by Chris Miller
Blessedly—if one might call any part of this horror beyond all horrors blessed—there was a single feature which didn’t send the mind tearing itself apart in madness in search of understanding and processing what it beheld. One thing on a being so large and vast, it vanished into the abyss behind it, seeming to have no end as it continued to emerge into the dim, twinkling lights of the sparkling jewels that danced in space.
It was the eye. That horrible, comprehensible eye.
This was not alien, not even foreign. It had the basic, commonly seen spherical shape of any normal eye. A massive black pupil hung suspended at its center, surrounded by a deep crimson where one might expect white. But at least it was a color a man could understand. Not like the shapes and tentacles and the rest of it.
Oh, GOD!
No, the horror of the thing seemed to be perfected in that one distinguishable feature, that horribly recognizable attribute. The eye. Gigantic, fitting for a beast of this seemingly immeasurable length and breadth. One might think there would be an audible smacking sound when the thing blinked—and it was blinking—but there was no sound. Only now was this anomaly recognized when the thing blinked. The total absence of all sound. A sort of vacuum which sucked that particular sense right out of a man.
But the other senses . . . oh, God, the others!
They were all frightfully present. The pain worsened as the thing continued to emerge from the inky blackness of what could only be the space outside of Earth. There was no other explanation. A place far, far beyond the peaks of the highest mountains, far beyond the white moon. A place of horrors and monsters.
A place of gods.
There was screaming once more, and now the absence of sound was made all the more apparent as the screams seemed so far away and so present at once. They were coming from within, but there was nothing to carry the sound beyond the lips to the ears of the monstrosity, if it had them at all. A smell of rot so strong as to be toxic seemed to fill the nostrils, though no real breathing was happening. Gasps of horror, silent in this place, went unheard and breaths seemed sucked from the lungs, expelled on silent screams as the eyes beheld that which they were never meant to behold.
The sounds came again. They had been present all along, the terrible, awful sounds that might have been words in another world entirely, but like the eyes beholding the sights before them, the ears were never meant to absorb these wretched mumblings, nor was the mind meant to try and make sense of them with letters and sounds it could appropriate. And that was when the realization came that the sounds were not at all coming in from the ears, though as the hands touched them they pulled away from the rivers of blood which flowed from them. The sounds were inside the mind. The thing, the monstrosity, the abominable damned thing still slithering from the abyss was inside the mind!
“Oh, God!” were the words attempted in a scream, but they never made it beyond the lips. “What divine horror!”
Sanity shredded entirely. Logic dissolved into vapor. Reason was utterly trampled. A cackling, silent laughter erupted then, shaking the agonized body, and multiple points to either side of the spine burst outward with horrific pain which was no longer dreaded but relished. The slithering feel of large stalks emerging from the burst wounds sending shivers up the spine, now coiled into a controlled knot from the cosmic beast.
“Ry’kuun N’yea’thuul Fhtean Ma’fhel!” the terrible sounds which were now wonderful, sensual things filled the mind.
And a sort of human understanding seemed to transcend as the coiling tendrils, the writhing worms of the great beyond, burrowed into the brain, bringing total understanding and utter madness into terrifying harmony.
Elder N’yea’thuul awakened comes!
The sight of the horrible, beautiful, ancient god emerging from an endless abyss vanished, as did the vast darkness and the sparkling gems within. The temple returned, the marker alight with the glow of the gods. The patter of rain on the roof and the spattering droplets through the glassless windows. It was all back.
Gear Dreary turned from the marker, hovering two feet off the ground on ten black—and very sharp—tentacles protruding from his back. The ache on his forehead was hot, and a touch caused something wet to seemingly bite at his hand. But he knew instantly with his new, unlimited knowledge, that it was no mouth, but an eye.
And without seeing it, he knew it was red.
He began laughing then, suspended in an agony beyond anything he could ever have imagined, but as sexual as the freest of brothel girls. The pain was pleasure, the agony divine.
He saw the gaping wound in his chest, the boney teeth snapping and snarling, the organs within lapping out like a terrible tongue. And still he laughed. It rose in pitch and volume as the mortals before him stirred and shrank.
This was godhood. This was divine.
“My dear Mr. James,” Dreary managed to speak through the sexual agony, blood sliming down his chin with every word. “The god-hunter has finally met his match!”
The snarling laughter of the abomination that had been Gear Dreary echoed in this temple of madness.
35
“Gear!” the man over him growled in a maniacal drone. “I got him, Gear! Ya see? I ain’t took off on ya!”
There was fear in that voice, a sort of tremulous testing of the waters. Whatever this man was doing, it was part of an effort to convince the other man—Mr. James Dee’s nemesis, Gear Dreary—not to do him harm.
Denarius’s hand was shoving at the side of the man’s face. Wet, sticky slaps patted against his hand as he struggled with the madman, and through his blurring vision, his searing pain from the knife in his belly and the man’s hands about his throat, Denarius saw it was the man’s dangling eyeball that was smacking against his hand as it whipped around while they wrestled.
The realization sent a sick wave through his punctured guts. The nasty gash of a wound above the man’s empty eye-socket informed Denarius that he had indeed hit the man when he’d fired at him minutes before, but rather than ending the man, he’d merely grazed him. Well, perhaps merely was too soft a modifier. A good quarter-inch sized trench had been dug across what used to be the man’s eyebrow, and it had not only dislodged the eyeball, but rendered the socket itself incapable of holding it in ever again.
But he was a determined honky, Denarius had to give him that. The man’s hands swatted at Denarius’s as they struggled, and then the man had a palm on his face, shoving his head over to one side. Denarius could see Marlena there, a pool of blood collecting around her head. Panic and grief and horror flooded his already tantalized veins, and he cried out her name, though the word that came out sounded more like a garbled grunt than anything else.
To his surprise—no, his astonishment—Marlena’s eyelids fluttered. Her head rocked ever so slightly, and she rolled off her belly and onto her side. Denarius was unmindful of the exertion he was utilizing against the man on top of him, the two locked in a sort of frozen dance to the death. He couldn’t look away from Marlena with the weight of the man holding his head in place, but even if he could have moved, he’d have still been transfixed. His eyes were growing wider and a sort of dawning realization of shock, elation, and abject terror flooded him in equal doses.
As she rolled to her side, she pulled her knees up to her as her arms and hands hugged tightly to her belly, in an almost defensive, protective manner. Her eyes were still fluttering, moving about beneath the lids in frantic movements, but he caught something on her lips as she began to mumble something, coming out of whatever daze Dreary had put her into. He could see the seared flesh running down the side of her head, past her temple and vanishing near the back of her thick thatch of black hair, could see the blood oozing slowly from the grazing wound, and wanted to shout for joy that she was still alive and scream in fury for the injustice of it all.
But through it all, he focused on the wonderful, horrifying word on her lips.
“Baby . . . ” she was barely croaking. “B-baby . . . ”
Everything in Denarius turned to ice. The flame in his gut with the protruding knife was turned to a frozen lake as gooseflesh rippled his skin. He could feel the hot breath of the man atop him snarling into his ear as the pressure on the side of his head increased. Could hear the small, pattering footsteps of someone nearby, rushing toward him or away from him, he didn’t know which.
And he could see Mr. James wasn’t moving at all.
It’s up to you, Denarius, he told himself. Your life, your family’s lives, and God knows maybe the rest of the world . . . it’s all on you. Now get up and get it done!
But he couldn’t move. Try as he might, the man’s weight on top of him was too much to move, no matter the frozen quality of the epic pain in his stomach. That hot, rancid breath in his ear again, the sticky, wet smack of the man’s eye dragging across his temple.
“Just watch your bitch,” the man was hissing into his ear. “Watch her while you fucking die!”
Denarius’s eyes were blinking as fast as Marlena’s now, his gaze still transfixed on her mumbling lips.
“Baby . . . baby . . . baby . . . ”
Denarius began to scream then, a deep moan of anguish and fury and horror erupting from deep inside his perforated insides. His teeth were bared and his eyes went from spherical orbs of terror to ovals of black hate. Hate for the man on top of him, for this damned town, for Dreary, even for Mr. James, the decent man who was also a cold-hearted murderer. Regardless what had led him here, bad luck and the plight of a poor black man in this day and age, Denarius was here, and while Congress told him he was only three-fifths a man in the eyes of the law, all five of his fifths were a husband and a father and—goddammit—a fucking man! A human being who had a family to protect. He would not lie here and die in front of his wife and child, not without putting up one hell of a good fight.
All of his strength seemed to surge inside of him then, and with all he had, he began to push back against the man with his hands and face and every inch of his body. He didn’t make much headway, not at first, but it was something. He was moving, and the son of a bitch on top of him was about to meet his reckoning.
“Just lie still, you nigg—” the snarling, dangling-eyed man had begun when a metallic thunk both silenced and rocked him.
The man began blinking, his face wincing in pain as the dangling eye swayed beneath the socket. And the force with which the man had been pressing down on Denarius eased all at once. Incredibly, both of his hands moved from Denarius and reached up, one snatching something in the air.
Denarius was moving, still encumbered with the man atop him, but no longer with the man’s hands holding him down. He saw the man’s hands wrapped around something that looked a bit like gold, but was probably bronze. The man’s face was a snarling menace. His good eye a furious orb of hate.
And then Denarius saw the hand at the other end of the bronze object he now recognized as a candle holder.
Martin’s face was beaded with sweat and his little boy was heaving breaths, terror etched on his features. He managed to let go of the candle holder a second before the man’s other hand smashed into his mouth, a spritz of blood arcing into the air as his little head rocked back and he tumbled away.
The sight of his son being punched savagely in the mouth by the bastard on top of him sent Denarius into a fit of rage he’d never felt before nor thought himself capable of, and if this nightmare was ever ended, he hoped he’d never experience it again.
With a deep, snarling howl of rage and hate, both of Denarius’s hands shot out and snatched the man’s head on either side. The man hadn’t been prepared for this, and the shocked expression on his face might have been comical had it not been associated with such savagery.
Hisses and grunts were all Denarius could manage as he sat up, grasping the man’s head in his hands and ignoring the roar of pain in his stomach as the knife handle pressed against the other man, pushing the blade deeper into his stomach. But those pains were far away now, happening to another version of himself, the decent man who had vowed to help a man who’d saved his life, now dying on the floor, not of the father fighting with every last ounce of his life to save his family and do away with the slime before him.
The man’s mouth began to form an oh as Denarius neared him, and his good eye widened beyond its standard limits. The empty socket next to it oozed and Denarius focused in on its dangling escapee.
His teeth bit down on the eyeball.
A sort of high-pitched screeching sound was coming from between Denarius’s bared teeth as they bit down on the soft meat of the eye, fluids and gels bursting through its sides as it was pulverized between his molars. The man was screaming too, his rancid breath driving directly into Denarius’s face. But he didn’t care. He could only see red rage as he ground his teeth against the squashing eyeball and his incisors began to bite the cords in two.
Blood sprayed as Denarius ripped his head backward in a savage arc, his screech turning to a growl. The other man had lost all focus except that which was on his ruined eye. His hands went to his face as he tumbled back off of Denarius and onto the floor. But Denarius didn’t stop coming. He scrambled on top of the man, his teeth still bared and ocular fluids dripping from between his teeth as he leaned over the top of the man, snarling.
The man was starting to notice him, but only just. He was still howling and holding his face, but his remaining eye was coming around to focus on Denarius, hate and fear present in equal measures.
Denarius ripped the knife out of his own gut, hardly noticing the horrific symphony of pain that shot through his entire body when he did. Then the knife was over his head and his free hand was clamped over the man’s throat. He leaned in closer and spat the pulverized remains of the man’s eye onto his face in a gelatinous heap. It looked like a half-chewed grape, but the color was all wrong.
“Mothafucka touch my kid, that mothafucka dies!” Denarius howled in wild fury, using the foreign term he’d heard Mr. James use back at the jail.
No term ever seemed so fitting.
The man seemed to have been sucking air in to talk or to scream some more when the blade buried into his chest. There was a wheezing whistle as air escaped his lungs around the hilt pressing against his chest. A moment later, blood erupted like crimson lava from his mouth, dripping down the sides of his face and onto the floor, as well as into the empty socket of his eye. Gurgles were the extent of the sounds the man made as Denarius ripped the blade out and drove it back into the man repeatedly with a maddened vigor. Blood slung about in ropes and strings as he worked, not slowing until the pain in his gut and the darkening at the edges of his vision brought him back to the reality of his badly wounded state.
As Martin was getting to his feet, nursing his split lip in his hand, Denarius drove the knife through the front of the man’s throat, severing the Adam’s Apple, and left the blade there. He tried to reach for his son as he approached, but fell to his side.
Marlena was there, still woozy from the looks of her, but coming around. She was putting an arm beneath Denarius’s head, cradling him in her lap while Martin hugged his daddy tightly about the chest, causing Denarius to wince in pain. Martin pulled back and looked down at his father’s wounded stomach and began to cry.
“Daddy?” the boy blubbered and stopped. He could say no more.
Denarius put a hand on his shoulder and squeezed.
“Gonna be alright, Martin,” he whispered, tasting copper on his tongue. “We gonna be al—”
That was when they all heard the cackling laughter of the man in the aisle before the glowing black cube. The man with spider-like legs coming out of his back and a gaping wound of a mouth smacking and dripping at the center of his chest. The man with a huge red eye blinking wetly from his forehead, just beneath his upturned bowler’s hat.
They all began screaming.
PART VII:
Awakening
36
The skittering steps of the Dreary-thing cl
icked across the wooden planks of the floor, a wet, bubbling sound which seemed to click rapidly rumbled from the horror of its chest. Dreary’s eyes were rolled back and fluttering, coming back into focus for a moment, then out again. His face writhed in agony, yet he still managed a sort of maniacal laughter, quiet and utterly mad, issuing from his blood-slimed mouth. His beard was caked in crimson.
It was almost as if Dreary weren’t there at all, at least not in the forefront. Like he was some sort of walk-on player in the background of a stage as the real action played out at the front with the real stars of the show.
But the red eye did not flutter. It was focused and hungry with want. The abominable thing blinked every so often, and James could hear it in spite of the gurgling and the bubbling and the clicking and the tick-a-tick-a-tick-a of its skittering steps on its alien stalks across the floor. The mouth on its chest snapped shut and open again, the bones almost chiming as they brushed each other, the organs within actually moving about as if they were independent beings themselves.
James was struggling to his hands and knees, his wounded left shoulder dripping blood, the arm attached curled against his chest. He winced, tears stinging his eyes as he rose defiantly before the beast.
The Dreary-thing stopped several feet away from him, the screams of Denarius and his family subsiding into fevered gasps of horror behind him. James could feel them trembling. While every part of his being was intent on ending the creature and destroying the marker at any cost whatever, something deep in his subconscious felt the need to protect these people. It wasn’t exactly something new, this feeling, but in all his time of hunting down gods and their soldiers throughout the years and the cosmos, he’d grown a thick and almost impenetrable callous around his heart, like a cocoon, not letting decency or goodness or the right thing interfere with his mission. He’d sacrificed countless beings throughout many worlds in his quest to bring down the elder gods, yet something about this man and his family had managed to prick his heart through the thick covering he’d woven it within. Perhaps it was the inherent goodness of this man, his determination to repay the good deed to James for having saved his life. Perhaps it was the troubling words of Miss Dupree, observing his purity of heart as well as the sacrifice of his own goodness. He had been a good man once. A troubled one, to be sure, but a decent man at heart. He thought to his childhood, playing with his friends in the woods, not all that far from here, but many years away from where he was now. Remembered facing down his first monster in that damned place in the woods, what he and his friends had done, not only to survive, but also to save the world. Had that been the beginning of what would finally eat away the goodness within him? He thought so. The decisions he’d made—that he and all of his friends hadmade—had led to a life of drink and sorrow and nightmares. Had led to the conception of his beautiful daughter Joanna, and the sacrifice he’d made twenty-six years later when they’d faced the monster a second time. Had he damned himself then, as a child? Had he redeemed himself as an adult? He liked to think so, but in the years since then, since his time in the void with The Others, he’d murdered his way across the galaxies, letting nothing stand in his way or in that of his mission, killing the gods, the demi-gods, and the monsters infecting reality.
