Deepest, Darkest Eden: New Tales of Hyperborea

by John Shirley

  No noise til morning when he was roused by a willowy whiteness, young, platinum, around the same age as the dark haired girl he first met and the redhaired girl who had roused him the previous day. The women of the house seemed to grow young and old as he slept, one a child, one a crone and one a woman his age. Such things made sense in the cavern. The blonde was a joyful and quiet child, rousing him with only a soft touch on the cheek and a whisper of “breakfast is ready”. And from the smell of roasted meat, he could tell it was.

  Though the old woman cooking was ancient, her red hair had only faded slightly into a pinkish color. She spooned him some soup quietly, a sharp, vulpine smile upon her face.

  “I trust you had a pleasant sleep,” she said.

  The dark haired girl, already up and seated at the table looked nonplussed.

  “Mother!”

  The blonde tried politely to hold back laughter.

  “We’re all women in this house. We all know what goes on in it.”

  The young man could not help but blush.

  “It… it was a nice night.”

  The old redhaired woman laughed heartily.

  “I’m certain it was. Eat up. Tell us about love.”

  “Love?”

  “Yes,” said the blonde, “I would like to hear you speak about love.”

  The young man had not thought to speak about love before. It had only brought him pain; it had led him, in fact, to his quest to be eaten, and to this cavern. He spoke of his love and of the man she had chosen instead and of the betrayal and the disappointment and of the loss and the unworthiness. He did not speak of the spider but of what had brought him to the spider. The spider was far from his mind. He spoke then of the night he had with the blonde and then with the dark-haired girl and of the satisfaction he had felt staying in this place.

  The red-haired old woman planted a kiss upon his forehead.

  “And you are welcome here as long as you would stay.”

  “I do not know,” he said, “how long I will stay.”

  “As long as you will, you will find what you desire.”

  And there was no more talk of staying or going from there. He enjoyed the company of the women; they were full of stories and songs, as one could truly only expect from residents of the cavern. They had chores to do about the cottage that made him feel useful and the dark-haired girl made him feel quite comfortable as he sat and rested his head in her lap. He spoke and laughed and sighed with contentment and the sighing became yawning and night came round again. Though he had only stayed there three days, he treasured the days and nights in this place equally and felt a certain amount of both excitement and regret as he turned in.

  Kissed out of slumber, the red-haired woman he saw on his first day at the cottage lay beside him. She clutched his hand tightly and smiled at him, warm as the phoenix plume of her hair, cool and soft as her snowy skin. The kisses they shared were long but gentle then grew in ferocity sharing blood drawn from bitten tongues. The fervor between them grew, taking from the place where they lay into itself, timeless, above and beneath judgment. They loved and played fought at once until nothing was left in them and they needed to rest.

  He stayed there through cycles of lovers, sisters and mothers, nights without judgment, days without consequence. He stayed there and forgot sacrifice and the name and the face of the one that had driven him to this place and the end of his life. He stayed and he became joyful, eager for the evening and eager for the morrow. He grew to love the three equally, for their words and their cooking, and their company and their sharp insights and their loving touch. If forced to choose, his heart would shatter but he would never be forced to choose by them. This place was not for that.

  But as a man who set out to be vanquished, there came a day when he dreamt once more of the spider and its jaws and the salvation of his village and the purgation of all that he had brought with him, things he had thought were purged among the women. He awakened and there was no bed and there was no house and he was alone once more among the gibberings of the archetypes and the objects without meaning and the objects too full of meaning to comprehend them.

  He tried to call out the names of the women and beg for them to come back to him and beg for him to take him back to the place that he had left, a place he knew in his heart was out there somewhere. Heart heavy, he set out, not knowing if he would find the spider or if he would once again see joy and hope and potential. He wandered intent but aimless, full of fear, knowing that he would find whatever he desired.

  The Lost Archetype

  By Brian Stableford

  Under normal circumstances, Durul Nariban would never have gone into the cave, because going into caves in the remoter slopes of Eiglophian Mountains was, in general, a very unwise thing for a human being to do. Even if one did not believe—as he did not—in four out of five of the monsters described in fireside tales, including most of the bastard spawn of the allegedly-beleaguered toad-god Tsathoggua, there was no doubt at all that Voormis still existed in the black peaks, and were extremely ill-disposed to humans, not least because persecution by human hunters had driven them to live in caves. Circumstances, however, alter cases, and when a man is being pursued by a dozen-strong gang of heresy-hunters avid for their ration of sacrificial blood, led by a crazed and vengeful priest like Yziug Imnuv, there are times when a sufficiently unobtrusive cave seems attractive, because, rather than in spite of its darkness and narrowness.

  The narrowness, in particular, seemed attractive. Durul Nariban had never seen a Voormi in the flesh, but they were reputed to be large, and he was glad to suggest to himself that any gap through which he, a thinner than average specimen of paltry humankind, could only squeeze with difficulty, was unlikely to seem hospitable to a furry giant.

  The last thing he was expecting to encounter in such a place was a snake, but when he felt something glide smoothly over his shoulder, around his neck, and then down his arm, it merely seemed that his run of bad luck was continuing to exercise its obstinacy.

  Ever-resourceful, Durul Nariban immediately conceived the bold plan of grasping one end of the snake—preferably not the end with fangs, although that would be a matter of chance—pulling it clear of his body and cracking it like a whip, thus, perhaps, dislocating its spine. In the darkness, however—for the dawn light was only just beginning to filter into the narrow cave-mouth, and his eyes had not yet adapted to the gloom—he could not see the slithering creature at all, and his ardently groping hands not only failed to find an end, fanged or otherwise, but failed to grip the creature at all, even as it curled swiftly around his midriff and formed itself into a kind of makeshift belt, wound three times around his waist.

  Although he could feel the pressure of a strange surface against his own, which certainly gave the impression of a cylindrical entity at least as long as he was tall and slightly thicker than his thumb, when he tried to grasp it and pull it off he could not do it. His fingers simply could not get a grip, as if the surface were somehow immune to friction, perhaps even devoid of true substance. Nor, when he had recovered from his panic sufficiently to reflect, did the soft surface seem scaly upon the flesh of his belly, as a snake’s would have done, but more akin to the texture of some luxurious and precious fabric. It was certainly not hempen, but the idea that the entity was not, after all, a creature of flesh and blood caused him to relabel it mentally as a rope.

  The idea of a rope was far less intimidating than that of a snake, and he wanted to gather whatever crumbs of self-confidence he could, for the ongoing ordeal.

  When he had made that mental adjustment, he felt the odd sensation that the entity was somehow satisfied: that it was content, for the time being, with the substitute identity in question…at least until it could find a real one.

  His hands, having given up trying to grip the remarkable entity, reached out to either side to support him against the walls of the cave, lest he fall over under the pressure of his exhaustion, but the harsh stone wall
s were far too cold for comfort, and there was, after all, no reason at all why he should stand up, given that his legs were aching horribly. Durul Nariban therefore let himself ease down into a sitting position, put his elbows on his knees and his head in his hands and cursed his fate.

  “Even if you were a real belt,” he said bitterly, you’d be no use to me.” It was, alas, true. He had been in bed when Yziug Imnuv had led his acolytes to seize him, trying to take him by surprise in the small hours, and he had been forced to flee in his nightshirt, only having only time to put on his clogs before leaping through his window and sprinting away.

  His nightshirt had been comfortably warm in his bed, beneath his rug, but it was no longer warm now that he was half way up the mountain, having run for more than three hours. He had gone up the slope because he thought that his pursuers might lose their enthusiasm more easily if forced to go uphill, but he had obviously underestimated Yziug Imnuv’s bloodlust and his authority over his followers. The advantage of his youth had only enabled him to gain a hundred paces in the space of those three hours, and he had to suppose that the hunters would find the cave eventually, now that daylight had come.

  “I’ll just have a rest,” he said to himself, “and then I’ll continue up the mountain. I’ll shake them eventually, even if I have to go all the way to the peak.” He spoke aloud, albeit in a whisper, because there was some slight comfort in hearing the sound of his voice.

  The voice that replied to him made no sound at all—and could not, therefore, really be a voice, as such—but he understood it nevertheless, and understood, too, that he was “hearing” in his guts rather than his ears.

  “Best go down, not up,” said the unvoice. “Go up, and you’ll probably run into the Voormis—and that will work out just as badly for you, as for me.”

  It was no time for debating the limits of the possible, so Durul Nariban simply accepted the fact that the temporary rope had spoken to him. He focused on the essential point.

  “Voormis?” he queried, in a tone a little too shrill to qualify as a whisper.

  “Six of them,” the unvoice confirmed. “Led by the last of the Voormi sorcerers, at the extreme edge of desperation. They went up to the peak to conduct their rite, and then headed down again, when I gave them the slip.”

  Had it been a mere matter of arithmetic, the number of Durul Nariban’s pursuers would have outmatched the one quoted by the temporary rope, but one of the furry monsters had to be reckoned equivalent to at least two humans, and he guessed that even a crazed priest of Yhoundeh possessed by evil intentions and bloodlust was probably not as dangerous as the last of the Voormi sorcerers at the extreme edge of desperation.

  Durul Nariban did not waste time contemplating the eccentric symmetry of the fact that while the heresy-hunters had been pursuing him up the mountain, the Voormi had apparently been pursuing something or other down the mountain, and that both quarries had taken desperate refuge in the same cave. Ever the optimist, he wondered, instead, what might happen if the Voormis who were coming down should happen to run into the humans who were coming up, while he and the temporary rope were able to hide out on the sidelines. His ready imagination showed him a satisfying shower of severed heads, torn limbs and glorious fountains of blood.

  Perhaps, after all, he thought, things were not as bad as they seemed.

  “And what would you do then?” asked the unvoice, whose possessor was manifestly not given to reckless optimism.

  It was a good question. Durul Nariban had a sneaking suspicion that he would not simply be able to go home. Although, technically speaking, he had been declared outcast and fair game for murder on the grounds that he was a secret worshiper of the forbidden god Tsathoggua, everyone in the village knew that the real reason was that he had seduced the youngest wife of the headman, Kokol Ammunix—or Kokol the Mighty, as he liked to call himself—who also happened to be the elder brother of Yziug Imnuv, high priest of Yhoundeh, the unforbidden goddess. Everyone in the village probably sympathized with him, if only secretly, because they were just as sensitive as he was to the horrid unfairness of Kokol Ammunix having six very attractive wives that he had no hope of satisfying, while there were good men and true who would never get the chance to try. That did not mean, however, that anyone would even be tempted to try and defend him against the supposedly-legitimate wrath of Kokol the Mighty, who would not be the village headman had he not had more than a little entitlement to his soubriquet.

  “There’s a lot more to Hyperborea than your village,” the unvoice pointed out. “You’ll have to go back down the mountain eventually, if you are able to give your pursuers the slip. Perhaps it’s time to broaden your horizons.”

  “And you want me to take you with me,” Durul Nariban deduced. “That’s why you’ve wrapped yourself round my waist, pretending to be a coil of rope. I suppose I ought to be glad that you didn’t continue pretending to be a snake.”

  “I’m not pretending,” the temporary rope replied, “and I didn’t have a choice. That’s not how it works.”

  “How does it work?” asked Durul Nariban, unable to resist the pressure of curiosity even in the darkest of circumstances—although the sun was a little higher now, and his eyes had adapted to the gloom well enough to show him the surfaces of the surrounding walls, so the circumstances were not quite as dark, at least in literal terms, as they had been. On the other hand, the space in which he found himself was exceedingly confined—there was no convenient tunnel leading deep into the heart of the mountain, into which he might go in the hope of finding another exit—so it was not entirely clear that the metaphorical darkness of circumstance had been alleviated at all.

  “It’s an essentially mysterious process,” said the unvoice, providing an answer of sorts to his question. “The sorcerer didn’t understand it either. Not too bright, the Voormis, especially when it comes to philosophical matters.”

  “Bits of rope aren’t exactly renowned for their intelligence,” Durul Nariban pointed out.

  The rope seemed to tighten momentarily about his midriff, but if the action was intended as a threat it probably didn’t work as intended. The rope’s strange lack of substance caused it to seem as if it were sinking into his flesh rather than squeezing it, almost as if it were trying to fuse its mysterious unsubstance with his own all-too-substantial and bitterly complaining flesh, but not quite succeeding. “It obviously doesn’t work that way either,” Durul Nariban observed. “Why are the Voormis chasing you?”

  “They want me to become a monster capable of exterminating humankind.”

  “But you can’t?” said Durul Nariban, hopefully.

  “I probably could,” the unvoice replied, “but I can’t do it just by wishing, any more than they can. Nor do I believe there’s magic enough even in the Book of Eibon to force or control the process. On the other hand, I’d never have believed that a hairy sorcerer, even on the edge of desperation, could conjure a nascent archetype out of the mists of being, so I could be wrong.”

  A dozen questions immediately sprang to Durul Nariban’s mind, but he shoved them all aside when a shadow suddenly fell across the faintly-lit floor of the cave. Someone or something was approaching the entrance, still hidden as yet by the jagged lip of the opening.

  Durul Nariban looked around desperately, hoping for some hidden corner where he might remain unnoticed by poorly-adapted eyes, but there was none. Whoever or whatever was about to stick a head into the gap to investigate the contents of the cave might not see him immediately, but would do so a matter of seconds.

  The one thing that gave Durul Nariban hope was that as the shadow became more distinct, it also became obviously human. He did not hesitate, knowing that the advantage given to him by the gloom would be very brief, and that he had to make the most of the element of surprise. He gathered the remnants of his strength, mercifully reinforced by his brief rest, and hurled himself out of the cave-mouth, head down, already knowing approximately where he would have to aim if he w
ere to ram his head full tilt into the searcher’s belly.

  Partly by luck and partly by judgment, he hit the target dead on. The man, who was armed with a spear—not the most convenient of weapons, in the circumstances—folded up with an agonized “Oof!” and fell backwards, badly winded. That prevented him from issuing an immediate call for help: a considerable advantage to Durul Nariban, as Yziug Imnuv’s men had obviously split up in order to search the area after losing track of him, and there was no one else nearby.

  Durul Nariban was distressed to see that the mountain slope was very uneven, full of gullies and asperities, which would make running downhill a more perilous exercise than running uphill had been, even by starlight, but he soothed himself with the thought that it would make things just as difficult for Yziug Imnuv’s men, all of whom were momentarily out of sight, hidden by those same asperities and gullies.

  His eyes immediately picked out a relatively smooth path, whose one disadvantage was that it was itself a ridge snaking down the mountain-side, on which he would be very easily visible to anyone on either side, whether upslope or down. The fact that one searcher had reached the altitude of the cave, however, suggested that the others would not be far away, and that there was a real possibility that none of the heresy-hunters would be in a position to climb the ridge ahead of him in order to intercept him. There was, in any case, no time for hesitation.

  Rapidly, he clambered up on to the ridge, measured his stride, and set off along it.

  Immediately, he was seen, but only from above, not below. The voice of Yziug Imnuv himself, marked by its towering rage, called attention to his presence and the direction of his flight, and the heresy hunters—who were spread out in the gullies to the left of the ridge—instantly set out to regroup and give chase. Fortunately, Durul Nariban had at least thirty paces head-start on the foremost of them, and they could not, as yet, move as rapidly as him. They did not even try to climb up on the ridge, but were content to run parallel to it, being unable to see, as he could, that the going would much more difficult for them than him.