World War Cthulhu: A Collection of Lovecraftian War Stories

by John Shirley

  They orbited the chaos helplessly. The chopper gave a lurch as one of the pedals locked up. Jatczak panicked, thinking the rotor had gone out again, but he felt down beneath the panel and found something wedged there.

  It was that paperweight the major had given him. It had fallen down there. Why had Dyer asked about it?

  Below, the attackers tried to flee or fight, but it was fruitless.

  However, the NVA who were already inside the wire, fighting the ARVN’s and the SF at close quarters, stayed where they were. No one inside the perimeter of William seemed affected by the Boonieman’s whirl and suck.

  The gun crews lobbed round after round at the thing, but the shells only sank into its mass and exploded with a far-off, muffled sound somewhere within.

  Though it shuffled voraciously at the edge of Firebase William, the Boonieman didn’t enter the perimeter.

  Each time it tried to advance, it stopped short, as though it had run into something. And something else, a trick of the light maybe, but the shape of the layout of the base, the star pattern of the 105s, the circle of barbed wire in which they sat, the placement of the center gun with its illumination rounds, like a burning eye. It all suddenly coalesced in Jatczak’s mind. The arrangement of the base was the same as the sign on Dyer’s good-luck charm.

  He heard Dyer’s voice on the radio again.

  “Elder Sign priority! I say again! Elder Sign priority! Boogieman at the wire! Broken arrow! Broken arrow!”

  Jatczak pulled back, putting the firebase between himself and the Boonieman.

  “What does it mean?” Beo asked, clinging to the back of his seat.

  “I don’t know what Elder Sign is, but Broken Arrow’s a call for any aircraft in the area to dump their payloads on the base.”

  “Everyone will die,” Beo said.

  “That’s the idea, man.” It was some cowboy shit. Adios, Dyer.

  He flung the stone charm on the co-pilot’s seat.

  Beo snatched it up.

  “What is this?”

  “I don’t know. Something the major gave me.”

  “It reminds me … of a carving on the yang pri trees,” Beo said, stroking the engraving in the center.

  “Here they come!” Jatczak hollered, hearing the buzzing of engines.

  They roared in from the southeast. Prop-driven A-1E Skyraiders up from Pleiku, four of them, with South Vietnamese Air Force markings. If the flyboys took exception to the Boonieman, they didn’t show it. They loosed a storm of 20mm rounds, peppering the ground and the Boonieman. All four dropped all their hardpoint ordnance, including napalm. FSB William was murdered by explosions and draped in a shroud of liquid fire. The caan was splashed with a 2000-degree tidal wave of burning hell.

  But even as the flaming gel spread up its body, two of the Skyraiders passed too close to the thing and were plucked spinning right out of the air. They fishtailed into the black maw and collided, exploding. The Boonieman inhaled the fire and the fragments of the two fighters rattled into place on its growing outer bulk.

  The air strikes had obliterated William. The Boonieman trudged to the top of the hill, no longer hampered by whatever had kept it at bay. It stood howling, coated entirely in blazing napalm, a towering beacon visible in the darkness for klicks around.

  Jatczak shuddered. It was unstoppable. Irresistible. Where could they go that it wouldn’t follow? It was slow, but it was as inevitable as death. It was a gaping mouth, patiently, indifferently, but assuredly waiting to be glutted.

  He urged the chopper to bank and descend. The wet mouth of the Boonieman spiraled repulsively. The mantle of corpses, the machinery, the jungle: all that was just the trappings of the hunger that waited in there, as it always had. What were the odds that he would be here this night to see this? How long had it slept beneath the hill, waiting for the war to come and wake it, anticipating him? Why should he avoid it? It seemed crazy to live full of dread. Who the hell was he, to deny the Boonieman?

  He felt the stick move of its own volition in his fist and let go. The chopper was drawn toward the Boonieman.

  Good.

  He heard a clink behind him and he looked back to see Beo unstrapping himself from the monkey harness.

  He had the major’s charm held to his chest. The wind was whipping his shirt and long hair, and the light cast him in flickering orange.

  He caught Beo’s glistening eyes a moment before the ’yard stepped out the open door.

  Immediately Beo was caught up in the sucking wind and whipped past the cockpit, freefalling toward the Boonieman.

  A surge of jealousy flared in Jatczak’s heart. No, he had to be first. Come back here you fucking dink. He wrestled with his seatbelt.

  But it was too late. Beo became a spread-eagled silhouette, like a doll. His clothes and hair caught fire. He disappeared somewhere in the wet black throat.

  The Boonieman shuddered. The throat quivered and collapsed. Tons of stone, flaming wood, bodies, and machinery tumbled down in a great avalanche, and just as suddenly, the chopper, released from the strange wind, went into an erratic spin.

  Instinctively Jatczak gripped the wild stick and wrestled with it. He planted his boots on the instrument panel, screaming with the effort of contending against the more familiar insistence of gravity. Finally the ship nosed up and leveled again.

  He looked down at the fiery wreckage strewn across the smoking remains of William. The sight was a snapshot of hell. Thousands of broken corpses lay strewn amid piles of twisted metal, broken timber, and shattered stone.

  The bones of the Boonieman.

  Had Beo killed it with Dyer’s charm, or doped it back into slumber with his own life, as the ’yards had done for God knows how long?

  More likely the latter, because Jatczak realized he was circling the hill, scouting hard for a place to land. He kept seeing the black spiral swirling behind his eyes, hearing the monsoon howl like an insidious call over and over in his head, drawing him down.

  He pulled up and didi’d after the Skyraiders, his heart hammering in his ears, mumbling to himself just to drown out the noise in his head.

  The wind had gone, but the pull was still there.

  He wondered if it would ever let him go.

  THE TURTLE

  BY NEIL BAKER

  Sergeant Oliver Schulte clenched his buttocks and lifted his knees no more than two inches, but this tiny gesture yielded great results and he sighed with relief as his cramped limbs tingled with renewed blood-flow. He peered through the front porthole into the gloom of a most disagreeable evening; bellicose clouds grumbling overhead, their saturated bellies threatening to dip into the very bay itself. The lack of moonlight and the omnipresent mists reduced visibility to less than ten feet, and Sgt. Lee did not like that one bit. No sir. Not when bobbing in a modified barrel in dark waters said to be teeming with godless fishfolk. No sir, not one bit.

  He wistfully considered how Bushnell’s face would contort upon hearing his beloved submersible referred to as a ‘barrel’. Indeed, after his invention’s maiden voyage, Bushnell himself had called the device The Turtle, but Oliver knew what it really resembled; a coffin. A pear-shaped, vertical coffin, just waiting to be flooded or blown out of the water. Oliver had accrued the most hours in Bushnell’s device. He had unsuccessfully attempted to screw a powder keg to the underside of HMS Eagle, both men blaming each other for the failure of the mission, but this effort had so captivated General Washington that their commander-in-chief had insisted on repeat attempts. The deployment of floating mines and surreptitious hole-making in the hulls of British barges had been satisfying enough, but none of these would be as crowd-worthy as the sinking of a frigate, and it just so happened that HMS Cerberus was moored in Niantic Bay for the evening. Double pay and the promise of relocation for his family from the shanties of Old Lyme, threatened by the fevered masses who worshipped a rumored sea beast, to the inland town of Hartford had been enough to get him back into the crate, a freshly sealed powder k
eg strapped to the exterior of the submersible, mere inches above his head.

  He cranked the handle next to his right leg with slow, deliberate effort, feeling the resistance of the water against the paddle-blade mounted on the front of the submersible. The pear-shaped craft lurched forward with a barely audible splash and soon Oliver settled into a steady rhythm which propelled him forward at a little under walking pace, leaving no wake in his path. His left hand gripped the rudder bar and he steered slightly to starboard, into the relentless push of an annoying current that desperately wanted to spill him out into the Sound. The soporific rolling of the Turtle always managed to calm Oliver before a mission, but just as his mind began to drift along with the submersible a small black object fell from the roof, brushing his nose on its descent. He recoiled with a start and looked down only to see a beetle, no bigger than his thumbnail, rocking on its carapace, its legs bicycling in the air.

  “How did you get in here?” Oliver said to the helpless bug, his voice deafening in the cramped vessel. He raised his heel, hovering it over the helpless form, watching the insect’s desperate attempts to right itself. After a few seconds his foot came down upon the beetle with a faint crunch and he turned his gaze back to the circular window. An insignificant life snubbed out, just one more casualty of war. In the morning he would have words with Bushnell about the cleanliness of this craft.

  After a few minutes a yellow smear of shore lights began to emerge from the blackness, and then Oliver saw three columns of flickering lantern flames that seemed to rise from the water and disappear into the clouds; the central masts of the Cerberus. Oliver’s mouth instantly dried and he took a swig from a water pouch hanging from the rudder bar. This was the night to show what he could do in Bushnell’s Turtle: a chance for redemption, fishfolk be damned.

  His more recent sabotage attempts had been impeded by the insidious spread of the sinister cult that festered along the Massachusetts coastline, corrupting good people and transforming them into bilious shadows of their former selves; webbed hands stretching to grasp at unfortified townships that were easily converted. With Washington devoted to repelling the British threat, it had been no surprise to see Ben Franklin step up to tackle this new problem. The biological, theological and political aspects of this new issue were like opium to the old man, and he had thrown himself into negotiations with the sea cult’s human representative, a shifty young man named Birch. Despite Franklin’s efforts, the cult continued to infect the eastern coastal regions, and glassy-eyed agents of the new order now infiltrated the waters as far south as New Haven. This prompted Franklin, on orders from Washington, to advance troops by land and sea to Long Island Sound in a final attempt to stop the ghastly advance of the aquatic monstrosities and their demonic rituals. Naturally, the British had capitalized on this new threat to the eastern coast and remained thoroughly disinterested in a combined effort to stamp out the cult, for it had rapidly transpired that the fertile land was much more important than the corruption of good Christians.

  Sgt. Lee, however, was a good twenty miles from the nearest friendly ship and was increasing that margin with every turn of the propeller crank. He slowed until he was drifting about eighty feet away from the stern of the vessel and then turned the handle backward until the Turtle stopped dead in the water, bobbing silently, its lethal cargo scraping gently upon the rounded shoulder of the craft. The Cerberus was moored a little more than a hundred feet from the shore, her bow pointed inland as if she wanted to escape the inky waters. He stared intently at the top rear decks of the ship, straining for signs of life, but none materialized. This was odd. Welcome, but odd. Every fiber in him yearned to crank forward quickly and secure his payload to the exposed rump of the British warship, but he felt compelled to sit tight, and so removed his hand from the paddle crank, pausing to take another drink while he watched his target closely.

  There. Movement! A lone figure ran to the back of the ship, a lantern held high and swinging wildly. Oliver could now see that he was a naval officer and he watched intently as the man looked out over the aft railing while running the considerable width of the deck back and forth, his movements frenzied and erratic. For a second Oliver thought he had been spotted, but then the officer turned without any indication that he had seen the submersible and sprinted back toward the mizzenmast. It was obvious the British were distracted by something; perhaps Washington had surprised them with an attack from the shore. If so, the General had kept that plan close to his chest. Oliver briefly entertained the notion that the wide-faced fishfolk were the cause of the Navy’s consternation, but the warship would have been too well armed for those religious deviants to be of any concern, and so he began his preparations for what was rapidly turning into an easy mission.

  Rotating about on the wooden bench, Oliver checked his clearance through each of the six tiny portholes that haloed his head and, noting that he was indeed a solitary body in the water, he screwed in the water-tight bung above his crown, smearing lukewarm tar from an insulated tin by his feet around the seal. He now had just thirty minutes to deliver the keg and return to safety; any longer and he would suffocate inside the wood and steel-banded egg.

  Oliver reached down and grabbed hold of the descent control, yanking upward on the steel lever until the sound of water rushing into the tank roared loud in his ears. Immediately the tiny submersible began to sink and Oliver counted off five seconds, a period of time that should equate to two fathoms, then pushed down on the lever, shutting off the bilge tank, and waited to see if he had indeed achieved the equilibrium he desired. Satisfied he could detect no further vertical motion he slowly began to crank the propeller handle, sharking silently toward his quarry. Even at this shallow depth it was pitch black and Oliver relied on his compass to keep him true as the Turtle gently rocked from side to side, swimming for all the world like its namesake toward the hull of the Cerberus until Oliver could see it quite clearly; a sharp-edged mass in the middle of the murk. He piloted the submersible closer still until, even in the gloom, he could make out the crosshatched beams of live oak that formed the plump underbelly of the ship. Oliver gently nestled the Turtle in the angle formed by the immense rudder against the frigate’s stern and pulled briefly on the bilge lever which caused the sub to dip suddenly. This action forced a row of iron hooks on the submersible’s exterior to bite into the soft hull of the slumbering giant, anchoring it securely.

  Oliver held his breath, but no shouts came from above; no thumps from the berth deck on the other side of the hull walls. He shimmied around inside his submerged tomb and located the tiny L-shaped handle by his left ear. This controlled the screw that would secure the keg to the hull of the frigate and next to it dangled a thin, hemp rope, soaked in bitumen and end-capped with a brass ball. Pulling on this rope would strike the covered flint bolted to the underside of the explosive barrel and then Oliver would have precisely two minutes to disengage the craft and paddle to a safe distance as the coiled fuse of wax-coated paper slowly burned. He pressed his cheek against the left-most porthole, trying to see whether the keg screw was facing in the right direction, but silt flurries and gloom hampered his vision and he knew he would have to risk using artificial light. Oliver reached down to the floor of the submersible and flipped open a small lockbox, pulling out a shrouded lump that he unwrapped to reveal a block of cork. The block was coated with a fungal layer (on the recommendation of Franklin), and this fungus instantly filled the chamber of the submersible with a soft, green foxfire. He pushed the cork block onto a short spike that hung down from the entry hatch and then pulled down a polished mirror attached to a brass arm, twisting it to direct some of the glow through the forward windows.

  The biological light source was dim but manageable, and all that was required was a slight turn of the lateral prop to line up the eight inch screw attached to the powder keg with a spot on the hull level with the base of the warship’s rudder. If the explosion didn’t sink her, at least she would not be leaving any time soo
n. Oliver began the slow turn of the screw handle, feeling the submersible tilt back slightly as the screw tip bit into the soft outer hull. This was another of Bushnell’s better ideas, a steel screw with gaps in its razor-sharp thread which would help it chew through the planks, resulting in a fastener that was near impossible to remove.

  As he continued the slow grind, Oliver thought back to the previous night’s meeting with Bushnell, Ben Franklin and General Washington’s representative, a squirrelly officer from Vermont, called Hooper. The evening had yielded no surprises from Hooper, who delivered Washington’s order to sink the Cerberus with clipped efficiency and waved away Bushnell’s assurances of success with a request for ‘results, rather than promises’. However, Benjamin Franklin’s latest revelations regarding the fishfolk had chilled the briefing room with such efficacy that not even the old man’s finest brandy could take the edge off. Franklin had reported how his negotiations with the young representative had already stalled, Birch seemingly blinkered to any rational discussion, and instead had focused on the physiology of the cultists. Two live specimens representing both genders, the result from a recent skirmish on Nantucket Island, had provided him almost eighteen hours of scrutiny before they had turned on each other in their holding cell, chanting loudly as they had ripped at each other’s neck flaps, asphyxiating in the clean air of the hospital. Franklin had gone into extreme detail regarding their anatomical defects, but Oliver had been too distracted with thoughts of the mission to fully comprehend what was said. The old scientist maintained that growths on the subjects’ lungs permitted an amphibious lifestyle, befitting the structural mutation that gave the cultists their vaguely caecilian features; bulbous, black eyes drifting apart, drooping translucent jowls framing obscenely wide mouths that smacked and drooled constantly, peppering the air with salty froth as they chanted in their mesmeric states. Hooper had scoffed at Franklin’s findings, having not personally encountered the cultists himself, but Bushnell had silenced him with recounted reports of a horrifying creature spotted off the east coast. Reports of a vast, humanoid shadow rippling just beneath the waves; upended fishing vessels claiming to have run aground with nary a rock nor reef in sight. The group had retired late and, though he couldn’t speak for the others, Oliver Lee knew full well that nobody slept soundly that night.