Cthulhu Unbound 3

by Brian M. Sammons (ed. )

  With Boyer and his men still casting about for the source, Hull leapt into the saddle and rode up the far slope to a spur of rusty red lava rock overlooking the sad, empty valley.

  Perched atop the outcropping was a humble whitewashed chapel with a crooked steeple. The woods crowded up close behind it in a dense, black picket line. Higher and louder, the bell rang and rang.

  Hull slipped his Sharps buffalo rifle out of its scabbard as he leapt from his horse behind a sturdy pine. He felt no one watching him, but he itched all over with the sense that he was going into this like a hand into a glove.

  Captain Boyer rode up and ordered his men to secure the chapel. The young officer’s excitement was like a wet cat in his pants. A self-described Indian expert, he’d eaten up all the dime novels and fabulist lies packaged as histories at West Point, and no doubt relished the chance to test his mettle against them.

  The narrow windows of the chapel were boarded up from within, and the doors, though battered and separated from their hinges, stood up to his shoulder. Pews and broken lumber were stacked against them, but Boyer’s men easily forced them open.

  The bell fell silent.

  They blundered into the chapel expecting to find no one alive, but they found no one and nothing at all. A sinkhole twenty feet across gaped in the rough-hewn knotty pine floor, which had given way beneath the besieged parishioners’ feet.

  Hull crossed the empty chapel with his rifle in one hand and his pistol drawn in the other. He approached the pit and looked down, seeing only splintered debris on the floor of a plunging lava tube. Warily circling the pit, he peered up into the steeple. A flutter of gingham skirt caught his eye, and then the barrel of a shotgun winked and blasted at him.

  Hull rolled behind a pew. Three troopers returned fire into the steeple. Their bullets rang the bell and sent a slim girl’s body tumbling out of the steeple to crash on the pulpit.

  Boyer charged into his men’s sights and almost got himself cut in two. “Cease fire, damn it!”

  Hull approached the girl. She was scarcely older than thirteen, and quite pretty, by white men’s standards, before she was scalped. Her naked skull wept in sympathy with the delta of blood pooling around her midriff, where her hand clutched a grievous belly wound like a bouquet of wet red roses.

  “Why the hell did you shoot at us, girl?” Boyer demanded. His eyes were as wet and red as her belly.

  “He… He s-s-said…” her breath hitched and rattled in her chest, but she struggled to sit up and reach out. Boyer sought to steady her, but she pushed him aside to point at Hull. “He said…you’d come…too late…”

  “Easy, girl,” Boyer murmured, lifting her head to drink from his canteen. Hull moved to stop him, but it hardly mattered. She was bleeding to death. “Where’s everyone gone? What happened to your people?”

  “End times coming…judgment trump sounded deep in the ground. Preacher called us to church…town got swallowed up… Devils come up out of the earth and beat on the doors, but he said we’d be safe, so long as we followed him. He took us down where we’d be safe, but…yonder hole goes straight down to Hell… He took me aside and…” She brushed the sticky dome of bone where her hair had been and drifted off until Boyer shook her. “Preacher, he said to wait on that one…” Her bloody finger pointed at Hull.

  Hull asked, “What did he say?”

  “Father Malachai, he said…” Her eyes were cloudy glass beads, her breath cold puffs of mist, as if she lived only to deliver this message. “He said…if you hurry…he might let you catch him.”

  Relief flooded her face as she died.

  “There’s no way in hell we’re going down there,” Boyer gasped. His eyes were wide, but saw nothing. The darkness and enclosed space of the lava tube had already stolen his nerve.

  “We have no choice,” Hull answered. “Your men outside are all dead.”

  “The hell you say—” Boyer and his men ran for the door, but Hull seized his arm. “How do you know all this, damn you, if you’re not a part of it?”

  Sergeant Watkins charged outside, fired once, then screamed. A pattering like hailstones pelted the walls and roof of the chapel.

  “They’ll kill you just as quick,” Hull said, “if you try to run. If they offer to spare your life, don’t take them up on it.”

  The other two troopers fired out the cracks in the windows. “There’s nothing out there! What do we do?”

  Boyer clutched at Hull’s arm. “What’s out there, damn it? What are they?”

  “Once they were men like yourself, who had all that men could wish for. Now, they are much more than men, and much less than human.”

  Hull tossed a rope down into the pit and tied it to the pulpit. “You can take your chances outside, or follow me. But choose quickly…the church is on fire.”

  * * *

  March 14, 1900

  White Widow Mound, Oklahoma

  They marched through coiling tunnels like the spiral of an infinite snail shell. They followed fresh footprints in soft green sand through a vast cathedral of a cavern hung with glittering crystal chandeliers, and descended a tapering chimney with treacherous switchbacks carved into its metamorphic walls.

  As the hours dragged out and the tangible darkness and pregnant silence began to take its toll, the troopers left off with their raucous songs and idle talk, for the cascades of distorting echoes made them uneasy, and surely announced their position.

  They emerged in a massive natural amphitheatre lit by huge, bumbling fireflies. Refilling their canteens at a brook meandering among colossal stalagmite towers, they caught fistfuls of blind albino crayfish, and then repented of it when they turned vicious. When they compared maps and compass readings, needles spun wildly, then fixated on some random point, only to drift and spin without rhyme or reason. Cawthorne declared that they’d marched seventeen miles, though how deep they were, no one could hazard a guess.

  Hull and the three Pawnee scouts spread out to find the walls and any exits. Hull returned first, having chalked a descending passage bearing recent smoke-stains, when Stickney spotted him consulting his weird coin.

  Another scout shouted for the Major. He led them to a blind niche in the cavern wall. Tucked away inside it was the ravaged corpse of an old Comanche woman. She lay naked and gutted from neck to pelvis with her entrails carefully laid out upon her hands. A black circle drawn around the body seemed to hold at bay the bloated black toads that sprawled around its border as if worshipping the murdered woman.

  “Savages don’t take long to turn on each other, do they?” brayed Tobin Roherty.

  “This was no cold-blooded murder,” Stickney piped up. “The forced march probably killed her. Notice how little blood was spilled. This all happened after she died. If I’m not mistaken, it’s a form of divination, isn’t it, Mr. Hull? Haruspexes in ancient Rome would read animal entrails to discern the will of the gods, and Aztecs would do the same with human prisoners—”

  Cawthorne lifted the heart out of the dead woman’s hand and threw it into the stream. “I’ve had quite enough of your history lectures, Mr. Stickney. It matters not a whit what they hope to gain by this barbarity. It only matters that they’re slowing down.” Cawthorne wiped his bloody hand on the Indian agent’s cheek. “It’s still warm, isn’t it?”

  Stickney shook with rage. “Major, if they’re so committed to this pilgrimage, how do you propose to peaceably bring back two hundred Indians, with only thirty men?”

  Cawthorne didn’t deign to answer, but Tobin Roherty cackled and replied, “I reckon we brought more than two hundred bullets.”

  The other two scouts returned then, with one hanging on the other’s arm. His face was swollen and drooping with his left eye closed over. His left arm hung limp at his side. “Spiders bit him,” said his mate. Mindful of the balance of morale, Cawthorne refused to let the Pawnee ride one of the mules, but let him have a few good pulls of whiskey before they set out.

  Mopping his face with a hand
kerchief, Stickney jogged to catch up to Inigo Hull, who walked on ahead to stay out of the troopers’ torchlight.

  “I heard the agent I replaced tell stories about the Ghost Dance, and I couldn’t help but wonder about this ritual they did on the mound. This was some new kind of Ghost Dance, that happened here, wasn’t it?”

  “Not like the Ghost Dance at all. If their hearts are set upon the Backward Path, and they are willing to pay its price, then this dance will work.”

  “But it’s madness! Surely they can’t really believe magic will save them—”

  “Nothing else has worked. Is Walking Tree still the chief of the Kotsotekas?”

  “He died just this past winter, I’m sorry to say. Pneumonia.”

  Hull took off his hat. “Walking Tree was always a coward. But he might have stopped this. The man who led them away, did you see him?”

  “I did, briefly…”

  “What do you remember about him?”

  The question threw Stickney into a long pause. He hesitated, as if trying to recall a long-ago dream. “I was quite taken in by him. A grandfatherly fellow, but you know, it’s odd, I can’t quite recall what he looked like… Well-spoken, charming. He was hardly a firebrand like Wovoka or Tenskwatawa. He was a half-Cherokee Baptist minister, according to his papers. Wanted to preach the gospel to the Kotsotekas, so I let him.

  “Of course, when they left their homes in the dead of night to carry on under the full moon, I was afraid…for them, of course. Every attempt to revive the old ways only stirs up trouble.”

  “Did you hear the songs? What was the name they chanted, when the chanting turned to screams?”

  “How did you know—?” Stickney started, but the effort of keeping pace with Hull’s long, driven stride forced him to save the breath. Halting, he blurted out, “Sadogwa, or something like it. That’s what they were calling out, over that hideous stone on the mound. Sadogwa.”

  Hull whirled on him with such heat that Stickney flinched. “Sounds carry down here,” the half-breed hissed. “And something is always listening.”

  * * *

  They scurried through narrow fissures like bubbles blown in the living rock, and marched on broad, buckled causeways like misplaced fragments of the Appian Way. Cawthorne ordered brief rests whenever the terrain allowed, but none of the men seemed willing or able to relax. Though gripped by an oppressive, moody silence, they seemed to have lost the rhythms of sleep and exhaustion, and shuffled ever deeper into the earth with the fatalistic dread of men lost in dreams.

  For nowhere but in dreams could there be any place like this. They descended a spiraling trail that wound around an inverted castle of onion dome stalactites and fluted minarets that hung from the roof of a seemingly bottomless pit. They slogged over a desert of quartz spires with jagged facets that sliced their boots. The men wrapped bandanas over their mouths to filter out the razor-edged dust stirred up by their passage.

  Where the crystalline floor became as clear as ice, they tried not to look at the squirming, blinking things trapped within it. Four of the mules dropped dead in their traces, vomiting blood in the crimson hoofprints of the pack train. Nobody complained or demanded that they return to the surface. Nobody spoke at all, if they could help it.

  Presently, they emerged into a cavern so vast that its far walls were lost in a lurid blue glow, and Cawthorne ordered the lamps and torches doused. Some of the men gave a numb cheer, for they believed they had escaped from the caves and found the surface.

  “Damn you lop-eared nimrods,” Roherty jeered, “if that’s the moon, you can call me Crazy Horse.”

  The gloom was saturated rather than dispelled by a coldly glowing cobalt sphere some miles in diameter, hanging in a vault of glowering stone clouds. Great screeching flocks of birdlike things swept by overhead—misshapen cousins to bats, eyeless, white and bigger than pelicans.

  The floor of the cavern dropped away in sweeping terraces to a boundless plain of shifting blue shadows. Sparks and green gas-jet fired in the murky distance suggesting the impossible silhouette of a city.

  By Cawthorne’s count, they had marched for thirty miles. The dazed troopers stumbled over the summit and took the switchback trail down the mountain. In the lead, Hull froze and motioned for the column to seek cover. Roherty and Cawthorne joined him where he knelt behind a boulder.

  “We are not alone,” Hull said.

  Roherty drew his celebrated silver Colt Enforcers and brashly leapt out from cover. “It’s about time you cowards showed your faces—holy shit!”

  “I can’t see anything,” Cawthorne shouted. “Where are they?”

  “Everywhere,” Hull said, and as their eyes adjusted to the indigo gloom, the others saw he was right.

  The terraced mountainside was crowded with human forms—hundreds of men and women bent over irrigated paddies to tend a bumper crop of deformed, fleshy vegetables studded with jewel-like, idiot eyes.

  The freakish fruits of their harvest were gathered in huge lead carts, which descended the mountains on tracks, like cable cars. The laborers were naked but for the filth of their work, pale skins almost translucent in the unwholesome blue twilight. Most were ravaged by and bore terrible, unhealed wounds, and many were missing limbs; but their clever masters had grafted shears, shovels, rakes and cleavers to the stumps. One and all, they wore rawhide leather masks, tied taut over their faces with no holes for eyes or mouth.

  Tobin Roherty stood surrounded by them, yet unmolested, unnoticed. Wonderingly, he cuffed a blind, silent worker with one of his guns, and chuckled when it went on with its mute labor. “You all see something fishy, in this picture?”

  “They wouldn’t believe me!” Cawthorne drew his saber and stalked along the ranks of oblivious slaves. “Nobody would listen, when I tried to show them what these red devils are capable of! These are white men!”

  Stickney approached Hull. “They’re in some sort of mesmeric trance. I’ve heard tales of such cases from Haiti.”

  “There’s no saving them,” Hull replied. “The Empire of K’n-Yan was built upon the labor of the dead.”

  “Rest easy, son,” Cawthorne said to a kneeling male slave, “we’ve come to save you.” Slashing the leather straps holding the mask on the slave’s head, the major parted the mask and ripped it away.

  The slave’s head tilted back as if to gasp for air and take in the dim blue light, but he could do neither.

  His mouth and nostrils were stitched shut with sinew thread. His eyes had been scooped out, and the sockets stuffed with quartz crystals that reflected the blue light in a glittering mockery of life. Tufts of blonde hair wafted away from the slave’s rotting scalp like molted feathers.

  Cawthorne went limp with shock. The unseeing slave returned to work. His saber shook at his side as he looked over the armies of hooded slaves on all the terraces below. “Remember this abomination, boys, when you have those savages in your sights. This is what they’ll do to you and yours!”

  Suddenly, he whipped around and hacked with his saber. The slave’s severed head tumbled into the foamy black water, while the headless corpse went on reaping.

  “Sergeant Jarvis! Assemble the Hotchkiss gun.”

  Hull tried to stop him. “We should press on. The y’m-bhi will harm no one if we leave them to their work…”

  “Their work! They’ve taken white slaves! They’ve butchered and bewitched them and made a mockery of death!” Cawthorne drove Hull to the edge of the path with his saber thrust out, as if he meant to run the bounty hunter through. “Damn your half-savage blood if the sight of this atrocity doesn’t make it boil!”

  Hull took hold of the officer and shoved him back until he almost tripped over the headless slave. “The Comanche did not do this, Major. We are not in America anymore. We have wandered into the capital of an empire older than Christ, and greater than Britain or Rome. Its territories reached under the seas, and down to the fiery heart of the earth. It fell into ruin eons ago, but this city lives still
, for death is but one of its conquered kingdoms.”

  All had fallen silent to hear Inigo Hull, though he lowered his booming voice in sudden respect for the toiling dead all around them. “This is Tsath, the capital of the Unseen Empire of K’n-Yan. And we are alive only so long as we amuse them.”

  Cawthorne looked around, but saw only the frightened faces of the living, surrounded by the faceless dead. “Where’s my cannon, Sergeant?”

  “She’s dancin’ if you’re askin’, sir,” Jarvis called from the end of the train. The five-barreled machine gun rested on its wheels at the top of the mountain. Jarvis and one of the Pawnee scouts stood at the ready.

  Even Major Cawthorne seemed to reconsider his rash order, when Sergeant Jarvis cried out, “You red bastard, you’ve stabbed me!”

  Jarvis grappled with the spider-bit Pawnee scout, who drove a bayonet into the Sergeant’s belly as he roared an incoherent oath—”Iä, Sadogwa! N’ggah kthn y’hulhu!” The cysts in his eyes and throat burst and overflowed with tiny newborn spiders.

  Jarvis shrieked and clawed the venomous swarm out of his face. The scout took the grips of the Hotchkiss revolving cannon. His eyes were weeping holes, but he scarcely needed to see the pack train and the idling cavalry troopers to rake them point-blank with five spinning barrels of piston-driven lead.

  Four men and eight mules burst like wine kegs, while the surviving pack train bolted down the mountain. The troopers threw themselves behind the only available cover, among the rows of hooded slaves.

  At such close range, the heavy shells chopped down the y’m-bhi like so much standing deadwood. Five more troopers were slaughtered before the posse rallied and cut down the infested scout. It took two of them to pry his dead, venom-swollen hands off the grips of the empty Hotchkiss gun.

  Cawthorne swiftly took charge, ordering men to dress out the dead mules for meat and divide up the contents of their panniers, then detailed three men to take the Hotchkiss gun, though the last ammunition belts had run away with the pack train.