Beneath Strange Stars: A Collection of Tales

by Ralph E. Vaughan

  As they journeyed into the night, Kira smiled at how Wabatu stayed close to her. He was not afraid of the spirits that dogged their steps, but he did fear those creatures of darkness vulnerable to a bronze sword. At his side he carried a throwing stick which could return to him, but its effectiveness at night was severely limited.

  Then they saw the fires of the Khuabata, small against a mountain rising to the frosty stars, a mountain Wabatu claimed was a single stone. The people were not surprised to see Wabatu and Kira emerge from the darkness.

  Around the central fire, the wise dreamers of the Khuabata told of the evil spirit that came upon them as they slept. The information they revealed matched what Wabatu had told Kira while still many leagues away.

  “The spirit comes up from the earth to punish us,” said Ghannarara, the youngest of the council of dreamers. “It punishes us for the presence of the stranger.”

  Wabatu shook his wooly head.

  “Beasts and demons from before the Dreamtime often search the land for prey, else no one would ever die. They come in the night and move on. This one, however, stays and feeds, spreading terror while we sleep. But it comes not because of Kira.”

  “If it takes the pale stranger,” Ghannarara said, “the strangeness of her dreams may satisfy it.”

  Again Wabatu shook his head.

  “You are neither wise nor experienced in the ways of dream.” He looked at those gathered about. “I shall sleep apart and meet the beast in dream. I will destroy it.”

  Ghannarara’s eyes narrowed and smoldered, but he said nothing to Wabatu’s proposal. The others nodded and murmured their assent. Despite their experience at dream-casting and soul navigating—Wabatu had tried to explain the concepts to Kira but had only partially succeeded—they were frightened by the beast that had come among them.

  Kira lightly touched the hilt of her sword.

  “If there is anything I...”

  The assembled men laughed, but their laughter ceased at Wabatu’s frown. He uttered sharp words Kira did not understand.

  Wabatu turned his gaze to her.

  “That which rages in the mind cannot be touched by the weapons you carry. It is not of the flesh.”

  “Be that as it may,” Kira replied. “I will stay by your side.”

  Later, Kira and Wabatu sat away from the others with a small fire between them. Wabatu chanted words in his own language and occasionally dropped pinches of herbs and dust into the flames, which sparked and hissed.

  In the years since she had escaped captivity among the tribes of the northern wastes, she had sold her skill with the sword and other weapons to those who could pay. Sometimes she earned coppers to protect a village, other times silver and gold from a lord. Most often, though, she earned her pay questing for an otherworldly type. Magician, alchemist, necromancer, typhonist—they were all the same to her, and she had learned to be very wary of them all. She had often watched them work their magicks, either using the objects of her quest or in preparation for the quest. They, too, used strange phrases or smokes and flames, as Wabatu did now, but she could not bring herself to liken the wizened wooly-haired old man who cast his dream-body across the leagues to those who sought to bend nature to their own warped wills.

  The night grew long, and the other campfires died away. A silence settled upon the world where it seemed that only Wabatu’s words filled the void. Though the words were alien to Kira, the chanting penetrated her being. After a while, it seemed to buoy her along like a leaf upon a gentle current. When the chanting stopped, she stared across the leaping colored flames of the fire. Wabatu seemed asleep, but she knew he was not.

  Then the old man opened his eyes, stood and took several steps away from the fire. He vanished behind her. But he still sat across the fire from her, sleeping. Kira tried to follow that part of Wabatu that had gone in search of the dream-beast, but she could not stand.

  She looked around. The world no longer seemed the same. It was still nighttime, the sky crowded with stars, but she could see through the darkness. The sacred rock near which the tribe encamped seemed imbued with a soft aura. She could look across the leagues of stony desert and see the sounding ocean, the creatures within and the ships upon it. The stars sang with soft voices. Between the stars slithered serpents that hissed in tongues Kira could almost understand. The moon became a dying old woman.

  Kira forced herself to stand. It was like trying to free herself from quicksand. She left the fire and started after the dream-body of Wabatu. Kira looked back to see herself still seated at the fire, across from the dull husk that looked like Wabatu. Each step took a supreme effort. It was her armor, Kira realized, the dead metal she carried. She divested her dream-body of the armor with which her mind clothed it, but she would not leave her sword. Besides, it was not heavy. The sword felt almost weightless at her side.

  Garbed in leather, Kira moved easier. She almost sprinted after Wabatu. She passed the sleeping forms the tribe. How like the dead they seemed, and yet there was a curious aura about them.

  Sounds of struggle drifted to Kira. She followed them to their source, expecting to find Wabatu gripped in titanic conflict with some great beast, some monster that would rival the ghastliness of the Medusae themselves. Instead, she found him fighting a man.

  At first she did not recognize her friend’s opponent, so twisted were his features. It was Ghannarara. The two fought over the sleeping forms of a mother and her child.

  Suddenly, Ghannarara struck Wabatu savagely with the back of his hand. Wabatu flew back and struck a rock shaped like a serpent’s head. He did not move.

  Ghannarara started for the mother and child, his hands extended before him like the claws of some predatory creature. This was the dream-beast that had come among them, one of their own number who used his skill at entering the dreamworld to devour the souls of his own people.

  “Leave them alone.” Though she had barely whispered the words, Kira’s command boomed across the landscape.

  Ghannarara staggered as if he had been struck and turned toward his new foe. When he saw Kira, he laughed.

  “The strange one has shed her glittering skin,” he sneered. “You no longer resemble a lizard basking in the sun, but you still look like you jumped up white.”

  “You are the monster come among your people.” Kira said.

  “They are all animals,” Ghannarara said, gesturing toward the sleeping forms around him. “I send my dream-body among them, and they are witless enough to believe that a spirit of the wastes torments them. They are weak.”

  “Wabatu found you out, though,” Kira said.

  “A powerful dreamer,” Ghannarara admitted, “but a foolish old man. His spirit will not be as sweet and tender as the others I have devoured, both away and here, but it will invest me with power. After a few more have died, I shall chase away the dream-beast and will be revered. In time, there will be in Sahu an empire to rival the greatness of the ones I have seen in my dream wanderings.”

  Thinking back upon what Wabatu had told her, Kira said, “Cities and empires are not the way of the nomads of Sahu.”

  “You sound as foolish as old Wabatu.” Ghannarara suddenly dipped his hand to the sleeping child at his feet and ripped its soul from its body. “Go back, woman, and leave me to my work. Perhaps I shall let you live for a while.”

  Kira rushed forward, striking Ghannarara with her fists. She did not feel strong against this man, not as strong as her powerful muscles should have made her. It was almost like fighting a blast of cold air. The more she hit him, the less solid his dream-body seemed to become.

  But the abrupt ferocity of the attack had startled the man, and he dropped the spirit of the child. Freed from his grasp, the luminous entity crawled back to the security of its sleeping form, to be cradled by a mother oblivious to the struggle taking place in the realm beyond sleep.

  Ghannarara’s face again twisted with hate, transforming into something not at all human. He sprang at Kira and threw her
down.

  “You are foolish in the world of dreams,” Ghannarara taunted. “You should not have allowed Wabatu to bring you with him. He was indeed a stupid old man. Of what help did he think something like you would be to him? Your spirit-flesh will taste strange, but I think I will enjoy it.”

  By the time he was upon her, Kira was on her feet. She grappled with him. He appeared to have a better grip than she, but she held fiercely and tenaciously. They struggled upon the dream-lit plain, within the aura of the sacred rock, surrounded by oblivious spirits, beneath the teeming, whispering sky.

  After an eternity, each threw the other away and sprang back. Ghannarara’s face was still twisted with hate and hunger, but now there was another emotion evident, even if only faintly—fear.

  Veteran of innumerable battles against men and monsters, Kira understood fear. She grasped the hilt of her sword. Its feel startled her. It seemed more substantial than her foe, and its usually cold metal was warm to the touch. Ghannarara laughed at her action.

  “Foolish woman! You may dream of your long weapon, but it has no power in this realm. It has no soul.” he flexed his black, claw-like fingers before him. “I shall shred your soul so that you suffer forever.”

  He advanced, and Kira parried with her sword. When the tip came into contact with the left arm of Ghannarara’s dream-body, the man shuddered and dropped back. Kira immediately pressed her unexpected advantage. Anger and hate washed away from his features, leaving only fear. No blood flowed from the wounds upon his dream-body, but particles of light seeped into the night.

  “You are the foolish one,” Kira said as she kept up her savage attack. “If you knew anything of the working of metal, you would know that all swords have souls, awakened in the fires of the forge. I dream of my sword, but my sword also dreams its own dreams, of which I am a part.”

  Ghannarara fell at her feet, light oozing from a dozen wounds. He crawled away from her, trying to reach his sleeping body, whimpering all the while. She cut off his escape.

  He looked up at her.

  “Spare me,” he whispered. “Let me live, and I will go away from these people.”

  “That would be a most unwise decision on my part, I think,” Kira said softly, raising her sword above her head.

  She brought the sword down in a roaring arc, cleaving Ghannarara’s spirit in twain, from head to waist. A column of light erupted, momentarily blinding Kira. When she could again see, there was a dry papery thing at her feet, like the skin left behind by a shredding snake, but having the general outlines of a man.

  She went back to Wabatu. A thin trickle of light seeped from a cut on his head. She sheathed her dreaming sword and lifted the spirit of her friend. He felt very light. She carried him back to his body, then re-garbed herself in the armor that did not dream and settled into the mortal husk of her body.

  Kira awoke to a gentle touch. It was Wabatu. The world was lit by the grayness of the rising sun and. For the briefest of moments, Kira wondered if any of her memories were anything more than dreams. Then, at Wabatu’s temple, she saw a line, like a very old scar, that had not been there before.

  “Ghannarara is dead,” Wabatu said. “I have told the others he was the dream-beast.”

  Kira stood and looked around. They were alone except for a body some distance from them. She crossed over and saw that it was Ghannarara. His body was unmarked.

  “Where are the others?” she asked.

  For a moment, Wabatu did not answer. Then he said, “They fear the whiteness and strangeness of you.”

  “But last night...”

  “Last night they feared you even more than today, but I told them you would help rid them of the dream-beast,” Wabatu explained. “They are simple people. Forgive them, for they are the sum of the fears that rule their lives.”

  Kira gazed into the liquid brown eyes of the man who had saved her life. “Wabatu, do you fear me?”

  He looked at her briefly, then turned his head northward.

  “It is now but a short journey to the place where the Bhugali come to trade. Let us go.”

  At eventide, Kira and Wabatu came to the sea. The water was a cruel blue, and strange stones rose from the gentle surf. There, Wabatu gave Kira a small pouch containing a quantity of moonstones, each a luminous sphere like the moon in phase. Then Wabatu returned to the wilds of Sahu. Kira watched him until the darkness swallowed him completely.

  The next day, a Bhugali trader appeared over the swells, dark sails billowing, a dreaming pilot at the prow. She traded a stone for passage, and another for the privacy of a cabin. She emerged from her cabin only when Sahu no longer stained the horizon.

  About thirty years ago, I told James P Roberts if civilization “as we know it” ended, humanity would create new mythologies. Fictions would become facts, used to explain the changed world. In the 1960s, I wrote a novel, The Winds of Alchemy, in which comic book super heroes became campfire tales, real in the minds of the people of the time, helping them understand the alchemical future. When I wrote this story, HPL and his mythos of monster-gods loomed large in my mind, so it was his writings (and those of his friends) that formed a template for understanding the new world. If nothing else, the stories, now taken as gospel, told the people of the fishing village of Darby what was permitted and what was forbidden. The beliefs were not true, but that hardly mattered.

  Possession Earth

  A Tale of the New Cthulhu Mythos

  “The Hounds of Tindalos took Simon Carlos,” announced Walter Burley, one of Darby’s biggest tongue-waggers. “Of that, there can be no doubt.”

  Everybody in the tavern knew Simon was missing, that he had dared to clear out a new section of land to expand his farm, and that the baying of the Hounds had been heard over the still evening air. It was obvious even to the slowest person in Darby that the Hounds had taken him, but Walter still managed to make it sound as if he alone were privy to that information.

  “That’s what comes from trying to change the way things are supposed to be,” Walter continued, “the way the Great Old Ones want things to be.” He paused for effect. “The retribution of the Great Old Ones is sure and terrible, swift and final. Simon broke the laws by trying to take more than was his lot, and he got what he deserved. No man can escape his Doom.”

  Nearly everyone in the Seaman’s Roost tavern listened with rapt attention. Walter was in rare form tonight.

  “Of course,” Walter said after pausing to take a sip of his ale, “there are more people in Darby than poor Simon who are tempting a visit from the Hounds or one of the other minions of the Great Old Ones. There are heretics among us…here, even as I speak.”

  The Seaman’s Roost fell preternaturally quiet, and everyone joined Walter in gazing toward Phil Howardson, who sat alone at a table away from the crowd of merchants, farmers, workers, and seamen in from other tiny coastal towns. Phil paused in mid-sip and met their gazes with unwavering grey eyes. It was not the first time he had been singled out by his suspicious neighbors.

  “Anyone have anything they’d like to say?” Phil challenged, breaking the silence.

  Many people felt their resolve breaking under his direct stare, and some turned their eyes away. Subdued conversations rose here and there. There were a few nervous laughs. Then the sharp nasal voice of Carl Dobbins, a toady of Walter Burley’s, cut through the murmurings and silenced them.

  “You know more than anyone else what sort of blasphemies you and your guardian practice out on his farm,” he said, taking, as usual, the side of Walter Burley. “You ask questions better left unasked, and so does Jon Lazarus. Always saying things better left unsaid. It’s a wonder you’ve not vanished already.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with wanting to know,” Phil said though he knew that only he and Jon Lazarus believed that. “The fact that Jon and I are still here proves that…”

  “That’s the kind of thinking that got Simon taken!” Carl spat. “First he clears a few trees out of the way, then a
few more. All of that against the teachings of the Great Old Ones – that we shall not expand beyond our lot. He tempted the wrath of the Great Old Ones and he was taken, leaving Darby with a widow and two fatherless children that a man will have to be found for. How does that…”

  “Oh, leave the boy be,” Walter interrupted gently, uttering a small chuckle. “He’ll soon find out the folly of his ways, as will Jon Lazarus, as does everyone who goes against the will of the Great Old Ones. The Great Old Ones have spared them thus far, but how much longer will their queer ideas be tolerated? Young Philip may reach home tonight only to discover that Jon Lazarus has been taken by the Hounds . . . or he may not reach home at all.”

  Phil stood and left the tavern amidst cruel laughter. They all knew Walter spoke the truth. That Walter had been making the same prediction for years, more years than Phil had been around, with nothing happening, meant little to people who very much wanted to believe him.

  Phil rushed into the fog-filled night. Instinctively, he looked up, half expecting to hear the baying of the Hounds of Tindalos or to feel the cold talons of Hastur, elemental of the air and the interstellar spaces. To the inhabitants of Darby and the other small seaports along the dark Atlantic, the earth, the air, and the sea were populated by the Great Old Ones and their minions.

  In archaic times, the Great Old Ones had ruled the Earth with Dark Powers. Then they had been expelled by the benign Elder Gods, banished to the spaces beyond the Earth, beyond time. But they had always struggled to breakdown the barriers and regain possession of the Earth.

  And one day they did, when the Stars Were Right. The reign of terror began and the Great Old Ones ruled as they had before. The teachings of the Great Old Ones were enforced by their minions. When someone greatly displeased the Great Old Ones, he was either taken, never to be seen again, or was found horribly murdered, gnawed upon or turned inside out. In time, people learned what they could do and not do.