Zon Mezzamalech being unresponsive before the crystal, Jason walked out of the wizard’s chambers and into his living quarters, passing shelves of archaic, ancient books that brought to mind some of those he’d knocked off the ashen shelves of the curio shop. Here, they were shrouded in dust rather than ash, although layers of fingerprints marred the dust on their spines, as if, although residing on these shelves for many years, they had been frequently and repeatedly examined. Jason glanced at the titles, but could make little sense of them…. The Book of Eibon, Ruminations of Nyolothep, Pnakotic Manuscripts… names that although unfamiliar to him filled him when he read them with an terrifically unsettling dread, as if they contained portals and portends of awful and archaic truths.
Leaving them on their shelves, he passed through the anteroom, opened the front door, and stepped out into the streets of Lanamir.
The city was a maze of cramped stone structures, braced with wood and black brick. A pair of oblong stone basins were situated in the center the street, filled with water as though serving as a trough for thirsty animals and men alike. It was dark but decidedly hot, the very antithesis of what this antediluvian country would endure in the coming centuries of glacial domination. There seemed to be little sense to the organization of streets and alleyways, and no distinction between public buildings and private. Many of the buildings seemed to take on unusual angles and dimensions if he looked at them too long, as if he were staring at them through a distorted lens that was being slightly tilted or revolved. There were few people about, and most whom he saw were cloaked or robed and wore unpleasant expressions beneath low-brimmed hats, hoods, or ruffled, wiry hair. These denizens of Lanamir paid Jason little heed as he strode about the dusty, darkening streets.
He wasn’t sure where he was going, but something compelled him to stray from the house of Zon Mezzamalech just as his growing fascination with this ancient place compelled him onward. Each corner proffered a new view of the most impossibly distorted construction, as if emanating outward from the sorcerer’s house the surrounding architecture by degrees grew steadily more perverse and irregular. At the same time, the populace increased the further away he strode from the house of Zon Mezzamalech.
The windows and doors of most habitations he passed were closed or else their recesses too dark to discern any detail. But he soon came upon an open shop whose front edifice had been drawn back to reveal displays of a great variety of items both curious and profane. Jason stared at one shelf that contained what first brought to mind the shadowy crystal into which his gaze has brought him to this place. But on further inspection he found that they were not crystals but small carven figurines, graven from some earthy black stone. He was instantly reminded of the carven trinkets he’d seen in the ruins of the curio shop. The majority of the minute statuettes here captured the same likeness, that of a crouching, toadlike figure whose furred, hunched back sprouted a pair of folded wings, like that of a bat. Its carven face was given to the most unpleasant and malevolent expression one could convey upon an image of stone.
Something vaguely recognizable, or familiar, passed over him as he stared at the face of the figure, and its tiny carved eyes seemed to bore directly into his own. He lost awareness of the shopfront and its surrounding buildings while the shape of that iniquitous toadlike face loomed larger, exuding a volume of thick, black smoke that poured into his lungs while a growing cacophony of shrieks began to resonate loudly in his ears.
“Zhothaqquah.”
Jason looked up, and the choking smoke and throbbing dissonance dissolved and he could once more see the shopfront, and the figures displayed on the shelf. A coarsely wrinkled and vastly aged man stood behind the countertop, indicating the figurines with a wave of his robed arm.
“Zhothaqquah,” the old man repeated. “Twelve flegurs.” He motioned toward another set of figurines, resembling a kind of amorphous blob that looked like it would have pulsated if it had not been carved from stone. “Ubbo-Sathla, twenty flegurs,” the man said, naming a price and hoping for a sale. Jason was staring at the latter figurine and for a moment, he felt the same way he had when he gazed at the Zhothaqquah sculptures and could almost perceive the shape of the nebulous, unstructured organism shift and undulate before his eyes.
A distant cry broke him out of it, and caused him to turn away. A crashing roar sounded from blocks away, punctuated by shrieks and yells. Looking at the surrounding rooftops, Jason could make out a glow reflecting off the stone edifices of buildings a street or two away, and even through the darkening sky he could discern the unmistakable shadow of billowing smoke. Something was on fire.
At least this was something familiar to him in this extraordinary environment. As he instinctively began running toward the location of the fire, Jason began to realize that in this antiquated community there probably was no kind of organized fire service. What was done when a house caught fire? Who existed in this obliquely constructed community of Lanamir to render emergency aid in such a case? Perhaps, he wondered as he turned a corner and ran toward the end of the road where he could see flames and smoke spurting out the windows of a large building, that was why he was here. Perhaps he could make amends and assuage the guilt that had immobilized him inside the San Francisco curio shop.
As he approached the burning structure, it suddenly became clear, even through Lanamir’s unfamiliar, skewed architecture and the belching smoke and the roar of increasingly violent flames, just where he was. This was the home of Zon Mezzamalech. And it was burning ferociously.
The few people who stood on the street all kept their distance, staring curiously at Jason as he ran boldly toward the burning building. He mused that some impossibly potent accelerant must have been involved for the fire to have gained such an intensity in such a short time. There was no sign of any constabulary or local government representative, no attempt or visible method of extinguishing the fire, which continued to erupt with a vast heat. Less than a dozen folk stood at opposite corner, standing and staring at the flaming surf that spewed out windows and the foundry-like belch of black smoke that rose from its roof.
Zon Mezzamalech was inside, Jason realized, probably still lost wherever that crystal orb had taken him. Jason ran to one of the men standing across the street, watching the fire. After muttering “excuse me” in a pitiful attempt to be less rude – as if anyone in this ancient land understood modern English – Jason yanked the robe off of the man’s shoulders before he could protest and wrapped it about his own. He grabbed a metallic bowl he found left outside the door of a nearby building and inverted it onto his head, then drenched his garments with water from the stone trough in the center of the street. Suitably attired in this meager semblance of protective firefighting garb, Jason mounted the stone steps and entered the home of Zon Mezzamalech.
A maelstrom of falling timbers and glutinous, churning smoke raged throughout the room, as wavelike flames eagerly devoured the ancient grimoires and manuscripts and cabinets and shelf beams that had been in the wizard’s library. The din of the destruction was tremendous, the fire creating its own sustained roar, punctuated by frequent pops and snaps and louder crashes of broken timber and falling stone. Crouching low and moving fast, breathing in shallow gulps, his head drawn close to his shoulder – “protect your airway! protect your airway!” came the voice from his fire academy training – he made his way into the great chamber where he had last seen the sorcerer.
Zon Mezzamalech stood before the huge, carven table but he was no longer unmoving and was no longer staring into the crystalline orb. He was backing away from it, pushing past his fallen chair and bumping up against the stone wall adjacent to the worktable, coughing gutturally and holding up his robed arms to shield himself from the flames and smoke that seemed to be detonating from the table itself. Even while doing this, Jason could hear the sorcerer expressing incantations and gesturing with his wrists and fingers, as if trying to ward off the flaming geyser with a variety of antediluvian spells.
As he came closer, Jason realized that the source of the flames and smoke was not the table but the crystal orb itself, a powerful rush of blistering energy with the volume and force of water rushing from a firehose, except that it was of flame and smoke, gushing out from the center of the orb to expand and splash violently against the engraved ceiling above. The area directly in front of the table, including the stone wall against which Zon Mezzamalech stood, was thus far unburned as the fire expended its energy upward and against the ceiling and surrounding walls. Still, the smoke was recoiling thickly throughout the room and Jason knew they would soon be overcome by smoke and lack of oxygen. He rushed up to the wizard and threw half of the drenched robe over his shoulders, then propelled him forward against the unburned wall, forcing him to crouch low and run towards the front room.
They were blocked by falling roof timbers and the debris of cabinetry from the sorcerer’s library. As they maneuvered around it, Jason heard a tremendous roaring sound – far too guttural and animal-like to emanate from the fire itself. He turned back toward the table, where the crystal shook and vibrated as the tremendous surge of pressurized flame spewed out of it. The smoke swelled and rushed at him, like an amorphous entity separate and distinct from the cacophony of flames discharging from the crystal, a shapeless, twisting, pluming mass of particles and expended energy that suddenly opened its mouth and with a tremendous roar, lunged at him.
Jason yelled an oath, pushing Zon Mezzamalech ahead of him and ducking down into an alcove. The bowl helmet fell from Jason’s head and clamored onto the floor. The smoke swelled into the space where he had been, then reformed with a cadaverous howl and confronted him again. Through the roiling smoke there suddenly came visible the distinct features of a face, a malevolently grimacing, impossibly wide mouth set in the smoky shape of a monstrous toad-like face.
“Zthothaqqua!” cried Zon Mezzamalech, again gesturing and succeeding the verbal appellation with a stream of alien syllables Jason could not begin to comprehend. But the malevolent creature in the smoke continued to expand and spew its visage around the blazing room. Jason again grabbed Zon Mezzamalech and maneuvered once more through the debris that littered the floor, this time finding his way to the front door and racing with the sorcerer, shrouded by smoke and steam rising from the robe they shared, out into the street. The face in the smoke fumed after them until, with a tremendous crash of timber and stone, the entire home of Zon Mezzamalech collapsed in on itself, smothering the fire with its own ruination as walls and roof and rubble crumbled into an ashy, smoking heap, tremendous billows of smoke and dust forced out in all directions like a pervasive wake.
Jason and the sorcerer stood, panting with exhaustion, against the water trough in the street. Jason pulled the smoking robe off of their shoulders and let it fall onto the street. The handful of people who had been watching began to approach, then recognized the figure of Zon Mezzamalech standing next to him. They quickly backed off and the streets were soon empty, echoing only with the final fiery snaps and crackles of the final bits of burning timbers beneath the rubble of Zon Mezzamalech’s home.
The sorcerer cast a gaze at Jason, noting with curiosity his sweatshirt with its unusual markings, “SFFD” printed in a large arc across his chest, his jeans and tennis shoes, then looked back at his collapsed residence, and then, oddly, gazed up into the sky.
“Zhothaqquah Cykranosh,” he muttered to himself, and then quickly receded from view.
In actuality it was Jason who was receding, and suddenly the scene before him began to dissipate, as if he were being yanked back into the distance at a rapidly increasing velocity, the rush of wind filling his ears with a roar and finally his vision obscured by blackness.
He next became aware of a cool breeze blowing in his face, stirring the acrid smell of charred wood and ash. He was standing in the burned curio shop in downtown San Francisco, the crystalline orb before him on its ebony pedestal. Its inner iridescence was gone, and it shone no reflection and bore no illumination. Jason shook his head and marveled. The sky beyond the crosstimbers on the roof was still darkening, as though no time had past since he lapsed into reverie, gazing into the crystal. Perhaps he had imagined it all, dreamt his adventure in time-lost Mhu Thulan. But as he took a step back, he realized his clothes were soaked, still dripping with the waters from the street trough in Lanamir.
He had no clue what had just transpired, but he realized that his grief was now tempered with a touch of his old confidence – the dream impinging against his nightmare. Whatever had happened, he had managed to save a life. The sorcerer Zon Mezzamalech was not killed in the fire that demolished his house, nor had he become prey to whatever being existed in the midst of the smoke, whose essence had either been crushed in the collapse of the structure or had been sucked back into Zon Mezzamalech’s crystal orb, back to whatever distant origin it heralded from.
Dreamt or real, the end result was one that filled him with regained confidence. His grief over the loss of Devan Farnsworth had not diminished, but he now felt that his dissolution over his abilities, his perceived failure as a firefighter, were indeed groundless. He took a step toward the door, ready to make his way back home.
And the crystal orb behind him burst with an impossibly loud crash, followed by a outward rushing of air. Jason Tregardis turned about in time to see the maliciously scowling face of Zhothaqquah, shrouded by the blackish, viciously swirling smoke that geysered forth from the crystal of Zon Mezzamalech while the curio shop suddenly burst into flame anew, its charred timbers and walls broiled by a massive wave of sourceless, flaming heat. In a moment he was engulfed by the smoke and the fire, incredible pain searing into and through him as he was lurched back toward the orb, the thunderous howl of the creature Zhothaqquah roaring into his ears as he realized there was a cost to thwarting the toad god’s intended sacrifice, a price to be paid, as the geyser reversed and Jason Tregardis merged with the flames and the smoke and all were sucked back into the crystal orb of Zon Mezzamalech. The orb which, long after the rekindled combustion had demolished whatever remained of the shop and its neighboring stores, remained undisturbed where it lay, now on the watersoaked, ashen floor beside its charred, wooden pedestal, untouched by the dust of ash or cinder, and pulsing with an inner glow that had no source in this age.
Randall D. Larson has been writing about weird fiction since the 1970s when he began publishing the small press magazines Fandom Unlimited, Threshold of Fantasy, CinemaScore, CineFan, and others. His Lovecraftian fiction has appeared in Eldritch Tales, Dark Fantasy, Space & Time, The Arkham Sampler, Etchings & Odysseys, Fantasy Tales, Shudder Stories, and other small press tomes of terror tales well told. Randall has been most prolific as a non-fiction writer and interviewer in the realms of fantasy/horror literature and film music (he writes a regular soundtrack interview column for buysoundtrax.com and has authored more than a hundred soundtrack album liner notes, most within sf/horror genre); he has authored a trilogy of reference books about author Robert Bloch, including a Reader’s Guide, Bibliography, and book of Collected Interviews. He has reviewed books and horror-related soundtracks for Cemetery Dance Magazine for many years. The 2nd edition of his book on film music in fantasy/sf/horror cinema, Musique Fantastique, is due out later this year from Creature Features.
Illustration by Steve Santiago.
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Ecstasy of the Gold
by Stephen Mark Rainey
DOLLARS, DOLLARS, DOLLARS.
So hard to find, almost as hard as finding another pureblood Caucasian. Other than himself, there were no more Caucasians, he was pretty sure; only mongrels, except for a few clusters of purebloods in Eastern Europe. So he’d heard, anyway.
“Locate dollars,” his brain said to his tecmate, which ran an instant search for concentrations of wealth in the vicinity. He hadn’t been able to afford an update in almost a year, and without it, his tecmate would eventually go silent. That would be bad. Tecmate expired, you exp
ire.
A translucent compass dial appeared in his field of vision, pointing westward. The coords bounced a bit, first indicating a target less than a quarter mile away, then settling at almost half a mile—Park Avenue, he thought. Target might have been moving and then stopped. More likely, his clunky old tecmate was just on its way to winding down permanently.
How the hell had people existed before the implants?
Jack Turner: a year shy of forty, unemployed but for the occasional bounty he managed to collect. Nowadays, even johnlaw was too broke to pay up, and a few of the brigands he had brought in were free now. Bad news if they found him. Find him they would, too, since his tecmate’s biobarrier would shield him about as well as a food processor. He couldn’t afford to move somewhere else, either; there was nothing lower than this little corner of East Harlem.
The streets were busy for a Monday after dark, and good for him. Better hunting here than anywhere else in the city, since only the down-and-out and the wealthy stupid used cash money. Few wealthy stupid but lots of down and out here. And if his tecmate weren’t completely fragged, he’d find dollars two blocks ahead. Nothing there but some abandoned buildings and a tiny, unused park. Weird.
At Third Avenue, he paused for a few motor cars to grumble past, felt the crackle of electricity and whistling wind of the aeros as they zoomed overhead like big metal June bugs. A flock of teenage boys on powerblades swept around him, beyond fast, almost invisible, like supercharged specters, heading north, in the direction of the bridge. The lure of the whore, he thought. Irresistible, if you still had life in you.
Lovecraft eZine Megapack - 2012 - Issues 10 through 20 Page 16
