Redneck Eldritch

by Nathan Shumate

  She was there, fighting claw to claw and mind to mind with the fiend our human papa had unleashed upon us both in his twisted ambitions, the fiend who’d made us the unwilling victims of this sickly energy that was quickly ripping our humanity away from us. There was no other way to stop his wave of destruction, and no other way to survive but to let the dark elements take us, and that sinking sense of doom became something more everlasting and profane than death. Time had warned the fiend about the perils and futility of creating fodderlings to escape his demise. Time had groomed me to carry out its consequence, the full extent of which remained obscure to me.

  A dull ache seized me deep in my bones, and I felt a thousand things pop at once. I was growing, twisting, my whole body distorting. The change accelerated. My ribs bulged and my shoulders sank, lengthening my torso and extending my neck several inches. My guts crawled around as they rearranged themselves, and my muscles slithered and swelled. My slime-saturated shirt grew constricting and I tore it away.

  My arms and legs stretched. My fingers and toes elongated, and the flesh between them melted back, splaying the meaty digits wider. I yanked my hands to my chest and curled them against me in futile defiance when two extra fingers budded up between the fingers I already had and the breath of my paws expanded. My spine flexed, crackling and jarring me with strange chills as the bones there multiplied. A tail budded and snaked out past my feet, hardening and rippling with new muscle like the rest of me. A pair of feelers teased up from the fibers of my spine, worming around under my skin until they found their mark and sliced out of my back into a pair of wonderfully gruesome spines.

  Fine, leathery webbing climbed across my many digits. The same sort fanned out across the hardened fibers of my spine, which had jointed and bulked with muscle so I could stretch them, flap them. I tasted chemicals and the inky energy together in a peculiar rush of something more sophisticated than sensation alone. The ease and grace with which I folded my new antennae/wings flush against my back nearly convinced me I’d become the dark god this hellish universe intended to make of me. I staggered to my doglike feet with webbed, taloned toes and threw myself at the fiend to tear him off Cassie-Jo. My body felt powerful. I stood over ten feet high. My foe was closer to twelve feet in length from head to toe, and his limp tail put him at about fourteen feet in all, but he could only raise his torso about four feet off the ground in his present wormlike stance.

  The wounds he’d inflicted in my flesh knitted together, leaving no trace. My skin thickened and crusted with dense little spines everywhere except for a varying line from my head to my thighs, and under my arms. Every movement I made felt like I was sheer brawn encased in rubber. But I was disoriented, and I battled the nausea of madness that came with losing so much of what I’d known and had been in so little time.

  It startled me to discover a sensitive nerve network had materialized within the whole swath of skin across my fingers and palms when I reached for Cassie-Jo’s arm to pull her away from her battle with the fiend. There was a bizarre sweetness to her skin, both energetic and material, that was utterly unlike the taste of sugar, and I shivered. She was cut up, fighting back her own revulsion and terror at what was happening to us. She couldn’t scream either now, and her bones were going to crack any second. I knew she might lose her shit then, and the Elder Thing would have his way with her out of sheer spite if I couldn’t buy us both a few minutes of reprieve. I pulled her after me, and we ran deeper into the mine, collapsing near the mouth of the pit that had once been my home and her prison.

  It would be our prison forever afterward, I realized. The Webowax had warped the natural flow of cosmic energy coming out of the pod to make it more accessible to lesser, undamaged hosts. When Earl broke that connection so violently, much the way he had broken my thoughts out of his head, that energy had wrapped back in on itself. The energy had fled to cling to the bowels of the mine instead, turning it into one giant Webowax and reactivating the commands he had used to trap the Elder Thing. When Cassie-Jo drew on that energy to embrace the change, she unwittingly trapped us under its influence. I knew well the boundary where the anomaly of energy ended, where I’d fallen on my face in the soot and the old bastard had dragged me inside. The mine created us, and the mine would cut us off from our sustenance and from each other’s thoughts if we ever left its confines. Further still, it would draw energy away from us back toward itself and leave us as desiccated corpses if we ever set foot outside again.

  The terror of it, the whole gruesome picture of this dead end, was too much. A shockwave of pain ripped through my head. I clutched my skull and roared. I thought it was the crippled god tormenting me until my skull cracked in several places and my head expanded. Oh, the bliss when my emotions fell away from me like ash from burning wood. The energy older than matter and time itself would purge the last of my crude and superfluous morphology, right down to the genes, the atoms, and the subatomics. I fought the lightless stuff no more but accepted that I’d become one of its chosen clay. I’d been born to it in part, after all.

  Everything inverted on itself. The irreparable pain of my warped condition filled me with exquisite satisfaction, and the pureness of my devastation and inconsolable terror cemented my stability and invulnerability. I was Papa Mayhem now, as Earl had put it. My skull bulged and broadened, fanning out into bony processes like a cuttlefish’s. The little opening that remained of my shrunken lips closed completely, and the mad part of me reveled in the retraction of my nose and the dissolution of my teeth, palate, and jaw behind the sealed flesh that had once borne a face.

  I couldn’t breathe, and I learned I didn’t need to anymore. I still had lungs, or something like lungs. These drew the stale gases trapped inside me back and forth in reflexive spasms until they quieted and fell dormant for a short time. The energy had freed me from my need for material sustenance. I no longer itched for breath, food, or water, except to indulge in the bodily experience of such consumption.

  The musculature of my shifting skull drew my tentacled mane deeper into the cavity of my mouth, closer to my esophagus. Then the new jawless ring gummed and teethed until a hexagon of skin sank to meet it and the circle of emerging teeth cut a wide new hole. More constrictable rings of teeth formed a fleshy cone tube behind it. I salivated, chewing and sucking new air, and the corpulent nest of tentacles bobbed and smacked with a twisted sense of glee at the perfection of this hideous orifice.

  I rose, physically blind and inwardly unable to blink, to face the thing I’d once trembled to call “Pa” as his withered aura and broken body slithered forth to decapitate and eat me, if it could.

  “You should not exist!” his cosmic voice cried. “You are a paradox I created, and a paradox I must destroy or the natural balance of things will be forever altered. Surely you’ve sensed how out of place you are, both in your natural state, and in joining the Old Ones.”

  Ma made a strange vibration in my new senses that I took for a sort of sobbing as she wriggled and clawed the clothes off her own twisting form with the only hand she had. I raised my hands to the sooty ceiling and took command of the living Webowax, the mine, and my mind churned the words of the curse with which the dark heart of space had transformed me toward my foe.

  I hunched down and gripped the Elder Thing by the throat. His cries of agony shrieked across my mind as I sucked away every last particle of the chaos from his form. At last he curled into a fetal ball before me, clutching his skull until his brain imploded and his aura scattered like dust into the writhing knot of energy thrumming through the tunnels. Later, I would eat his corpse.

  I reached for Cassie-Jo’s shoulder and joined her back to the flow, splitting the power to draw its sustenance between us. When, at last, I collapsed beside her, numb as ice, her hand licked out across my arm, searching for mine. I took her hand but we both pulled away with a start at the intensity of sensation. A thing as human and natural as holding hands had warped into something bizarre, intimate. It unsettled me, lik
e we’d held onto something I didn’t care to know about anymore because it contradicted what I’d become.

  She did that sobbing thing again, and I reached for her, cautious to avoid her hand. Her skin was smoother than mine, knotted though it was, and its slime still bore that strange inner and outer sweetness that wasn’t sweet. She brushed my face, fingers feathering over my mane of tentacles. I drew her hand in toward my strange lips and kissed the back of her knuckles with my mouth and suckers. I traced the contours of her broad, hairless skull, and she returned a cautious kiss to my hand with the shorter mane expressed about her own mouth. I pulled her to me in an embrace.

  She still had breasts. It surprised me, considering all the deep changes we’d been through. I checked and found I still had all my parts, too, and they weren’t like those of the thing I’d destroyed. I’ll be damned, I thought. Then a part of me roared back in disturbed amusement the fact that I was already damned. Skin and bones aside, some of the most fundamental components of our humanity had remained unaltered by cosmic conformity.

  Somewhere inside me I still knew lust, and beauty, and disgust, and I still knew it wasn’t right to want Cassie-Jo, her being my Ma and all. I didn’t want to hurt her. I wanted her to stop crying, to help me accept the hell of our fate for what it was and tell me it was going to be all right anyway. That meant some part of my head was still human, too, that some part of me still thought about things like the color of sunsets, and wars, and video games, and still cared. I laughed, if you could call that strange gurgling purr I made in my throat laughter.

  That’s when my skin receded back around the sockets in my skull and my eyes came back into existence. They weren’t special. I thought they were useless at first, because they saw only darkness where my mind saw the energy and Cassie-Jo, and the two dead bodies we’d added to countless others that had decayed into the now-living tunnels of the mine.

  My new eyes soon perceived shapes, and they took in the young sliver of moonlight kissing the hills of Appalachian wilderness just beyond the threshold of these cursed tunnels. It hurt more than I could hope to describe in any tongue, old or human, knowing I’d never be able to bask in the light or warmth of day again. The frigid slime of deep space would ooze from me forever until the day something broke my connection to the dark elements and finally obliterated me like my two fathers. I could still feel after all, and I knew there was still one way I could bring Cassie-Jo a measure of peace.

  She still wanted babies, babies that were whole, babies that weren’t conceived to be eaten or destroyed. With control, we could have offspring more human than we’d been, with enough of the Elder Things in them to withstand the chaos in the cradle, who could leave this mine unharmed when they were grown. Immune. Natural. Free. This was the change the Elder Thing had feared, the paradox, the shift in cosmic balance time had warned him about. After us, there would be no more Deep Things, or Elder Things, or Captive Things.

  My new eyes shed tears as I turned them on the girl in my arms. She quaked against me with the shared knowledge of the endless, unnatural torment she’d elected to bring upon us in an effort to save me and stop the fiend who would have destroyed us and others still. She would never grow old. Neither would I. We were damned together. I wanted to love her so the two of us could forget.

  Her enlarged eyes met mine, looking far more cephalopoid than human. But surrounding each rectangular pupil in the pale lick of moonlight that graced us was a doe-brown iris, a familiar trace from a past form and a past life we’d forsaken. Her gaze was no longer glazed and distant, but sharpened and dark with the affliction of our understanding. They glistened with the same tears, the same inverted terror and apprehension I knew.

  “This ain’t how things is supposed to be,” she whispered in my mind in the language of the damned. “You’re my baby. Not… not…”

  “We’re gods now,” I replied. “The rules is different for us, and it’s too late for us to turn back. Cassie-Jo, I think I always wanted to kiss you. You’ve become more magnificent a fiend than all the predators and parasites that do what nature made them to do. You’re the first and only She-Thing I’ll ever think to love. Will you marry me, the son who adores you and shares your condemnation?”

  She shook with that same purring laughter I’d made. I drew her strange mouth toward mine and kissed a strange kiss, our tongues and tentacles snaking around one another in a natural delight I’d thought the dark had taken from us. I took her hand, and we took back our humanity in the only way we still could.

  BLOOD

  Steve Diamond

  Her entrails still steamed in the cool March air. Franklin Mercer wiped his eyes for the thirteenth time since he had walked into the house with his bouquet of flowers.

  The woman’s name was Rebecca Mercer, and she was his wife.

  Franklin pulled a pocket watch from his jeans and checked the time. Nearly two in the morning. Which meant it was officially their anniversary. Ten years.

  Her beautiful red hair now lay thick with blood where it had pooled around her in a crimson halo from her cut throat. So much blood. Franklin wasn’t any stranger to blood, but it still shocked him how much had escaped from his Rebecca.

  When he’d walked into his home with the flowers, he’d hardly crossed the threshold when the smell assaulted him. Blood, yes, coppery and thick in the air, mixed with the indignities of death… but under it, the familiar smell of sulfur. Franklin knew that smell, an odor that spoke of old rites and summonings. He and his brothers had witnessed more than their fair share of “normal” atrocities in Vietnam, and then some. Most members of Franklin’s family could see things. They could sense when the Elder Gods’ own were near. Many had taken up the cloth in some form or another to warn humanity against the things of the night—things even the night was afraid of.

  But not Franklin. And not his brothers.

  What was the point of warning people when you had the means to send evil back down its hole?

  Besides, Franklin knew that as terrible as the Elder Things were, human beings were just as capable of evil and selfishness. He knew he wasn’t free of those failings either.

  Franklin crossed the room to the kitchen table and sat down. He carefully placed on top of the table the flowers he’d cut from outside. His eyes were drying up; he was running out of tears. For a moment he was glad their children hadn’t lived to see this. No child should see their mother in this state.

  After a few deep breaths to steady his nerves, he pushed himself back to his feet and retrieved a sheet from their bedroom to drape over her. He paused only long enough to close her eyelids. Those green eyes had looked so terrified and shocked.

  He went back to the room and opened the closet—he’d built the armoire himself, just like the rest of their home—and pushed aside the shoes on the floor of the closet. Using the small hole in the back, left corner, he pulled up the floor board to expose the false bottom. Snug in the recess was a box, the top inlaid with carved stars and runes.

  Franklin pulled out the box and opened its lid. More stars and old, arcane symbols covered the inside surfaces. The only thing inside was a single Colt Peacemaker.

  Franklin knew what would be coming his way, and there wasn’t much time. Blood and sulfur always called the Old Ones and their minions.

  He ran his fingers over the runes—ancient words from a dead language—carved into the grip of the Peacemaker and etched along the barrel. It could kill what normal guns couldn’t. As he walked out of his home, he spared a glance to the shrouded form of his wife.

  He’d go to Hell and back for Rebecca. Do anything for anyone or anything for her.

  Franklin took one step outside his front door, pulled the lever back on his pistol, and fired it into the air. There weren’t but five homes in the vicinity—all built by him just three years ago—and that gunshot would bring their occupants running. And they’d come armed. He expected no less of his brothers.

  ***

  Franklin Mercer didn�
��t have to wait long. His brother came—guns ready—into the clearing in which his home had been built. They each carried a pistol similar to his own, all passed down from the Lieutenant.

  “Heard the shot, Franklin,” Jeremiah said. He was the youngest of them, with dark hair that had no chance of ever being tamed.

  “It does my heart good to know you still know the sound of this here gun.” Franklin held up his pistol, then flipped open the cylinder to pull out the empty casing and replace it with a fresh one.

  “What happened?” asked Henry, only eleven months Franklin’s junior. Henry looked a bit like a bulldog. He’d been the only one of the brothers to inherit their father’s looks.

  Franklin gestured inside. “You’d best go see.”

  They knew better to question him. After all he had done to get them through the war, they accepted his words without a fuss.

  Franklin waited outside as they all filed in silently. He didn’t plan on going back in there himself until this was all finished.

  Stephen came back out first, followed by his twin, Alan. They weren’t much for talking, but Stephen put a hand on Franklin’s shoulder. He didn’t say a word. Didn’t need to.

  “Condolences,” Alan said. He did most of the talking for the twins. His eyes were wet, and Franklin figured this was the first time he’d seen his brother weep. “Any idea who did it?”

  “Oh, I think I have a general idea,” Franklin answered.

  Jeremiah and Henry followed the twins out. It was a few more minutes before Daniel walked out, his brow furrowed in concentration. Daniel was the smart one, the one that people had to be careful around because he never missed a trick.