Cthulhu Unbound 3

by Brian M. Sammons (ed. )

  Then one night as he cowered in the darkness, alone in that cage, feeling nameless things crouching in the shadows, a sense of terror settled into him that was palpable and devastating. It slid into his heart like icy needles that would not retract.

  There was something fumbling at the grille.

  He could smell its hot and fevered breath.

  Then it spoke to him:

  “I’ve been following you for years, living in pockets of writhing shadow and creeping through sewers of time-space and slinking through the cold radioactive mud of shattered extradimensional ghettos in the black void. Just another mind of the many. But I’ve been watching and I’ve been waiting. In the end, you will crawl and you will slither, but you will not walk as a man…”

  Luis was silent then, his tale finally told, and Coogan knew he was the first human being to have ever heard it. The very fact that Luis was sitting in a Federal prison and not a madhouse was proof that he had never mentioned a word of any of it to his lawyers or prosecutors or the investigating cops.

  “That’s it, Coog. Now you know what I know. That sense I developed with Third Eye—sixth sense, psychic shit, whatever—it seemed to go dormant after they stuck me here five years ago…or was it six? Don’t matter. Things were calm, quiet. I was a con. I was incarcerated. I was doing life behind bars. I deserved what I got and you ain’t gonna hear many of these animals behind these walls admit to that.” He shrugged and stubbed out his cigarette. “Yeah, it was all dormant. No dreams, no nothing. Then Sloat showed up. Soon as I saw him…well, it started again. Not so bad, but it’s building. And the first time I heard him speak, you know what? I recognized the voice because it was the voice of the thing that had spoken to me in the MCC.”

  Coogan didn’t know what to think about it. A huge conspiracy, one that was not neat or ordered but large and ungainly, lacking boundaries. Luis believed that primal hatred, Nemesis, was out in the Oort Cloud getting closer to Earth every day. Those other things…the ones that followed him back and abducted people, fooled with their brains…were in league with it somehow. They had an interest in the human race, too. But it was not to exterminate it. They wanted something else.

  “But what?” Coogan asked him.

  “I don’t know, home. But hear me on this: Eddie Sloat is part of Nemesis. Some way, some how. He was what was speaking to me in the MCC. He was born about the same time Franky McGrath died and I’m willing to bet he’s been hundreds of people before that. He’s the conduit. He’s the beacon. This won’t get any better. If we want to stop it, then we have to stop Eddie Sloat.”

  Staring out the window at the expanding blackness in the sky, Coogan decided that was something that had to happen sooner rather than later. Time was drawing to a close and even he knew that right down to his marrow.

  11

  Once upon a time, back in the Medieval days of rehabilitation, the hole was basically an iron cell without furniture of any sort. You slept naked in the dirt and darkness and pissed in a hole in the floor. These days, you got a bunk and a toilet and a sink. In the punishment cells you got twenty-three hours of darkness; in the segregation cells you could burn your light from morning till night. Eddie Sloat was put in the former.

  When Captain Getzel and two of his guards led Sloat down below in chains, he could smell the dankness and foul milk of suffering oozing from the concrete walls, feel the darkness and claustrophobia.

  He thought it was a good place for someone like Sloat.

  Two days later, he stopped by to see how things were going. The guard said Sloat was quiet thus far and they were keeping him in twenty-fours of darkness.

  “Let’s see if that breaks his ass,” Getzel said.

  While Sloat was led away in chains to the shower, Getzel inspected his cell.

  He looked at the artwork on the walls. Some of it was scratched names, various parts of the female anatomy. But above the bunk there were elaborate scribblings and diagrams of some sort. Just looking at them made him feel cold inside. He looked closer and there seemed to be symbols and numbers mixed in with it, all in cramped handwriting. It looked like some kind of weird math, maybe algebra or geometry…but not the sort Getzel had ever actually seen before.

  “What’s all that shit?” he finally asked.

  The guard shrugged. “Don’t ask me.”

  “He’s writing this in the dark?”

  “Suspect so, sir.”

  Getzel liked it all even less now. “Look like calculations of a sort.”

  “Yes sir, they do.”

  “How the fuck does he do it in the dark? You sure he ain’t got no flashlight hidden up his ass?”

  “No sir. We give him a cavity search every day. No lights.”

  Getzel kept staring at the graffiti. It was math…he could see all the numbers and calculations, lots of interlinking geometrical shapes, but the symbols—like crescent moons and inverted triangles, crossed staffs and clustered orbs—and words he saw were totally foreign to him. There were elaborate formulae here, curves, jarring angles, exotic shapes similar to complex polyhedrons and anti-prisms merging and canceling one another out or transforming into abstract collections of intersecting surfaces and lines. It looked like a freakish combination of math, astrology, and alchemy.

  There was something very wrong about it and Getzel began to sweat hot and cold. Maybe it was his imagination, but it seemed that as he traced the figures with his eyes— arriving at the sum of a particular expression that took up half the wall—that the wall itself seemed to shimmer, grow hazy. It looked like it was moving, attempting to fold back on itself.

  Struck with an alarming vertigo, Getzel turned away.

  “You make sure nobody talks to him,” he said, quickly striding towards the door. “He has…has a way with him.”

  By the time he reached the stairs, all Getzel could think was, thank God, thank God it’s not me down here at night with that freak.

  12

  Three days later, when the lockdown was lifted, Tony Bob stepped out of the Prison Industries building and promptly sank to his knees in the stubbly grass and threw up. By the time two other guards got to him he was white and shaking. “In there,” he managed. “In there…the carpentry shop…oh my Christ…”

  The two guards—Philly and Whitestep—looked at each other, then charged inside after calling it in over their boxes. At that time of day—3:30 p.m.—most of the convicts had been rounded up and brought back to their cells, save trustees and those on special duty. Tony Bob had been out gathering the stragglers and the workers from PI. Last place he looked was the carpentry shop.

  And that’s exactly where Whitestep and Philly were looking now.

  What they saw was so graphic, savage, and over-the-top Hollywood gorefest that at first it almost seemed like it couldn’t be real. But it was real and as the stink of blood and meat wafted up their noses and got down into their guts, their legs went shaky and they had to turn away.

  Bodies.

  The carpentry shop had been turned into a body dump, a death camp litter pile of bloated torsos and gaping rotten egg eyes and stiff, clutching limbs. A communal profusion of the charnel, all of it moist and pustulating, seeming to ooze and melt, decompressing into a flabby stew of split skins and pink muscle mass and spilled yellow-purple organ.

  Words like disgusting and horrible and revolting barely scratched the surface of this beast.

  Whitestep said later it looked like the bodies had gotten caught in a sheet metal press and had the sauce squeezed out of them, but Philly thought that was inaccurate. Because what he saw reminded him of one of those nature documentaries on the tube where they bring up deep-sea fish and they explode from massive decompression. That’s how the corpses looked to him: blown up into purple-mottled flesh bags, eyes popping from skin vaults, fluids spread over the floor like a fresh coat of wax, blood sprayed up the walls and over the lathes and table saws. A single shoe had gotten blown clear up into the rafters where it hung, blood dripping from t
he toe. And down below, contorted faces had opened agonized mouths and vomited entrails in a gushing stew of blood like squashed frogs.

  When Warden Sheens arrived and got his stomach under control, he listened to what Whitestep and Philly said even though it was unthinkable and hinted at boundless nightmares. They recognized some of the mangled faces and they belonged to the missing convicts.

  Taken away, Sheens found himself thinking as the bodies made cracking and rupturing sounds as they continued to decompose and dissolve. These men were taken out of here, crushed, imploded, exploded, blown up with gas and suffocated…then dumped back here and how do you like that?

  Honestly, he did not like it very much.

  “They’re melting,” Whitestep said and Sheens decided then and there that there was probably something wrong with him because no man could look at this and not be sickened to his core, but Whitestep was almost clinical in his appraisal.

  “How could that be?” said the warden, wincing as a large yellow eye slid from a socket and popped like a soap bubble, spewing gore over his polished wingtip.

  “Look, Warden, you can see it happening.”

  And he could: like flash frozen jelly allowed to thaw. That’s how the bodies looked. Like melting ice sculptures. They were dissolving into a fleshy, oozing sea of tissues and fluids and bubbling plasma. In an hour, there would be nothing but one hell of an ugly stain. The coroner would need a mop and a bucket.

  “I want a cap on this shit,” Sheens said. “This isn’t fucking natural and if those shitheads out there get a taste of this we’ll have a four-alarm fucking riot on our hands. Not a word. You got me?” He looked at Whitestep who nodded. “Not a fucking peep.” He looked at Philly who was as green as the eggs and ham in a particular children’s story. “Yeah…uh…yeah.”

  Then Sheens, who had somehow managed to keep his composure in check and his stomach where it belonged, marched outside, haughtiness in tow…and went to his knees and threw up his lunch.

  13

  Out in the yard, Coogan smoked, watching, waiting, listening to Luis and Chi Chi talking about things that he did not want to hear about.

  “Shit they’re talking is bullshit,” Chi Chi said. “Ain’t nobody fooling no one. I heard about them bodies.”

  “You don’t like the warden’s story?” Luis said.

  “Hell.”

  Coogan heard all about it all, of course, and he’d even heard the crazy bullshit story the warden had spun on his loom: a group of cons had gotten crushed by a load of timbers. Even the hacks were making sick jokes about that. As to what had really happened, no one was saying. But there were plenty of rumors.

  “Gotta friend over to the Corpse Farm, home,” Luis said. “You want the truth, here it is. He overheard the warden talking with the doc. FBI did autopsies on the bodies. Get this, they didn’t just puke out their intestines…their lungs were ruptured from methane poisoning, blood full of enriched nitrogen.”

  “Hell’s that mean?” Chi Chi asked. “Where’d they breathe in methane?”

  “Not on this planet, home.”

  “Dead all the same,” Coogan said.

  “Dead? Shit, man, there’s dead and there’s dead. Autopsy said death by massive decompression. Those bodies were crystallized. Now people say I’m crazy, but it’s gonna take a real peculiar set of circumstances to do something like that.”

  “Whitestep told me they was melting,” Chi Chi said. “But you didn’t get that from me.”

  “They were…dissolving. By the time the Feds got here, most of the remains had liquefied. But there’s something even worse, something even weirder.”

  Coogan and Chi Chi were both looking at him.

  Luis looked around, ready to espouse state secrets. “They didn’t have any brains.”

  “What? What do you mean?” Chi Chi said.

  Luis licked his lips which were pale as his face by that point. “I mean what I said. The brains were missing from the bodies and there was not a single cut on the skulls. Now, tell me this: how do you extract a brain without so much as scratching the head?”

  Coogan sat there, shaking, something invading him, digging deep like rootlets seeking hot red wetness.

  14

  At Auburn Correctional, the idea to murder Franky McGrath had come when Coogan walked into the prep room at the prison mortuary where he worked and had found McGrath squatting naked over a corpse he was cutting apart on the floor. The corpse, it turned out, was not some cold cuts from one of the drawers—which would have been bad enough—but the body of a slight Hispanic boy of nineteen named Armando Ramirez who had been doing ten years for robbery, repeat offender. When Ramirez disappeared, everyone had assumed he had gone over the wall.

  Not so.

  Franky McGrath, they later learned, had beaten him and while he lay in the prison infirmary, strangled him and somehow got his body out to the mortuary.

  Where Coogan found him.

  At the sight of that hulking, feral horror squatting over the body, Coogan could taste bile in his mouth. He just froze there, not sure what he was supposed to do. Jimmy Pegs, Sean Bolland, and another street-eater named Vinnie Scuzzio were on their way over and he hoped to God they’d hurry.

  He was speechless.

  McGrath looked up at him, huge like a shaved gorilla, naked and heavily tattooed, his red hair hellfire, his eyes glistening grub worms, his hands filled with gore-streaked knives. He grinned with teeth like bloodstained white diamonds in a grave rictus. “Get that fucking look offa yer face, Coog,” he said with a scraping, dirty voice. “This is my thing and it don’t concern you or any of the others. This is my thing, this is how I do it and how I stay alive.”

  Coogan had been around plenty by that point. He’d seen all the atrocities prison life had to offer. He was truly frightened of no man. But this…it filled his mouth with a taste of rusty metal and sickly sweetness. He could smell the corpse, the blood—-like pooling fat and well-marbled meat, harsh, clammy—and he could only stare at McGrath, eyes locked in orbits like insects in amber.

  McGrath kept smiling, teeth jutting from pale pink gums. “Watch what I do, because you just might learn something. The boys you’re running with, it’s only a matter of time before you gotta trunk a body, joint a corpse, and I can show you how it’s done. Limbs are hard to get free from their sockets, Coog, so don’t dick around none, just take a saw and cut ‘em. Limbs gotta go. Then the head. No dental records, no fingerprints. Take the pieces and scatter ‘em to the four winds, far enough apart that they’ll never put Humpty Dumpty back together again.”

  Coogan finally asked him why he’d did it in the first place, why he’d killed the kid and then did this to him.

  “You don’t know shit, Coog, none of you do,” McGrath told him. “Something happened to me once. Long time ago. Something you could never understand. But since then I been different, you know? On the streets, I killed people to order. And, yeah, I enjoyed it. But it’s more than that. Lot of primitive warriors believed that if you killed somebody, you absorbed their strength, their soul, their spirit. See these tattoos on my back? On my chest? Not just tats, Coog, but blueprints, instructions that describe a ritual of sorts. If I kill people in a certain way, if I bring ‘em to the point of absolute fear, what’s in ‘em gets stronger and when I take it, I get stronger. You understand? What’s tattooed on my body shows me the ritual and how to perform it, little things like sucking the terror out of them and jointing their corpse in a particular way to gain the favor of them outside…the others…”

  Absolute insanity…yet Coogan believed it. He could almost feel the pull of those others waiting on the threshold to take their sacrifice. And the tattoos…arcane words and symbols, skulls and crescent moons and bones and bodies being pulled apart, countless screaming faces, abstract representations of demons with the heads of toads or wraiths with wreaths of tentacles where their hair should have been…all of it intermixed, crowded, clustered on his body so that it almost took your
breath away to follow the maze of inking and see where one thing started and another ended, all of it melting into a hallucinogenic haze of images and words and glyphs.

  Coogan later told Jimmy Pegs about it.

  Jimmy Pegs, a.k.a Jimmy Pagano, was a made guy in New York’s Lucchese family. Not much went on at Auburn that Jimmy Pegs and some of the other old wops didn’t have a hand in. Let the gangs mix it up in the yard all they wanted, guys like Jimmy Pegs practically owned the place. Word came down that McGrath would get whacked as a favor to a certain high-ranking member of the Mexican Mafia; Ramirez had been his cousin. Blood demanded blood. When Jimmy Pegs brought Sean Bolland and Coogan in on it, it was past the discussion phase.

  “Friday night, most of the cons in K-block are going to be watching a movie,” he said. “I’m going to arrange for Franky to have a little entertainment with a fish I told him about. Only, when he gets into the rec room, won’t be no fuck boy waiting for him, it’ll be us.”

  By that point, Coogan had piped a few guys, shanked one man, and beat quite a few others, but he’d never killed anyone. He was a thief. He was not a killer. But he joined up and mainly because you didn’t say no to Jimmy Pegs because he was the sort of guy who could make your life real easy or real hard. That was part of it. But the real reason was simply that McGrath was an animal, an absolute animal…and after what he’d seen him doing and those awful things he’d said, that fucker had to go down.

  When McGrath walked into the rec room and saw Jimmy Pegs and Coogan standing there with plastic ponchos on and lead pipes in their hands, he knew, like an animal led out into the slaughter yard and smelling the death-stench of bowels, brains, and blood, he knew.