I say. “Keep an eye out for me, will you?”
And just like that, I leave my vessel again, keeping close to the ground, hugging the ley-lines to surf away from the hell of mouths that picks apart at the edges of reality. Riding across a rusted old train track, feeding off the distilled hatred of Chinese laborers who cursed it as they drove it into the ground, I launch myself into Miskatonic Library. Wafting through the snapping, snarling things that have been trapped between covers woven from human skin, I follow the distinctive memory-scent of the sea into the triple-locked vault beneath the University and plunge into my new vessel, still and unraveled inside its formalin tank. Its advanced fish-brain fights me with the barest shadow of what used to be its lower self and then finally submits. Using the atrophied muscles, I slam my huge fists against the glass until it shatters and walk-crawl my way across the tiled floor, shutting out the wailing sirens in the enclosed space. From there, the vessel bursts through the wall into the twilit chamber where wizened children keep the toys of alien grown-ups, sift through the mess until I find what I’m looking for:
To a layman’s eyes, it looks like a fossilized children’s toy. A small artifact made from clay, conical in shape, festooned with strange designs. Looking at it through the eyes of the spirit, the entire thing unravels into a vista of shifting shapes, strange machinery that stretches out for miles with the cone in its center, operating as an imperishable tesla coil. Sparks of power still linger in its circuits, aching for more. By the time Security bursts through the door, I’ve charged the plywood wall, burst through it and led myself to crash through a double plate-glass window. The jagged shards slice at the flesh, sever ligaments already stretched and thrifty beyond measure. My mind jumps inside the brain of a passing stray dog that grasps the artifact with the utmost care. I make the poor thing run all the way to the Haitian district. Its heart pounds in its chest, fit to burst, and I let it plop the artifact into my original vessel’s arms before I wrest control.
“Jesus wept,” Nardi says, as he watches the dog collapse just as the dead man I’m riding shoots up on his feet. “Where the hell did you get that?”
“Ask no questions, hear no lies” I say with a wink before handing him the clay artifact. “I need you to do something for me, Frank. You have to take this thing here, get it to a high place, okay?”
“What even is this?”
“Think of it as a wireless power relay station. The Australians found one of those in Borneo, back during World War II. A native cult was using it as a sort of spirit battery.”
“You want to drain God?”
“In a way, yes. This ought to let the walls of God’s bubble weaken so I can break through them. Give me enough time to stop Donnie.”
“And what’s going to happen to the power? Where is it going to go?”
“No time to go over this, Frank. Are you game or not?”
Nardi nods, understanding. He points at one of the larger department buildings, just around the corner. Its roof is barely higher than Donnie’s current altitude. “Will that place do?”
“It’s fine. Now go.”
“Are you sure you’re up to it?”
“Bloody hell, Nardi. Are you going to keep faffing about for much longer?”
Nardi breaks into a run. I send my vessel running out into Washington, toward Donnie and God, zig-zagging so I won’t make myself a target. Invisible things slam into the ground around me, sending up clouds of dust. I jump across the last couple of feet, fingers weaving through complex motions in the air, forming the first break of a charm that will drive me through the bubble.
And then I drop to the ground like a stone, as an unseen scythe materializes inside my vessel’s midriff, pinning me down like a butterfly. There’s the barest hint of nails scraping across a blackboard as the blade cleaves me clear in half. I make the jump blindly, wake up in a tiny body. It’s a child. One of the eyes doesn’t seem to work. A quick probing verifies that her skull was crushed under a chunk of ceiling. Her motor skills are rubbish, but she’ll have to do. The God-bubble is growing in size by the second. Nardi is moving into place, setting the artifact. Running up the emergency stairs of the building, I weave the spell in relative safety. Outside, Donnie howls in rage, babbles in an alien language. The spell takes hold and my spirit is shielded in a cloak of power. The thing is rudimentary, but it will serve to keep some of the dead at bay. Through a shattered doorway, I stumble over the debris of a tiny apartment and into the kitchen. Rummaging through what’s left of the cupboards, I gather the ingredients for the ritual: rock salt and corn flour and a chicken leg to serve as a rudimentary gris-gris. Feathers from a smashed dreamcatcher over a teenager’s bed. A string of pearl from a mother’s snapped neck. With them, I build a circle on the rooftop, set the body kneeling there and call out to the dead. They howl at me in horror and rage, make a beeline for my occult beacon.
While they’re occupied, I abandon the vessel and make for the body of a man well in his fifties, heavyset and muscular. He makes for a choice morsel for God, giving me just enough time to hop into a woman that bled to death through her severed leg in her car. I hobble toward God, slip into his bubble. Before the heat has had time to burn her, I let out an incantation that sticks on the weakened membrane. Then off to another: a stubborn young teacher who has evaded my allure. She sinks her claws into me, fights me for her body every step of the way, but in she goes anyway, makes another glyph. I go through them one after another, the recently dead. They swarm around me like a cloud.
“Cold, so cold … Mommy, what’s going on? Papa Ghuede, aidez-moi, s’il vous plait … I hope the kids are okay … Goddamnit woman, just RUN! … I knew I was going to die a virgin … Moira, just turn on the lights … A scar, as big as the world … It’s just not fair, you know?” they babble on and on, even as they rake themselves against me, fighting back. Something pulls itself loose from me but I can’t afford to assess the damage. In they go, one after another, my disposable little vessels, until the inside of the bubble is choked with the charred and bloated dead. Donnie lets out a bellow of rage, as the bubble begins to diminish, collapse. God’s idiot brain causes it to lash out against the artifact and me, all too late. It falls apart and the Universe rolls in, crushes the thing, reduces it to a tiny point that barely contains Donnie.
My last vessel is an old man, pushing near a century. He drags a chunk of I-beam behind him, halfway embedded into his chest. He tells me his old war-stories and I pretend to listen, as we make out way to Donnie, reach our hands out to him and cup his head in our palms.
“Please, please help me, I didn’t mean to …” Donnie whimpers.
“Shhh, it’s okay, Donnie. It’s okay,” we whisper into his ear, as our hand grasps the h
orrible, crawling thing that’s become his arm. We tug at it with savage force and it rips away in a gush of blood and severed tendons. The act drains us of most of our power, leaves our physical form too spent to do what needs to be done next. Donnie bawls and whimpers. Deprived of its focus point, God is flung back into the dark place where time and space are nonsense. Arkham falls silent. We turn the thing in our hands. It tries to get a grip, but we push it back. Slowly, it devours the scraps of Donnie it’s left with and returns to its original, quiescent state. Nardi runs down the steps, exhausted. The artifact in his hands is positively bursting with power, slowly funneling it into who knows where.
“Is it over?” he asks, looking at the shattered little junkie writhing on the ground, grasping at the hole where the left side of his arm and chest ought to be.
“The boy is still a conduit,” we say. “The circle must be broken.”
“No,” Nardi whispers uselessly. We reach out into his mind, wrest control of his arm. He fights us off with newfound strength. “No, damn you!”
“There is no time for sentiment, Nardi,” we say, slowly. “To let the boy live, when he has become a gate, would be cruel. God can no longer slip through him, but he possesses a court of hungry things that will. They will burst out of him, in time. The boy is an instrument for further destruction.”
Again, we push to gain control. Again, Nardi fights back. This time, we hit him with the full force of the dead that have lingered, Find an opening in his formidable defenses. From it, we dredge the memory of broken men, prowling in the dark corners of New York. Of Tommy Malone and Jack London and the rest of the damned gang. Nardi recoils in horror. We make him grasp the service revolver, aim it at Donnie’s head.
Arkham Detective Agency: A Lovecraftian-Noir Tribute to C. J. Henderson Page 9
