Cthulhu Unbound 3

by Brian M. Sammons (ed. )

  Cawthorne seethed in his ear. “You abandoned us, boy. You and that gutless prairie-nigger bounty hunter left us to die—”

  “No, Major, it wasn’t like that! Hull was right, and we were wrong! You were—”

  “Shut your yellow hole, you goddamned renegade!” Cawthorne smashed Stickney in the mouth with the butt of his pistol. Stickney dropped quickly, then Cawthorne kicked him where he lay. “This is why they must be exterminated and swept away, root and branch! Behind their subhuman masks, they’re animals or worse! Their way of life is a disease, and you’ve become infected, Mr. Stickney—”

  Despite his wounds, Stickney rolled over and raised the gun, pulled the trigger with his eyes closed and shot Major Cawthorne in the throat, then hammered him three more times before he hit the ground.

  Spooked flocks of vampire bats shrieked and took wing, flapping back into the bottomless gulf. The endless dance of devolution continued around the Indian agent. On his perch at the summit, Malakai clapped and shouted, “It feels good, doesn’t it?”

  Stickney numbly levered himself upright and stepped over Cawthorne’s corpse, staggering towards the high altar, when he got his first glimpse of the cavern beyond the pyramid. Stickney’s head swam and his stomach rolled when he looked out into it and saw nothing at all, forever.

  The irregular edge of the chasm cut across the far corner of the step pyramid, and Stickney realized with sickly certainty that the whole pyramid lay upon a shelf thrust far out over the void. The ribbed roof of the cave gave way, likewise, to a perfect blackness teeming with flapping, chittering nightmares.

  The floor beneath them sagged and swayed in sympathy with every rolling impact of the tribe’s feet and fists pounding upon the crumbling basalt bricks. If they only beat the earth with their bodies a little harder, and in rhythmic unison, the ledge beneath them would surely collapse into the bottomless gulf of N’kai.

  He forced his eyes back down to the ground before his feet. The gun was much lighter in his hand. He pointed it and squeezed off a warning shot. “Malakai—or whatever you call yourself! Release your claim upon these people forthwith!”

  Malakai regarded him with a short bark of sneering laughter. “Will you release them, as well? Did you not drive them from their homes and drop them at my door? Did you not starve them in summer and leave them to freeze in winter, and quietly murder their way of life? I did not take them, little man. You delivered them to me. You sent them on the Backward Path. And look, I have answered their prayers.”

  All about the pyramid, the Comanche lurched on in their dreadful dance, but their faltering steps grew elastic and fluid, swimming through the air as if through molasses, and their bodies began to change.

  Arms and legs bowed and warped under their weight, as if their bones were becoming soft, rotting or melting inside them. Some among the mob writhed on the basalt steps, wracked with convulsions and spraying foam from impossibly stretching mouths as they vomited forth, bone by painful bone, their own skeletons. Stickney bit back bile and clawed at his skull to hold in his sanity as those boneless bodies rose up again to slither the Backward Path in a monstrous imitation of Tsathoggua’s formless offspring.

  Such things could not be, and yet he saw them. He could not stand to see any more, but perhaps he could stop it.

  Stickney sighted down the big steeple on the end of the Colt’s barrel and shot the priest.

  Malakai didn’t even flinch as the bullet passed through his chest. “We are all Nature’s instruments, white man. The world is a game playing itself. But you are not the proper instrument, for my deliverance.”

  Stickney came closer. The liquid shadows at the base of the altar quivered and drew erect and raked the air with branching, barbed pseudopods. Swimming in sweat and goosebumps, he fired again.

  Malakai twisted and let the bullet cleave the air beside his face. “I will die tonight, but I prefer to be killed by a knife. I would suffer you to bear witness, but don’t try my patience. Where is Inigo Hull?”

  Oh God, he doesn’t know, Stickney thought. And instantly, Malakai did know.

  Lifting a long, tapered dagger, he slashed the air and leapt down from the altar. “You monstrous, bloodthirsty, vain, greedy, hollow fools! You could not even be trusted to bring him to me!”

  Stickney jumped back and turned his face away as he emptied the gun at Malakai.

  When he turned to look at what he’d shot, a flying torrent of black slime engulfed the gun and swallowed his hand up to the wrist. When he pulled it back, the gun was gone and so, down to the smoking bone, was his hand.

  Stickney sank sobbing to his knees, cradling the cauterized stump. Malakai stood over him. “If you are so intent on being useful, you may fall on this knife, or throw yourself into the pit.”

  Stickney closed his eyes. A chill, damp sensation enveloped him. He must be going into shock. When he opened them again, he saw only clouds of blue mist pouring up the pyramid steps to converge on Malakai’s perch.

  “You are welcome to watch, my brothers and cousins,” the high priest sneered, “but if you would stand between K’n-Yan and its rebirth to glory, then I will add your poison souls to the sacrifice.”

  The blue mist eddied and swarmed and clotted around a pillar, stout and suddenly quite solid. The pillar raised its arms and shook itself, then waved away the mists, which retreated like whipped dogs from the resurrected man.

  Stickney hid his head, then looked up and whimpered, “It can’t be… I saw you die…”

  “I was not allowed to,” said Inigo Hull. His hair was still the color of steel dust, but the wrinkles in his face and the stooped weariness in his carriage had been ironed out of his rawboned, powerful form.

  A cold, noxious wind blew up from the mouth of the pit. Hull’s hair flew back from his head, laying bare his earless skull.

  Malakai laughed. “Excellent! Now, you are truly one of us, my son! But you could have restored your ears and teeth. Will you always see yourself as maimed?”

  “You did not give me these scars,” Hull replied. “I earned them.”

  “And you know, at last, why you were always so precious to me. I gave my only daughter to the outer world, but the world gave you to me. And all for what must be done, tonight.”

  Hull drew his coffin-handled knives from their sheaths and held them up to catch both the yellow glow of the fire and the blue glow of the atomic lantern. Any shock he might’ve felt at the revelation, he shrugged it off with a grim and mirthless smile. “I’ve only ever wanted one thing from you, old man. Nothing between us has changed.”

  Malakai stepped closer to Hull, who seemed paralyzed, or even—Stickney felt sick at the thought—a trick of the damnable blue mist, and not the real Hull, at all.

  “Perfect!” Malakai cried. “I had hoped you would bring a knife.”

  Malakai jumped back as Hull surged after him, hacking the air in audible arcs with his bloodthirsty knives. The high priest climbed back onto the altar and took up his own dagger. “Iä Tsathoggua, Father of Night! Iä G’noth-ykagga-ha! Awaken with the bitter blood of this offering to crush our enemies!”

  The Comanche dancers redoubled their savage ritual, hurtling over the fire or beating their heads into the ground until the bricks were slick with blood. Many lay dead or dying before the fire. And many more succumbed to the final throes of the Backward Path, expelling their bones and raising twisting tentacle-arms to their new god in a blasphemous mockery of spiritual rebirth.

  The floor beneath the pyramid groaned a long slow song of tortured stone that added a desperate urgency to the dance. Spreading webs of cracks shot through rotted masonry. The ledge was breaking apart under their feet, yet no one but Stickney took any notice.

  And when he looked beyond it, out there in the perfect void that seemed at first to offer the only respite from carnage and horror—now he sensed that the boundless darkness was no longer an emptiness at all, but a presence that filled the void as nightmares fill sleep. It was no avatar
or idol, but an incarnation of darkness itself, for unless Stickney had finally lost his mind, he now saw the guttering bonfire lights reflected in a pair of colossal, half-lidded eyes that watched in the gulf, drowsily mocking their fighting and dying and hungering to be filled with all that lived in the light.

  Hull lunged up after Malakai with both knives upraised, but suddenly, he stopped, just out of reach of the waiting, passive priest. Perhaps he saw it, too.

  Something was wrong. The blue-eyed monster could not help gloating as he thrust out his pallid chest to accept the blade. “Yes, kill me, Inigo Hull. Deliver me to Him, as the ritual demands. To awaken the sleeping Father of Night, his favored priest must be slain by another priest of the blood. The father must die by the hand of the son. Surely, you can do this much?”

  Hull looked at the knives, and then at the Kotsotekas band, dying or worse on the crumbling pyramid. Then he looked for some time into the void. He said nothing, did not move.

  “If you will not play your role,” Malakai sneered, “then all of them will still belong to Him. And if you die by my hand or your own, remember that your blood and soul are recorded in the dreaming engines of Yoth. We can keep bringing you back and trying it until you get it right.”

  Hull stood frozen for a long moment, but finally he sheathed his knives on his belt. “I am sick to death of killing you. If your gods were apt to trade blood for miracles, they would have awakened long ago. This nation is red and ripe with the blood of millions, and still they sleep.”

  Hull stood fast before the silently fuming Malakai. Stickney fought the urge to step between them, for a web of silent conflict seemed to weave the air between them in flexing nets of invisible force.

  “No,” Hull finally said, breathless but resolute, “I will not kneel to Tsathoggua. And neither will my people.”

  Stickney felt, rather than heard, a roaring voice speaking the Comanche tongue, too fast and too loud for him to understand any of it. But he was not the audience for the bolt of thought that stormed the cavern.

  His sight was obscured by a flurry of overwhelming images, each striking with the force of a seizure: of men a mile in height riding on horses of fire over oceans of buffalo; of decorated dancers and storytellers leading a laughing band of families in a song of earth and sky; of an old, old woman teaching a little girl to care for a silent, pale baby with deep green eyes; of a fierce warrior launching long arrows from the back of a galloping horse, three at a time, as if to shoot down the sun.

  In the blink of an eye, he reminded them that they were the people of the horse, the warlike masters of the plains, and the gentle finders of lost children. They were the children of the ones who walked away from the decadent decay of K’n-Yan, and chose a harder, simpler life. They were the Comanche, and they would not bow to a beast, or the god of beasts.

  Instantly, the mad, raw-throated chanting behind him fell silent. The surviving dancers froze and then shrank to the bloody stone steps, weeping and gasping for breath.

  It seemed Malakai fought for the strength to stab Hull’s eyes out. Though he did not move, his narrow chest heaved and bucked, and his pale face darkened with scarlet blossoms of broken blood vessels spreading like spilled wine under his skin. “No, you are but a child… You could not possibly know how to walk in their minds…”

  “But I have had a great teacher, in you,” Hull grated. Despite the strain in his pained expression, he pressed forward, driving Malakai back towards the high altar. “That first time we met, you walked through my mind, and every time since, you’ve searched me to find if I was mad enough yet, to join you. But every time we met, I learned more of how you did it, and I learned more of what you are.

  “Did you really think it would come as a surprise to me, to learn I was of the blood of K’n-Yan? Did you think it would break me, and remake me into you? I was a tool to you, as you are a tool to the evil gods you serve. The Comanche tried to give me a home, when no one else would. They told me I was one of them, but I lost my way. When you showed me what I am, you reminded me of what I could have been, and could be, still. Thank you for that.”

  The pyramid was littered with dozens of dead and dying bodies, and the transformed ones had seemingly slipped away, but the hundred and thirty or so survivors had begun to recollect themselves. Lifting wailing children and shouldering the old ones and the wounded, they limped down the steps of the pyramid. However, their long road to the surface was blocked by another mob of naked, battered bodies that came shuffling to the foot of the pyramid bearing an object that flashed with blinding azure light.

  Stickney rushed to get ahead of the Comanche in leaving, but he hid behind Hull when he saw the silent procession of y’m-bhi shambling up the steps of the pyramid towards the high altar.

  The scorched and half-cremated undead slaves bore an even more haggard specimen on their shoulders like a conquering hero: one who, for all its grievous bodily wounds, was yet somehow alive. “God damn you…Hull,” the blackened husk of a man cried, and Stickney realized it was Tobin Roherty.

  He got his treasure at last, Stickney thought.

  Cradled in his arms was an enormous, oddly-faceted crystal that glowed with a sinister indigo radiance so pure and hypnotic, it seemed to warp the air around it into the fleeting phantoms of screaming faces.

  The same awful azure light gushed out of Tobin Roherty’s eyeholes. Stickney supposed that, if he had stolen the gemstone from the machines with which the people of Tsath resurrected themselves, then perhaps he’d become the last refuge for all the immortals of K’n-Yan trapped inside it. A thousand lunatic ghosts howled with his throat as the y’m-bhi bore him closer to the altar.

  “You treacherous sidewinder, I’ll see you in Hell—”

  “There are many Hells,” replied Hull. “I doubt we’ll end up in the same one.” He turned to Malakai and bowed. “If your god must have a sacrifice, let us see what he makes of this one.”

  With Roherty screaming curses all the way, the y’m-bhi marched off the edge and plummeted into the void. The cracks in the pyramid became groaning fault lines. The outer edge of the pyramid crumbled away into the gulf. Stickney listened intently, not expecting to hear them hit the bottom, but he heard them hit, or get caught by something, much sooner than he expected.

  Malakai screamed a wordless battle cry and flung himself upon Hull. The half-breed danced back and drew his knives to drive them both into Malakai’s breast…then just as quickly dropped them and threw his arms wide, as the high priest fell upon him.

  Like a rattler’s strike, the dagger lanced out for Hull’s throat, but he dodged it and caught Malakai in a fierce embrace. Almost, one could have thought that Hull had forgiven everything and expressed only his love for his grandfather, until the bones of the medicine man’s spine began to pop like corn in a fire. Malakai went limp in Hull’s arms and dropped his dagger.

  “If you had only given me a home and a name,” Hull said, “I might have been yours, and eager to help you burn down the world.”

  “When I am gone…” Malakai croaked, “He will call to you, in his greedy dreaming. You are the last one left who can wake Him, now… You will never know peace…”

  “When have I ever known peace?” Hull’s laugh was bitter, but deep and loud with relief. “When have I ever asked for peace? If he calls, I will tell him what I have told you. He can’t afford me.”

  Malakai gurgled and spat blood by way of reply. He tried to drag himself to the edge, but Hull held him tighter and twisted his neck until he sighed and finally died. He dissolved in Hull’s arms in a churning cloud of blue smoke that wafted about as if desperate to take solid form again; but the granular mist dissipated on the noisome breeze of N’kai, which Stickney darkly suspected was no wind at all, but some kind of belch.

  Stickney whooped with joy, so great was his relief, but then he looked around and saw only a glowering Inigo Hull and a horde of painted Comanche refugees gathered around him.

  “I won’t tell anyon
e,” Stickney stammered, “what I saw—”

  Hull picked up the dagger and some other odd effects from the strange blue puddle where Malakai had died, and turned the full force of his gaze on Stickney’s shivering form. The wounded Indian agent felt steel-tipped fingers tapping on the paper walls of his mind. “And what will you tell them?”

  He bethought himself for a long moment before choosing his answer. “I will tell them that the Kotsotekas got lost, but we found them, and led them home.”

  Hull looked into him for a long time, and then simply said, “Good. And Major Cawthorne?”

  “I’ll tell them I hope they find him, someday. And to start looking in Mexico.” Stickney stumbled, and Hull caught him as they began to climb the spiraling steps out of N’kai.

  “That thing in the pit…Sa—”

  “Never say it,” Hull hissed.

  Stickney felt light-headed, and rushed to get it out before he fainted. “If it ever awakens—”

  “Not in your lifetime, white man,” said Inigo Hull. “But if that day ever comes, I will be waiting.”

  Hull helped Stickney to his feet, and together the two men staggered upwards, leading the refugees up the long trail to daylight.

  MirrorrorriM

  D.L. Snell

  What’s the difference between a duck?

  —Setup for an absurdist joke

  I

  “In the end you’ll realize it isn’t supposed to make sense,” Dr. Specht said as Justin reviewed his own new-patient paperwork, which someone else had already filled out. “That’s the purpose of the joke.”

  “How’d you know all of this?” Justin asked, ignoring the doctor as he read farther down the new-patient form.

  First Name: Justin

  Last Name: Devecka

  He and Dr. Specht sat on black furniture in a white room, the doc on a chair, Justin on a couch. Framed MRI scans decorated the room with every plane of a normal human brain: unilobed.