Cthulhu Unbound 3

by Brian M. Sammons (ed. )

  His face grinned like a sacrificial nascent moon.

  He charged forward and got his hands on Coogan before he could even think of swinging the pipe. “You motherfucker! I coulda shown you things! I coulda taken you places—”

  When McGrath’s huge, apish hands took hold of him, something happened to Coogan that he could never explain: it was like being electrocuted. An electric surge ran through him like he had just gripped exposed wires in his fists. His body went taut, blazing fire-heat consuming him, and in his head…like a dozen suns exploding with flashing prismatic colors and then collapsing into their own mass, into something like a sucking, whirlpooling gravity sink that yanked him kicking and screaming out of his own head, tossing him light years through some perverted multi-dimensional hyperspace and into a fractured black cosmos where the stars were oblong corpse-white faces staring down from an abyssal whispering blackness and he saw a great sphere rushing at him. It wore irradiated mist like a mask and slowly, the mask was pulled away to reveal—

  But by then Sean Bolland had swung his pipe and it connected with McGrath’s head with a meaty impact, his skull cracking open, blood, gray slime, and something like white pus leaking out as he was driven to his knees.

  Coogan came out of it and he was on his ass, dishrag-limp, numb, flesh crawling.

  Then he was up and they were all swinging their pipes with savage, idiotic glee. McGrath’s head was shattered, a soup of blood and brain matter oozing over the floor like congealing pudding. His teeth were scattered like dice, jagged ends of bones jutting at crazy angles from livid, swelling purple flesh. The pipes kept coming down until McGrath was a great distended mewling skin sack of macerated organs and fragmented bones crawling through the slime trail of its own puddling fluids. He looked up once, directly at Coogan with a remaining good eye that swam in a stew of bile and intracranial fluid, his head a smashed puzzle of skullbone, his face a pulpous raw matter.

  And for one mad, unreal moment as that orb of hate drilled into him, Coogan thought he saw something rising up out of McGrath’s body—something like a thousand green rubber worms that blossomed into a fungal lunatic forest of grinning emerald-eyed clown faces that themselves divided into the gleaming sugar-bone whiteness of dead children that opened their huge smoldering fissile eyes to reveal a sucking, limitless vortexual blackness that had come to turn the world into a graveyard of well-picked bones.

  Then this, too, was gone.

  McGrath died with a shrill simian cry of dozens of gibbons being flayed alive and a resounding wail of bleeding ghosts that echoed through the confines of the rec room with a charged, energetic chanting that became a blood mist that dripped from the ceiling and walls.

  “It’s done,” Jimmy Pegs said, standing there in his blood-streaked plastic poncho, his face the color of bleached flour.

  “Did you see—” Coogan began.

  “I didn’t see fucking shit and neither did you,” Jimmy Pegs said. “What is done is done and we talk no more about it.”

  The plastic ponchos and pipes went into a laundry bag and that was that.

  At least…that’s what Coogan had thought at the time.

  15

  Two days after they’d shoveled the remains off the floor of the carpentry shop, Buster Cray came up to Coogan. He had a mixed bag of headhunters and ghetto-crawlers with him: black, white, Latino, even an Asian dude with a knife scar slashed across his face ear to ear like a questing pink worm. Badass. Corpse-maker. Looked like he could chew pigiron and piss tacks.

  “You Coogan? Johnny Coogan?” Buster said. “Hear you tried to break out of the Hot House, but we’re exactly successful.”

  “You heard right.”

  “Got a friend over there name of Raul Mingle,” he said. “Call him El Ming around the block. He says you owe him five large and I’m here to collect.”

  Shit. That’s what this was. It was true enough, Coogan owed El Ming the green but he was hoping his escape attempt and transfer to Grissenberg had canceled that out. Not so. The prison grapevine strikes again.

  “You tell Ming when I get it, he’ll get it.”

  Buster was fat and soft, a fleshy pink Arkansas hog in blackface. He mopped his sweaty bald head constantly with a towel, degreasing it, a well-chewed cigar butt blossoming from his crooked mouth. He was strictly the non-violent sort, Coogan knew right off. He paid others to hurt people. They called him ‘Chocolate Pudding’ behind his back, but never to his face because death was kept at a low boil in those eyes.

  “Ming don’t care about your problems, bitch. Neither do I. He wants his money.”

  “Well, I still don’t have it.”

  “Things might get rough.”

  “Things always do.”

  Coogan was already tensed, ready to bust.

  He stood at an even six feet, stacked hard with muscle from religiously doing two thousand push-ups a day, working the weights, and hitting the bag. He was known to be easy going for the most part, someone you could talk to, a guy who would help you if you were indeed worth helping. But he was also known for his absolutely fearsome temper. He demanded respect at every joint he pulled time in. It was the only way you survived. In a max joint you were either a predator or you were prey. And if this fat boy thought he could be intimidated, then he was right: things were going to get rough.

  “There are other ways, of course,” Buster told him, coveting absolute indifference. “You could join up with us. We represent a new sort of organization, you see, once based on brotherly love and blind to skin color and racial affiliation and all such bullshit. You want to come on board, you’re welcome. We get stuff the rest don’t, got hacks on the take. And that five grand? Forget about it.”

  Coogan lit a cigarette. “And what might I have to do to wipe out that debt?”

  “You know Eddie Sloat?”

  Here it comes.

  “Heard of him.”

  Buster nodded, his eyes filled with a vacant sort of fear. “We gonna have some business with him. You know what I’m saying?”

  Coogan did and he didn’t care for the idea.

  Because if he murdered somebody—even a parasite like Sloat—that was life, fucking life in the cage.

  Buster mopped his shiny dome. Coogan studied the lines on the man’s face, crow’s feet splaying out from the corners of his eyes and sutured wrinkles spreading out like hairline cracks in delicate pottery. A line for everything he had done and everything he wished he would never do again. “Things have been funny since that cracker got here,” he said.

  “Funny how?”

  Buster looked to his posse and they all bowed their heads, closed their eyes, as if in reverence to this criminal godhead that walked amongst them.

  “What a question, what a question,” Buster said, shaking his head. “Motherfucker, you will see it and know it and recognize it as such. That’s all I’m gonna say.”

  It seemed to Coogan that big bad cellblock playa and snake in the switchgrass Buster Cray was trembling on the edge of admitting something, of lancing the poison behind his eyes, maybe squeezing the black blood from his soul. It was close, real close. He needed someone to hear it, someone whose ears were hooked to a working brain…not these hollow-eyed walking mops he had for a posse.

  So Coogan took a chance, seized the moment and palmed the meat, as they say. “You’re talking in riddles, my friend,” he said. “But I understand that. I got one for you. How could a guy who got killed at Auburn four years ago be walking around the yard today?”

  The posse studied each other nervously. They were primal, simple things who had just evolved from the black jungle of animal ignorance to discover the fear of the dead.

  Buster licked his lips. “Nightmares and reality get soft here, get runny, start to mix together.” He pulled off his cigar. “You ever have visions, Coog?”

  “Never.”

  Buster laughed with a harsh metallic sound. “You will, man. Trust me on this, you been here long enough, you will.” He
looked over at his thugs. “Sooner or later, Sloat is going to get out of the Hole. We’ll forget about that five large if you do what’s right.”

  Coogan blew smoke in his face. “You want him done, why don’t you have one of these fuckheads do him?”

  “Because I want you to.”

  “Ain’t gonna happen.”

  Buster just moved his eyes. “Skin,” he said. “Do it.”

  The Asian dude rushed out with murder in his eyes, but Coogan was ready for him. Skin lashed out with a chopping kick and Coogan sidestepped it, caught his leg, twisted it, and kneed him in the balls. While he was going down, Coogan drilled him in the jaw with a short devastating punch. Down in the grass, Skin vomited out three teeth in a spray of pink foam. Another dude rushed in and Coogan jumped him, twisting his head on his neck and jabbing his thumb into his eye. He went down screaming, crying tears of blood.

  Before the others could make a move, Coogan locked an arm around Buster’s throat. “Call it off or I’ll break your fat fucking neck,” Coogan told him.

  “Ease up, ease up,” Buster said. “Please now…ease up…”

  “You want Sloat, get him yourself,” Coogan said, pushing him away into his own ranks. “I don’t want to get involved.”

  Buster just stared at him. “Son, if you’re here, you’re already involved.”

  16

  After Coogan went on his merry way and the boys scattered, Buster stood there alone, surveying the yard, remembering things and feeling things, his stomach turning over and wanting to come spraying out of his mouth. He wished he could tell Coogan, take him aside and make him understand about Sloat, about the big bad wolf coming to Griss City and how sharp his teeth were. But Coogan, as reasonable and stand-up as he was, could never wrap his brain around any of it, could never understand what inhabited Sloat’s skin and what its plans were.

  But Buster knew because he saw it in his dreams every night.

  Buster put his face in his hands, squeezing it, losing himself, forgetting, drowning in rank pools of denial and coveting a numbness that was blank and dreamlike.

  He watched the cons out in the yard. Cons throwing balls back and forth. Cons leaning against walls and scheming. Cons huddled in groups, smoking, puffing out their chests, arguing. Cons watching other cons. Cons watching the hacks with their sticks and hacks up in the gun towers. Cons gambling. Cons keeping an eye on the new fish in the yard, sizing them up. Cons leading their fuck boys around, daring anyone to touch them. A game. All a meaningless fucking game in this place that the cons played twenty-four-seven, wind-up toys that never ran out of batteries and clocks that never stopped ticking. All of them puffing out their chests and fluffing their tail feathers, scanning the yard with flat dead eyes and caustic attitudes thinking they had cornered the market on evil and not knowing, never guessing they were amateurs. Because they did not know of secrets kept and secrets tended like dark gardens, of men who stank of raw, bleeding hides with eyes like simmering pools of acid. Men who were not men at all but things that laid their eggs in low, steaming places and the terrible things they had done.

  Tick, tick, tick.

  The clock kept running and Buster knew deep within himself that it was ten minutes to midnight.

  The end was coming soon.

  17

  Daytime in Grissenberg was a constant cacophony of noise blending into a seamless dull roar: men yelling from cell to cell, steel doors clanging, guards shouting, cons hollering at the TVs in the rec rooms, boom boxes blaring, men screaming, religious freaks praying out loud at the very tops of their voices, headcases babbling incoherently at tormentors no one else could see. On and on and on.

  But at night it was the low murmur of a caged animal breathing in its sleep, dreaming ensanguined dreams of blood and meat and death. Water dripped and men moaned in their sleep. Rats clawed at the walls, pipes groaned, ducts ticked as they cooled. Cons whispered and sobbed and begged Jesus and Mary for deliverance. The air was hot and moist with the stink of unwashed skin, sweat, urine, and garbage. Hacks made their hourly rounds up and down the walkways and you could smell their cologne and chewing gum, the smoke of their cigarettes. By midnight, other than an occasional distant scream echoing into nothingness, there was only the silence of the beast breathing, filling itself with night, recharging itself for another day, hungry for the violence and isolation and intolerance that kept its belly full and its teeth sharp.

  18

  “Oh, God, here we go,” Philly said. Not only was he pulling the night shift but he had to listen to fucking Sloat.

  He was chatting away in his cell with his invisible friends again.

  Philly set his girlie magazine aside and went over to the cell, preparing to rap the door with his stick, tell Sloat to pipe down.

  But he didn’t.

  He listened.

  In a weird, buzzing voice that sounded like the steady hum of bees a voice was saying: “We sent them through the White Space, trip-trip-trip they went, falling through the hollow spaces, tumbling, tumbling, little lost boys, open your eyes, this is Yuggoth, the ninth world…where the terrible darkness rolls…the cyclopean pits of elder fungi…look how warm-blooded life squirms in the cold, the cessation of atmospheric pressure, how your entrails steam on the barren plain, crawling worms…”

  After that, Philly sat in his chair shivering like a kid who was waiting for some goblin-eyed horror to come creeping from the closet on eight spidery limbs. His sweat came in cool-warm rivers, plastering his dark hair to his skull. In his brain there was a perpetual scratching white noise that only barely covered the sounds coming from the cell: slithering and scraping noises, inexplicable metallic screeching and a low whistling drone that he swore made the earth rumble and throb beneath him. There were sounds like things walking about on a multitude of spiny legs, a constant hissing and whispering that seemed to come from a dozen separate mouths. Sloat carried on low, hushed conversations and it all made Philly’s skin absolutely crawl.

  Good God, what was going on in there?

  19

  When Coogan closed his eyes that night, the dream came for him immediately.

  He saw a field of green energy envelop him, flashes of cobalt and indigo directed at his eyes, laser-bright, blinding him, then letting him see, really see, as he was yanked along by some thermonuclear tidal pull, riding its white-hot wave with incredible velocity towards a yawning zone of blackness that was darker than anything he could imagine. The threshold was reached: a radiant firestorm burning from the inside out like a melting sun…and then he was through.

  He had breached.

  Yes, that was the word: breached.

  The threshold was slit open and he fell screaming into a lake of cold bubbling plasma that was impossibly close to Grissenberg and unbelievably distant.

  He did not know where he was.

  His mind told him it was a world between worlds…a dank gutter in some interdimensional anti-world.

  Everything was changed around, turned inside out, flesh made smoke and smoke made flesh, atoms scattered and reassembled. Coogan’s mind was a thorny growth of black roses, sprouting, flowering, bursting from his skull which no longer existed in this abstract place.

  Before him was a fathomless darkness and right away he saw the city: it looked like crowding, clustered toadstools and greasy, tall mushrooms washed by a gray, bubbling river of creeping fungi. As he got closer, he saw not toadstools but buildings that were tall and narrow like coffins set upon their ends, all spilling blackness and despair and incredible age. In the dream, he did not walk, but flew, drifting over the city. He saw that the structures were not made of brick and stone, but things like pipes and reeds, femurs and ulnas welded together by mats of what looked to be cobweb, fine filaments of which connected the buildings, consuming them and woven through them.

  The city was a corpse.

  In the dream, he knew this. As he drifted about, he saw things like bloated slugs inching about. They were a ghastly, phosphore
scent white, crawling in and out of the edifices. They were maggots, weird alien maggots feeding on the rot of the city.

  Lamprey mouths sought his warm, pulsing throat and everywhere, decay and slime as the city went spongy with putrescence and the shadows were heady with charnel perfume and that boiling river of fungi shrieked with a hundred scraping voices.

  Coogan slid into one of the buildings like a shadow. In an immense convex chamber, he saw shapes moving. Not human. But sentient. Horrible, but not necessarily threatening.

  They looked like some kind of grotesque alien insect or crustacean that stood upright on thorny pronged claws. They were a dull orange to fleshy pink in color and made of segmented bands of white-striated tissue with several sets of curving plate-like wings at their backs. Set at the end of fleshly, wrinkled stalks, their heads were egg-shaped and convoluted, a mass of spiny antennae rising from them. They had no eyes, no mouth that he could see, just bony chambers.

  They were absolutely obscene.

  And the closer he looked, the less they resembled insects or crustaceans for it seemed that they were not composed of flesh as such but minute braided filaments and fibers like threads of fungi, interwoven, overlapping, communal. Like a great colonial fungus.

  Coogan knew they were seeing him.

  Their antennae were changing color, flashing on and off like the chromatophores of deep sea squids. They were communicating. Discussing him and he knew it.

  The Mi-Go: the Fungi from Yuggoth, the Outer Ones.

  This was what they were called on Earth and they wanted him to know that.

  These were the things that had followed Luis from the outer spheres: The Mi-Go.

  They began to move in his direction.

  He could see…McGrath before him on a slab of black stone like a rhesus monkey awaiting the cutting and piercing and changing. Yes, Franky McGrath, but mutilated and broken just as he’d looked after he was beaten to death. He was here now, in this place.