Beneath Strange Stars: A Collection of Tales

by Ralph E. Vaughan

  A movement snagged Kira’s attention: the robed and cowled figure emerged from the alcove and approached the magician from behind. A curved blade flashed in the attacker’s delicate hand, hurtling downward.

  The magician whirled about, moving more swiftly than any warrior Kira had ever fought. The acolytes remained still. In the struggle, the attacker’s cowl flew back, revealing hair the color of the full moon and the features of a girl not yet a woman.

  Kira had been content to let them complete their rites and move on in the darkness. Now, Kira saw one whose animosity to Set and Set’s minions was greater than her own, an animosity that moved that one to ignore odds and danger, and now Kira felt herself moved by the Goddess to rush to that one’s aid.

  Kira padded swiftly across the stone floor, drawing her bronze sword as she ran. The magician’s head whipped in her direction. For an instant Kira gazed into absolute darkness, against which even the ebony sphere was but a pale reflection.

  At a guttural bark from the leader, Set’s faithful surged toward Kira and the girl. Kira cut down one reckless soul, but more followed. Bronze and silver flashed against the night. Kira fell into the magician, then recoiled as she felt ropy cords writhe and bladders inflate beneath the black cloth.

  Something slammed into Kira. She glimpsed bulbous obsidian eyes and a flash of silver as bright as the moon. She fell into the ebony sphere and then all was a formless void.

  Kira awoke upon a shore of volcanic crags, by a waveless grey sea. The sky was ash. The air was thin and bitter. Not far away, upon a narrow spit of land, an obsidian tower rose against the gloom. Kira gripped her sword and made for the black spire.

  Shrouded in obscurity, the world possessed no horizon. The land was formed from shadow. Slithering, writhing sounds came from the night land, and Kira hurried toward the tower.

  A portal was surrounded by fiery dolabriform glyphs. She passed through, wary of things that capered and fluttered just out of sight. She climbed stairs of dark crystal.

  Heavy breathing sounded from above, and the slow thudding of a great heart. Despite her growing fear, Kira continued upward, for there was nowhere else to go.

  Desperately gripping her sword, Kira cautiously entered the dim summit. The circular room was topped with a cupola of smoky crystal and edged about with colonnaded archways.

  A ropy black tentacle exploded from the darkness, wrapping about Kira. Another sought to rip her sword away. Kira pulled free of one tentacle and sliced through the other with sharp bronze. Kira hacked the strands of darkness seeking to snare her.

  Black muscular ropes struck Kira and her sword flew from her hands. Other tentacles gripped her, lifted her into the air.

  “Your death shall be delicious, woman,” a dull voice whispered. “I sent my soul ahead to prepare the way, to gather believers that I might escape this place.”

  “Who are you?” Kira said.

  “I am!”

  Hissing laughter echoed through the tower. The strands of darkness holding Kira drew tight, pulling her closer. She saw bulging eyes, a gaping maw. Frantically, Kira grasped her dagger and threw it as hard as she could into the heart of the squirming darkness. A choked and liquidy gasp filled the chamber. The tentacles about Kira loosened, fell like lax ropes. Darkness closed about her; the world of the night seemed to lose all substance.

  Kira fell through endless space.

  A pale light glimmered, and she fought her way toward it.

  Then Kira was on her knees in a temple lit by stars and the dark of the moon. Before her lay a black robe, ooze and smoke issuing from it. Protruding from the bubbling mass was Kira’s dagger. Beyond were a few dead worshipers and cracked flickering lanterns. The others had fled into the night.

  Thin arms circled Kira’s shoulders and helped her to her feet. She turned to see a girl with moon-bright hair. Kira pulled her dagger free and wiped it on the fiend’s robe. Her sword was against the wall of the temple. She picked it up.

  Kira gestured toward the dead thing. “It wore the sigil of Set to gather followers, but it was not Set. It was an extension of something older, more evil, something that, I think, has been waiting a long time to break free.”

  “You killed it,” the girl said. “You did what I could not.”

  Kira nodded though knowing the thing yet brooded in darkness.

  “My name is Orthia. My sister died trying to protect this place when the followers of that thing came by night,” the girl said. “I could only watch as she was slaughtered. I ran and hid. You’ve avenged her death and saved me. Who are you?”

  “My name is Kira,” she said. “I’m also your sister.”

  Orthia crossed the temple and pushed in a stone, which caused a hidden panel to swing open. She pulled a leather bag out and gave it to Kira. Insider were a hundredweight of silver.

  “They never found the temple’s treasury,” Orthia said. “Now there is none to claim it but you.”

  Kira poured half the money into her empty purse, then pressed the bag into Orthia’s palm. “You must flee Tarsettos.”

  Orthia kissed Kira’s hand and vanished into the night.

  Kira gathered her belongings. Before leaving the defiled temple, she used one of the lanterns to kindle a fire in the temple’s wooden frame.

  She hurried to the waterfront and booked passage on a ship sailing with the midnight tide. Once beyond the fortified harbor, Kira stood at the railing and gazed back. The fire consuming the darkness would ultimately be swallowed by the night, but, until then, how brightly it burned.

  I do not often write horror stories (my Lovecraftian tales really do not count) and less often tales of serial killers. Here, though, is a story which involves both. Societies naturally fear “the other” and “the outsider,” for it is a cultural survival mechanism. When people from “outside” enter a society, they bring with them all the ethnic and cultural baggage they should have left behind—it makes little sense to move to a new, established land, then try to remake it in your own image. However, societies have a certain flexibility, just as people do, so some traditions do get adopted, while others, often heinous in nature, do not, hence we have St Patrick’s Day and Hanukkah openly practiced, while animal sacrifice and honor killings remain undercover…hopefully. But since societies are made up of free-willed individuals, there will always be those who embrace the dark and the hidden things imported from elsewhere.

  Mythologies

  A Tale of Fantasy (Maybe)

  A suit of human skin hung suspended in the air…

  Jon Talmond huddled under the loading dock on Front Street. At first he dismissed it as nothing but a mass of swirling papers and other wind-blown trash, but the moving air, trapped between warehouses, held it aloft, unfolded it, made it dance. Then there was no denying its nature. A humanoid ophidian might have left such a relic, but in the pale lights of faraway Market Street Jon saw remnants of new blood and the neat slashes of a very sharp knife. The wind carried the diaphanous suit of skin into the night.

  Jon moaned silently, clamping fists to his temples and pulling his knees to his chest. What the hell was he doing here?

  The economy, of course, same as most people, he answered himself. The construction industry had bottomed; living on the edge of his finances, he had tumbled into the abyss. Then the wife and kids were gone and there was nothing to fight for.

  He tumbled through life till he crashed in a broken heap.

  He might have escaped the streets of San Diego, he told himself, but there were too many well-meaning people who made staying homeless and on the street easier than escape—if the weather turned foul, there was the shelter across from the bus company; when hungry, he could count on the Salvation Army, any number of churches, or businessmen expunging guilt by giving away change; when he felt sad at Christmas, he could go to the city’s shelter and surround himself with many worse off than he. Lacking motivation, it was easier to hold steady than to move forward. Even the murders failed to do more than make
him seek ever more secure shelters by the fall of night.

  The problem, as Talmond saw it, was not people were being murdered. It was just a fact of life. Murder was so common, even in a medium-sized city, that such occurrences were generally relegated to back sections of the newspaper, if reported at all. No, it was not the murders themselves, but the methods. What was important was the mind revealed in the manner of death.

  Three months earlier, the first victim was found by a street sweeping night crew—a large man sitting on the curb, back against a lamppost, his still-warm heart cupped in hands forced into a lotus position. Four days later, the second—he collapsed when touched because his skeleton had been removed.

  Each murder by virtue of its grotesqueness reeled across the newspaper, which was how Talmond tracked them. Undistracted by life, he read voraciously from newspapers and magazines salvaged from bins. A serial killer stalked the streets of San Diego, but there was no panic from people who voiced their opinions—only street people were being killed. How could that possibly affect them?

  The murder of Teodora Mantly changed everything.

  It was the city’s policy to renovate the city by inspiring upscale development in blighted areas. It was not unusual to see men in tuxes and women in gowns rubbing elbows with people like Talmond. Society luminaries strolled avenues haunted by people who had lost all hope. One block brightness and silvery laughter, the next darkness and insufferable gloom.

  The Kahn Metropolitan Theater was at the edge of the warehouse district, in what had once been the city’s Chinatown and, later, the Stingaree red light district.

  Teodora Mantly, owner of a stylish uptown gallery, left the theater after watching a revival performance of Arsenic and Old Lace. Witnesses saw her reach her silver Lexus which had been parked in a lot on State Street. At 3 AM, a private security patrol found Teodora sitting stiffly behind the wheel of her Lexus, doors locked, obviously dead.

  The police discovered Teodora’s skull had been opened, the brain removed and the bone-cap neatly replaced.

  Teodora, even in life, had not been the sort of person relegated to the back pages of a newspaper.

  The investigation began in earnest; the murders continued. Although the victims were still by and large street people, each death garnered more ink.

  Tires crunched gravel, and Talmond edged deeper into the blackness he had discovered under the loading dock, pulling his worn blanket tighter. He saw a police cruiser and still hid. This was a good place and he did not want to be rousted from it. They might have taken him to a shelter, and two of the murders had happened in shelters. Or they might just beat him—the cops had been mean and evil before, but now they were also scared to death.

  The cruiser’s side-spot cut through the night, swept over his huddling place, then was gone. He crept to the edge of the loading dock and watched the taillights vanish. Talmond noticed suddenly that his face was wet with tears and he loathed his weakness.

  Footfalls sounded. Before Talmond could skitter away a man stood next to the loading dock.

  “Got room?” The words were slurred. “I’ve a bottle.”

  “Go away,” Talmond said softly. “Leave me alone.”

  “Tired…damned tired…” The old man was already crawling under the dock. “Tired of runnin’…got a bottle…”

  Talmond pressed against the brick wall of the foundation, the man next to him, bottle extended. He took the bottle, tilted it to his lips and downed a huge burning swig. Then things were better, the night less deep, the terrors fading. The bottle was nearly full and obviously not the old man’s first. Talmond swallowed again.

  “Name’s Max.”

  “Jon.”

  Max was silent for such a time after that Talmond thought the alcohol had put him asleep. Then: “You afraid of the New People, Jon? They scare you?”

  “New People?”

  “Used to call them Takers, but it sounded just as silly when I called them the Dark Ones.”

  “Heard that somewhere before…”

  “People got all confused, said I was a racist at worst, an ethnophobe at best.” The old man laughed. “Politically incorrect any way you look at it, eh?”

  Talmond frowned in the darkness. The old drunk did not talk as old drunks were supposed to talk.

  “Do you ever pray, Jon?” he asked. “You ever whisper in the smallness of the night and hope someone hears you?”

  Talmond gulped from the bottle, then forced a nod.

  “To what gods?”

  “Some people say the murderer is a Satan worshipper or a renegade from a coven of witches.”

  Max sighed. “Not one man. It’s the New People, like I said.” He uttered a small laugh. “Besides, Satan’s just a pup compared to the really old gods that walk in the Grey Mountains. Specialists in comparative mythology have seen glimpses of the old ways, but they’ve only tread the fringes, seen campfires on the opposite shore. There is a mask, of which each perceived detail is only a fragment of an inconceivable whole. The old gods came with the New People, came to our shores—new lands in which to hunt, and our young gods cower before their elders.”

  “Who the hell are you?” Talmond hissed.

  “Max,” Then: “Maxwell Cyrus Wilson. I used to live in the light, but I escaped to the dark and people call me Max.”

  Memories stirred in Talmond, an article in a stained newspaper. “You vanished three weeks ago; you killed your wife.”

  Max shook his head. “The New People killed her. They came questing for me, but they found my...they found Alice.”

  Talmond recalled now, how Maxwell Cyrus Wilson, professor of folklore and ethnic literature, had vanished, leaving behind a wife who had been reduced to very small pieces. And a graduate student named Elliot Graves, whose bloodless body was found hung upside-down from the ceiling of Wilson’s study.

  Poor Alice…poor Elliot,” Max murmured. “Alice was ignorant of what I had discovered, and Elliot had grasped only a little of it. He didn’t want to believe, you know, didn’t want to admit there are times when it is correct to subdue the differences in others.”

  “They said you were trying to force the country back to the days of controlled immigration and segregation,” Talmond said.

  Max stared at Talmond with a confused expression on his face, then reached for the bottle. He tried to swallow but coughed it up.

  “They do not care for life because it is not part of their culture, and they have gods who hate us,” Max said sullenly. “But the worst of it is that they live out the mythologies they bring with them. They live the myths, and their old gods become real.”

  Furtive sounds came from the darkness. Talmond retreated into the shadows, away from the former academician, pulling his blanket around him. He reminded himself of an ostrich, but he did not find the comparison humorous—he understood the ostrich’s motivation.

  A small band of men glided through the night, clad in darkness. Talmond fought rising fear and the feeling that their yellowish eyes could see into the shadows, into the dark corners of his soul. When they paused near the loading dock, Talmond’s heart, already threatening to slam through his breastbone, nearly stopped.

  A terror-filled bleat sounded toward the railroad tracks. The searchers started for the sound. A large black man broke from the shadows beside a building and ran at the tracks, heading for the traffic of Harbor Drive and the lights of the new Convention Center, but they were upon him before he even reached the tracks, silent as wolves careful not to scatter the flock, dragging him back. They gutted and skinned him and left the sinewy remains on a rail signal post; they vanished with their prizes.

  “We’ve have to get out of here,” Talmond whispered. It was the first time he had seen anyone killed. “We’ve got to tell someone.”

  Max shook his head. “Predators fill ecological niches. With our laws and beliefs, we’ve created an urban ecology in which they can flourish.” Max lifted the bottle to his lips, paused, then let it drop. The crash o
f shattering glass split the night. “The days of the gods—Jehovah, Allah, Buddha—are numbered; Gotterdammerung for them all.”

  “Jesus,” Talmond hissed, his voice barely audible.

  “Chaos breeds life, order breeds habit,” Max said.

  “Those men…”

  “The New People. One day you may hunt with them, forging new mythologies for gods we had all but forgotten.” He chuckled. “The old gods did not forget us.”

  Swift footfalls padded closer.

  “Jesus,” Talmond mewled, seeking to merge with the shadows.

  They stood before the loading dock.

  Professor Maxwell Cyrus Wilson crawled into the open and stood. “I am he whom you feared; I am the stuff of legends.”

  The hunters of the night ringed themselves around the man, their numbers seeming to swell with each passing moment. They surged over him, obsidian knives flashing.

  Max did not scream; Talmond could not turn away.

  The New People were reverent, almost kind, in their cuts.

  When they vanished back into the night, taking with them holy relics of a new religion, Talmond emerged and ran from that place and hid until the dawning sun chased away the shadows. He applied for public aide and landed a job in a start-up plant where he was taught to make molds for designed plastic parts. It did not pay much, but he was quick to learn and did well. He did not return to the streets from which he had fled. He tried to contact his wife, but never found her.

  The murders continued for a time, but decreased in frequency and eventually ceased altogether.

  They were no longer necessary.

  People believed.

  Attendance at established churches, temples and synagogues dwindled to almost nothing. Street corner prophets multiplied, speaking for the great forms that moved in the darkness and hated humanity. When people went to sleep at night, they did not whisper familiar prayers and were as restless as cattle in the presence of the wolf. The long night was at hand.

  Talmond prospered with Polymorph Plastics, Inc., and within a year moved into a hilltop apartment overlooking the city and the bay. Sometimes he would awaken in the quiet hours before dawn, sweating and frightened for no reason he could clearly discern, and he would gaze over the shadowy streets. There did not seem to be nearly as many streetlights as he remembered.