The Lovecraft Squad

by John Llewellyn Probert

  The stream of figures passing them was now becoming a river of the dead and the damned, ever-increasing, all marching toward the horizon with the same purposeful intent.

  “Where do we fit into all this?” It was a reasonable question, even if Chambers didn’t imagine he was going to like the answer.

  Moreby’s smile held little humor in it. “You two are perhaps the most important element of all. To pass through the Nine Gates of Hell is a remarkable feat indeed, and one that could only be achieved by individuals such as yourselves.”

  That wasn’t an answer.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I needed you. Both of you. Two interconnected, yet uncorrupted souls who could pass through the Nine Circles, thus opening the Nine Gates so that the undead of each circle might pass freely between them.” Moreby’s gaze became more intense. “You do understand that, do you not? This was the secret that Verney finally imparted to me upon his deathbed in the madhouse. Your passing has released all those damned souls who were trapped in their individual corners of Hell. Now they are free to roam between the levels, and enter this Sea of Darkness. And from here to return. Return to your world . . .”

  The significance of this last remark was not lost on Chambers. He was about to speak, but Karen interrupted him.

  “Where’s Paul Hale?”

  Moreby’s smile broadened. “As every religion must have its figurehead, so too it must have its sacrifice. Mr. Hale, an innocent destined for a glory even greater than yours, was chosen by the Almighty to take on His aspect and give Him form in this realm.”

  “You mean . . .” Chambers could barely bring himself to say it, as Moreby nodded savagely.

  “Behold . . . the Anarch!”

  The dust was clearing now, and the thing that hovered over the horizon became terrifyingly, overwhelmingly clear. It was the image of the creature they had seen on the wall of the church. A huge, flea-like monstrosity, with a segmented body whose myriad bristles shone with an unearthly light. From its lower end, an awkward tripod-like arrangement of jointed limbs emerged, although they did not make contact with the ground. Two huge compound eyes gazed over the realm that belonged to it, while vicious-looking mandibles clacked together in glee and frond-like antennae waved as if beckoning to the ragged hordes that swarmed toward it.

  Karen stared at the thing in horror, open-mouthed.

  “And that . . . that was Paul?” She could barely croak the words.

  “Only at the very beginning,” Moreby explained. “Once the essence of the Anarch had filled his body, there was nothing left of the individual you knew, only the supreme might of the God that you see before you now.”

  “Your God.” He had been slow on the uptake, but Chambers understood that now. He tried to keep the tremor out of his voice as he beheld the monstrous leviathan. “Your Almighty. But not ours.”

  “No!” Moreby spat the word at him. “Not yours. A secret and ancient god, one of a mighty pantheon known only to those few who have sought the sacred knowledge; have journeyed far to places where only the bravest and the most foolhardy would dare to ever venture; have lived and died and lived again so that they might continue their studies, and enter into that most vital of pacts with the Ancient Ones capable of bestowing upon them that which they most desired.”

  Chambers shielded his eyes from the insect god. “You talk as if you yourself have lived many lives.”

  “Indeed I have!” Moreby seemed more than happy to discuss the matter with them. “Tell me, why was it that you both decided to embark upon an investigation of All Hallows Church?”

  Karen and Chambers looked at each other.

  “Because of the scrolls,” Karen said eventually.

  “What scrolls do you speak of?”

  “The ones that were found, sealed in the clay pots.”

  “Ones that just happened to tell a story, by any perchance? A story that foretold of things to come?”

  Chambers shook his head. This was just too incredible. Then he checked himself. No, after everything they had been through, nothing was too incredible anymore.

  “You’re not trying to tell us that . . .”

  Moreby nodded. “It took many centuries of work to achieve the goal of lifetimes. Naturally, I had to assume the persona of many different individuals to achieve it. ‘Geoffrey Chaucer’ was but one of these, and in thus guise I was able to lay the foundations of a plan that is soon to bear fruition.”

  “Remember what Dr. Cruttenden told us about Chaucer?” Karen was squeezing Chambers’s arm. “About how he went on a mysterious sea voyage in 1377? And then disappeared from the historical register altogether in 1400?” She glared at Moreby. “Where’s Dr. Cruttenden now? What have you done with her?”

  Moreby shook his head. “Through her I have guided you to this place. The exertion of one will over another is not without its consequences. I am afraid that by the time we reached the Ninth Circle, there was very little of Dr. Cruttenden left to manipulate.” He gave a tiny shrug. “And now there is nothing left at all. She knew it might end like this, but she was willing to give herself up for the knowledge I allowed her, for the insights into aspects of history that none but the dead are party to.”

  “She died for knowledge?” Even as he said the words, Chambers believed them. Academics wanted for nothing else, and if it came at the cost of their own lives, he knew more than a couple who would be willing to pay that ultimate price.

  “But of course.” Moreby seemed to find this unremarkable. “I visited her once in Oxford—in fact, I believe you both were there—and then again, later in the church. After that it was an easy matter to both guide her mind and take her soul. You never guessed though, did you?” He smiled at that. “I must admit that she did do a marvelous job of getting you here without either of you suspecting a thing. I would offer her my heartfelt congratulations . . . if there was anything left of her to congratulate.”

  Suddenly Chambers remembered the question he had wanted to ask Dr. Cruttenden back in the Circle of Fraud. But now he knew the answer. Of course it was Moreby who had been able to speak the alien incantation so perfectly and effect their escape from the Circle of Violence.

  “What is this plan? The one that’s taken hundreds of years and cost the lives of the people we knew?” The glow from the flea god was increasing now, and Karen was shielding her eyes.

  “Not just people you knew.” Moreby glanced at the thing hovering on the horizon for a moment. “So many souls over the ages have been sacrificed for this one cause, and the Anarch is only a small part of it.”

  Chambers licked his lips. “Well, seeing as we’re also part of it, and seeing as we’re most likely going to die too, you might as well tell us what it is.”

  “Very well then. You should know what fate has brought you to this place. I followed the directions in the Liber de Nigra Peregrinatione.” Moreby almost had to shout to be heard over the noise of the mass movement around them now. “I found the legendary city of Chorazin, and its whispered Black Cathedral. And I made a deal with what I found within.”

  “The Anarch?”

  Moreby nodded. “That is not its true name. But no human tongue could pronounce it. An ancient and forgotten god, trapped on a plane beneath Hell and yearning with the desire of eons to return to the world.”

  “Trapped?” Chambers pointed at the vast insectoid creature. “How could something like that become trapped?”

  “It was imprisoned in the Sea of Darkness by the changing beliefs of men and women throughout the ages, as they created layer upon layer of ideas of what it meant to be eternally damned, ideas that were eventually summarized and given form by Dante Alighieri in his Divina Commedia.”

  “There are other belief systems, and many other visions of Hell.” Chambers was partly stalling for time, but he also wanted to know. “Was Dante the one who somehow miraculously got it right, then?”

  “There are many ways to descend to the Sea of Darkness, but all have Nine G
ates to keep those banished here from returning back into the world. In return for opening them, my God has granted me immortality—His gift for a job well done. The distance from the pit of Hell to the civilized world has always been impossibly vast. Now, thanks in part to you two, it is considerably shorter. And it can be bridged.”

  The first of the denizens of Hell had reached the horizon now, and the air was sparking with blue lightning as energy passed from the image of the Anarch to the tiny figures. As each one was struck, it turned away from the fallen god, and began to return to where they were standing.

  “Behold!” Moreby’s eyes glinted with the zeal of madness. “The Anarch who is the Servant of God and I who am to be His representative on Earth! With His army of Hell I will bring his gift of chaos to a world that has been too long without it!”

  “What do you mean?” Karen’s eyes were still fixed on the horizon, at the myriad blue flashes that were now crackling from the immense figure and momentarily encasing the creatures beneath it in the same, blinding light.

  “He is imbuing them with His power, the power of the Old Gods.” Moreby seemed almost too overwhelmed by what they were witnessing to speak.

  “Then what?”

  “Then He is sending them back. They will pass through the circles, through the Gates which you have opened, so that they shall ascend through each one until finally . . .”

  “. . . they reach our world.” Chambers’s face was grim.

  “And chaos shall once more reign over all!”

  The returning dead were closer now, moving much faster since they had been filled with the Anarch’s power.

  Karen gripped Chambers’s arm. “We have to stop this!”

  “No one can stop it!” Moreby was triumphant. “You opened the gates, now they can pass through! No one can stop the might, the will of the Anarch!”

  There was a rumbling behind them. Chambers and Karen turned to see, in the distance, that a broad staircase of spiraling black stone had emerged from the pallid landscape. Puffs of dust fell from it as it rose, higher and higher, until it penetrated the purple sky high above them.

  “They are coming!” Moreby pointed at the closest ranks of the dead, then at the staircase. “And soon they will rise again!”

  “Not if we stop them first.” Chambers grabbed Karen and began to run toward the steps.

  Karen pulled him to a halt. “How can we? Dr. Cruttenden said all along that we can’t go back.”

  Chambers shook his head and urged her on. “I don’t think Dr. Cruttenden told the truth as often as we thought.”

  “But how can we close the gates?” Karen asked as she followed him.

  “If we opened them, it stands to reason we’re the only ones with any chance of being able to close them too. Perhaps passing back through the circles will have the reverse effect.”

  “It is too late!”

  From far behind them, the sounds of Moreby’s voice urged them both on. They reached the first step when he shouted again. “You have broken things that cannot be repaired! Not even Verney’s constructs will be able to save you now, should you even get that far!”

  Karen was following Chambers up the stairs. “What does he mean?”

  “I’ve no idea.” Chambers was starting to get dizzy. The higher they went, the more blustery the fetid wind became. “Just keep going.”

  When they were a hundred feet above the plane of the Sea of Darkness, they both looked down, and both wished they hadn’t.

  The dead were coming.

  Crawling, stumbling, clawing, the denizens of Hell were making their sure and certain way up the staircase, crowding the broad steps to the extent that many fell from the sides. Those who landed in the gray dust below merely dragged themselves back to their feet and began climbing again, no matter how great the distance they had fallen. Chambers was reminded of soldier ants piling over and on top of one another in their single-minded efforts to reach their destination. On the horizon, the unchanged dead were still pouring toward the Anarch to receive their unholy blessing. The god was so immense that even at this height and distance it towered over them.

  “Hurry!”

  Chambers had begun to slow, but Karen’s cry spurred him on. On and on they went, higher and higher, until the ground below them seemed miles away, the Anarch ever-present, dominating the horizon and delivering blue flash after blue flash of energy to the dead still arriving to receive their obscene communion. It was only when the black stone beneath his feet began to blur, and the air through which he was walking began to thicken in a haze of purple cloud, that Chambers knew they were reaching the exit. Before he had time to think anything else, they were out of the Sea of Darkness, and back in the Ninth Circle of Hell.

  THIRTY-FOUR

  THE COURTROOM WAS DESERTED.

  Chambers was not surprised. The jury that had presided over their “hearing” had been the first to descend into the Sea of Darkness. Even the judge-thing had vanished, leaving behind it a vast impression in the worn leather of the chair in which it had been sitting, and marks on the bench where moldering fingers must have gripped the wood in ages past.

  “Where is everyone?”

  Chambers answered Karen as he searched for the way out. “They went before us, remember? They were the first ones down into that hellish plain of Moreby’s.”

  “I don’t mean those. I mean the others, from all the other circles. Surely they have to come through here on their way down to the Sea of Darkness?”

  Chambers hadn’t thought of that. “There must be other courtrooms like this,” he replied. “Perhaps an infinite number of them.” He began tapping on the wood paneling of the walls. “One thing’s for certain, though,” he said with a grimace, “the undead who are coming away from the Anarch, the ones who have received their ‘gift,’ will likely be coming through here soon, so help me find a way out of here.”

  Karen joined him in tapping and kicking at the walls and floor. Every now and then she glanced over at the corner of the room near the judge’s bench, where the staircase yawned.

  “Still no sign of them,” she said as Chambers began to give serious consideration to trying to lever the oak boards off whatever wall they must be attached to. “Just a minute. Yes, I think I can hear them coming now.”

  Chambers searched around for something he could use to tear the wood free, but there was nothing that even remotely resembled a useful tool. Perhaps there was some sort of steel light fixture hanging from the ceiling? He looked up.

  And saw the way out.

  “Give me a hand with this!” Chambers rushed over to the jury stand and wrenched at the wooden enclosure. It came free easily. With Karen’s help, they positioned it under the glowing purple circle that had appeared dead center in the ceiling.

  “Hold it steady,” Chambers said. “Let me get up there, and then I’ll pull you through.”

  A low moaning was now coming from the staircase.

  “Hurry up!” Karen held the enclosure steady as Chambers climbed onto it. He stretched, but still couldn’t quite reach the exit.

  “I’m going to have to jump,” he said.

  “Well go on, then!”

  Chambers took a deep breath and launched himself at the exit just as the head of the first zombie appeared above the rim of the steps. Arms outstretched, but with his angle misjudged, Chambers missed by inches and fell back. He yelped as the foot of his injured leg landed on the thin rim of scarred wood.

  Two zombies had entered the Ninth Circle now, and were shuffling toward them.

  “They’re almost here!” Karen screamed.

  “I know!” Chambers crouched as best he could, and then launched himself into the air once more. This time his fingers met with the lip of the exit. It felt curiously soft, like plunging his fingers into a velvet cushion. He thought he was somehow summoning superhuman strength to pull himself up, until he felt Karen pushing from below. Then he was through and leaning back downward into the Ninth Circle, arms outstre
tched to grab Karen.

  Five of the undead had surrounded her, and she was climbing onto the wooden enclosure just as they began to reach for her.

  “Grab my hands!”

  She jumped.

  She missed his hands by a whisker and fell back to the floor.

  There were now more zombies in the room.

  Somehow Karen managed to dodge between them and get back to the wooden frame. It was slowly being pushed across the room by the movement of the creatures. She tried to push it back, but the combined force of the undead was too much for her. She climbed on anyway, launching herself at an angle in an attempt to grab at Chambers’s flailing hands.

  He caught her right wrist just as the enclosure collapsed beneath her.

  “Pull me up!”

  Chambers was too busy doing just that to reply. As he dragged her through the exit, they could both hear the howls of anguish as the Anarch’s undead were deprived of their first human victims. For now, anyway.

  They were back in the Circle of Fraud, halfway up Chambers’s ice staircase. Karen skidded a little and clung onto him. She looked over the edge to the land far below.

  “It’ll take them a while to climb that,” she said.

  “Except that none of this is what it seems. We’re in Fraud, remember?” Chambers looked up, then down, then over the side.

  “We’re going to jump,” he said.

  “Are you insane? We’ll break our necks if we fall that far!”

  “We won’t fall. To escape from Fraud it’s important that you don’t go along with it . . . that you don’t go the way it wants you to. So the way out of here is neither up nor down, but straight across.”