World War Cthulhu: A Collection of Lovecraftian War Stories

by John Shirley

  The other striking feature of the corpse is that the limbs and abdomen were punctured by a series of circular wounds that have left raised welts and rings of teethmarks.

  This is not the first time I have had the misfortune to encounter a corpse in such a condition and suffering wounds of this nature. Regrettably, I am not alone in my experiences.

  From the records available at this office and from my conversations with my colleagues in neighboring counties, it would seem corpses like my latest John Doe have been washing up along the shores of the Long Island Sound since at least the 1920s, when my illustrious, but nowadays much-maligned predecessor Herbert West conducted the autopsies in this county. As well as here on Long Island, medical examiners and coroners in Connecticut, Rhode Island and Massachusetts have all reported similarly mutilated human remains turning up at their morgues.

  Today’s corpse was found on the Gold Coast shore, just down the beach from the site of the old Beacon Towers mansion. Coincidentally, this was where a cluster of human remains were recovered during the war years of the 1940s.

  Over at Arkham, the Professor of Cryptozoology and Teratology at the University of Miskatonic is of the opinion that the culprit is an as-yet unidentified sea creature, possibly an unknown form of giant squid, that haunts the shores of the East Coast of the United States. I’d like to think she is right, and that this is the explanation.

  THE YOTH PROTOCOLS

  BY JOSH REYNOLDS

  Sarlowe sat on the Ford’s hood, dribbling cigarette ash onto the ground below as the Oklahoma sun beat a tattoo on his head and shoulders. The heat pierced his fedora with ease, making his scalp feel like a cooked lobster. He sucked smoke into his lungs and expelled it slowly through his mouth and nose. His suit was rumpled and felt grimy, thanks to two days on the road and a motel shower that had put more dirt on than it had taken off. Damp patches formed under his arms and on his chest, soaking right through the regulation white shirt.

  “You almost done?” he said, sucking the last bit of life out of the cigarette and dropping it to join the small pyramid of its brethren between his feet. He pulled the distressingly light pack out of his coat and extracted another coffin nail. He stuffed it between his lips with mechanical precision and fished for his lighter. “Only, it’s hot and my stomach thinks my throat’s been cut.” Right on cue, his stomach gurgled.

  His partner didn’t reply.

  Sarlowe lit his cigarette. It wasn’t a substitute for greasy eggs and overcooked bacon, but it was all he had, other than a half-ounce of turgid coffee-flavored sludge in the bottom of a thermos; nicotine and caffeine, the G-man’s best friends. Sarlowe looked around. They were a few miles from a no-nothing town called Binger, parked near the mound. The mound didn’t have a colorful name, and it wasn’t on any maps, not anymore. No one but the Boys in Binger knew it was there, and they were paid to make sure it stayed that way.

  When you first saw it, it looked like any other lump of dirt. Slightly square and oddly angled and shorn of vegetation. It was only when you were on top and looked closer that you saw the stairs. Stairs in odd places, going down into the deep dark, taking everything you thought was true and real with them. There were hidden places, tumors in the earth, stinking of blood and old, wild things. Not just in Oklahoma … everywhere. The Warren site in the Big Cypress, the Martense molehills, certain secret cellars where a certain artist had painted certain pictures and almost certainly been eaten. Poor old Inspector Craig and his Special Detail in the subway tunnels beneath New York.…

  Worms in the goddamned earth, Sarlowe thought and chewed on the cigarette, trying not to think about dark places and tight corners and things crouching just out of sight. Or in plain sight, as the case might be. He eyed his partner through the initial expulsion of smoke and couldn’t repress the old, instinctive shudder.

  The man who called himself Indrid Cold stood some distance from the Ford, long arms spread above his head, speaking old words in his oddly-pitched voice. Unlike Sarlowe, who had a Carolina drawl, Cold affected Massachusetts vowels, though he sounded like a nest of wasps stuck in a tin can most of the time. Cold was dressed in Hoover’s best, black on white, tie and shiny shoes, black gloves, but it looked wrong, like a wrapper on a rotten fish.

  As if he’d heard Sarlowe’s thoughts, Cold dropped his arms and turned. Sarlowe flinched. “Did you say something?” Cold said. His face was like wax and stretched in an unnatural grin. Cold never stopped grinning, that was what the boys in DC said. They also said that if he ever did stop, Sarlowe was to shoot him, and then burn what came out. Sometimes he wondered if that was a standing order. Sarlowe wasn’t Cold’s first partner, nor would he be his last. He outlived them, mostly, though if what Cold did could be called living rather than just … persisting, Sarlowe didn’t know.

  The water-cooler gossip back at the spook show was that Cold had met Thomas Jefferson once, and that there were a number of the latter’s letters which had been excised from public record because of that. Hoover was right when he said that the rot went deep, though even the Director wasn’t aware of the true extent of said rot or the yawning, cosmic abysses it spread from. Sarlowe knew, though he wished to God he didn’t. “Not a damn thing,” he said to Cold. “Are you done?”

  The locals in Binger had sighted lights in the sky and heard strange noises which could have been earthquakes, and since nothing had been scheduled with the involved parties, the Director had concluded that it needed to be checked out. It wasn’t often that it was something, but when it was, it had to be handled. The flying fungi liked to play rough with hillbillies and dairy farmers, but there were worse things in Heaven and Earth than dreamt of in Alhazred’s philosophy, things that were interested in human affairs and liked to take sides. The local ‘old ones,’ the Shonokins, the K’n-Yani, whatever you wanted to call them, were like a crowd at a boxing match, yelling and placing bets on the hairless monkeys with their quaint intercontinental sling-stones and primitive ideologies.

  To keep them happy and friendly, a regular coffee klatsch had been authorized. If you stayed on a first-name basis with a species, they were less likely to start chatting with the Kremlin. That was the theory, anyway. Keep them happy and keep them out of human affairs. Sometimes Sarlowe wondered if there was a hill chieftain in whereverthefuckistan who was thinking the same thing about the Good Ol’ US of A.

  “They haven’t replied,” Cold said. His cheek twitched and for a moment, Sarlowe couldn’t help but imagine what was under there. He sucked in a shaky lungful of smoke and expelled it with a cough when he processed what Cold had said. The K’n-Yani were telepathic, on top of everything else. They didn’t like coming aboveground, and nobody particularly wanted them to, so someone from the spook show, usually from the Binger brigade, would come out once a year to chat about how Spain was doing in the Finals to the empty air. They always replied; had always replied.

  “That’s not good,” Sarlowe wheezed.

  “No,” Cold said.

  They were only out here because of the lights, because somebody had seen something where nobody was supposed to see anything on account of the ancient and decadent pre-human civilization liking its privacy. Sarlowe took a shuddery breath. “So what do we do?”

  Cold looked at him, his eyes as wide and as black as the lenses of Sarlowe’s sunglasses. “We go down.”

  “That’s not SOP,” Sarlowe said quickly, his heart sputtering like a jackhammer from too much coffee and nicotine. “The Yoth Protocols state that we don’t go down if they don’t go up.” Standard operating procedure was to call for backup if they failed to establish peaceful contact, and to set up a cordon.

  Cold looked at him.

  “They didn’t reply.”

  “I’m not going down there,” Sarlowe snapped and crushed his cigarette and flung it down.

  “Then stay up here,” Cold said, starting towards the mound. Of course he knew where the stairs were, curling down into the dark.

  Ladies’ lingeri
e, housewares, Sarlowe thought, releasing a bitter chuckle. With a grunt, he dropped off of the Ford and hurried after Cold. Standard procedure after the Frenchman’s Flat incident was to not let Cold go anywhere without a human handler. Bad things might happen otherwise.

  “We should let Binger know,” he said, as they reached the top. He coughed and wheezed as he caught up with Cold. Too many cigarettes, not enough time on the obstacle course. He bent forward, palms pressed to his knees, and spit up something foul-tasting.

  “There is no need. We will investigate,” Cold said, dropping to his haunches. The stairs were hidden beneath a circular stone, like a well cap. It had been placed after the Zamacona Cylinder had been unearthed. Tentative, quiet contact with the indigenous inhabitants had been established not long after the cylinder had been unearthed. Every alphabet-soup agency existent in the Twenties had tried to get a hand in. Cold had led the delegation, because Cold led every delegation of that sort. Had done, always would do.

  Sarlowe had been down into the blue-lit caverns only once, and that had been enough to last him a lifetime. There were things man ought not to know, not if he wanted a functioning liver and an easy conscience. It was easy to understand why it was considered important to maintain good relations with their ground-floor neighbors, besides the obvious: with the Reds getting twitchier by the year, they might all need a few miles of topsoil between them and a dose of nuclear sunshine sooner rather than later. But you couldn’t very well just move in. Not down there, where things walked that ought to crawl. You had to know somebody in the building to get an apartment.

  Cold lifted the stone easily. He was stronger than he looked. The stench that rose out of the aperture was like that of a cellar in summer, and Sarlowe waved a hand in front of his face. Cold didn’t appear to notice. He rose to his feet and started down without turning to check that his partner was following him. Sarlowe tensed as they descended, expecting to be confronted at any moment by the mutilated guardians that normally haunted the passage.

  But no one greeted them, living, dead or otherwise. There wasn’t even a hint of the weird wind that normally accompanied a descent. Cold stopped on the stairs, head cocked, gloved fingers twitching idly as he examined the great basalt blocks that made up the tunnel around them. Sarlowe touched the automatic holstered beneath his arm, looking for reassurance as the darkness seemed to press down on him. The K’n-Yani could move through solid rock like it was fog, and he imagined them moving around him and Cold, giggling silently in the darkness.

  Higher mathematics, Sarlowe knew. That was what the think tanks said, at any rate. It was all mathematics and ‘extraplanar matter.’ That’s why bullets didn’t bother them, and why they couldn’t stick a nuke down a chute and fumigate the basement. It might work on the kissing cousins, like those things under the subways in New York or the batrachian hillbillies in Massachusetts, but the old ones weren’t from around these parts. The only crap that worried them was stuff in the vaults in Yoth and those things in N’kai. Both of which worried everybody else as well, which was why nobody had made too much fuss about the K’n-Yani being between them and those other things.

  The dark gave way to a bluish light that seemed to seep from the stones and the stairs slabbed smooth near an arched aperture. “No guards,” Sarlowe murmured.

  Cold’s head twitched in reply.

  “Do you have your amulet?” he said.

  Sarlowe’s hand went automatically to his neck. Hidden beneath his collar and tie, pressed close to his skin was the round amulet every agent on the spook detail was issued. It was shaped like a face, but one not even a mother could love. It was like the lovechild of a bat and a toad, and it had a grin like Cold’s carved on its bloated face. The amulet was made out of some soft green stone that no geologist had ever been able to identify. Like too many other things, they’d been provided to the federal government by Cold.

  Sarlowe tapped the amulet. “Yeah, I got it,” he said.

  “Good,” Cold said.

  You needed an amulet if you wanted to get through the archway to K’n-Yan, either coming or going. Water-cooler gossip had it that it was a gesture of good faith from the downstairs neighbors, and that they could get out any time they wanted. Sarlowe didn’t know whether that was true or not, but he knew that the archway wasn’t just for them. There were worse things down in the dark, things that the K’n-Yani had fought so often that they’d stopped worrying about them, but that could do a lot of damage if they got topside. He and Cold stopped in front of the archway. There was a familiar smell on the air, and Sarlowe had flashbacks to red, wet rooms and black lumps on concrete floors.

  “We should go back,” he said. “Something has gone wrong.” He felt a tingle in his spine, a bit of Carolina hoodoo that warned him when it was all about to go sour. That was why he was on the spook detail, though no one had ever said as much. Family history had a lot of weight with the Director.

  Cold looked at him. “All the more reason to investigate,” he said.

  Sarlowe closed his eyes and took a breath. He wanted a cigarette, but resisted the urge. “You first,” he said hoarsely. Cold’s thin lips twitched in a smile.

  They stepped through the aperture and Sarlowe’s spine seemed to burn and freeze at the same time, and the amulet around his neck became as hot as a pan pulled fresh from the stove before the heat drained away a moment later. “Oh sweet Jesus,” he whispered, as they stepped out onto the great stone balcony that overlooked the infinite cavern beyond.

  The first time he’d seen it, he’d gotten a bad case of temporary agoraphobia. There was too much space in the darkness. The void was too big, the scale of it too vast for him to comprehend. He’d been down in the dark before, in other deep places, but this was the deepest place in the world. A yammering abyss where cities did not sit idle on the solid ground but coiled about massive encrustations of rock and rose like serpents from the deep wells of darkness that was Yoth, and below that, forbidden N’kai.

  The thought of the latter made him shudder unconsciously. No one knew what was in N’kai. The K’n-Yani weren’t saying, and official policy was ‘we’re better off not knowing.’ Cold probably knew; but then, Cold was the only one who’d ever used the Voormithadreth Corridor and hadn’t rotted from the inside out. The Corridor was a minute-past-midnight contingency plan due to the weird chromatic radiation that permeated it. They thought it came out somewhere in Mongolia, but no one was certain, not even the Reds.

  There were a dozen cities in the cavern, occupying the spaces between titanic stalagmites and stalactites, like urban moths pinned between stone fangs. Or there had been. Once, they’d have been lit up like Christmas trees, with billions of lights piercing the gloom in all directions. Now, there were lights, but they were different, and far, far fewer.

  Sarlowe looked out across the great stone bridge which connected where they stood to the nearest of the cities—Yath, he thought, though he wasn’t sure of the pronunciation. The last time he’d visited, there’d been two enormous statues, glaring at one another from nitre-encrusted niches set to either side of the undulating cavern wall, guarding the approach to the bridge. Both of those statues now looked as if they’d lost an argument with an artillery division. Eerie-hued witch-fires danced on their cracked and oddly blistered forms. The glowing pinpricks made his skin crawl, the way the lights-out at Frenchman’s Flats had, after the nuclear test.

  Cold extended a hand, and the witch-fires were pulled from their perches to swarm about his spread fingers like fireflies. He made a fist, snuffing the fires all at once. “Valusian spectrum radiation,” Cold said. Rather than echoing, his voice was swallowed by the sheer enormity of the space before them.

  “Valusian—,” Sarlowe began. The prickling sensation on his skin got stronger as he realized what Cold was talking about. “Oh, oh no, no, no, no, we have to report this, Cold. We have to get Binger on the horn, get the Bureau.” His heart was pounding in his chest, not from exertion now, but from fear. No
t the casual fear that being around Cold engendered, but something more crippling. He looked out at Yath, and saw more witch-fires, curling up from the shattered husks of distant buildings. Earthquakes and lights in the sky, he thought, and stifled a sudden giggle. Something had happened down here, and God alone knew how long ago it had been. It was something much worse than any unplanned nuclear detonation or lateral troop deployment. The amulet suddenly felt like it weighed a ton, and he hoped it was only his imagination that was making it seem as if it were getting warmer.

  “Someone has entered Yoth,” Cold said, as if Sarlowe hadn’t spoken. The grin wavered, and Sarlowe’s fingers crept towards his automatic instinctively. “Can you smell it?”

  “Smell what?”

  “War,” Cold said. He froze, as still as one of the crumbled statues that loomed over them. “Something is coming.”

  “The old ones,” Sarlowe said. He looked around, expecting to see smiling devils bleeding out of the walls, chuckling and smiling. The amulet was hot on his chest, and he half-thought about taking it off, but didn’t.

  “No,” Cold said, “Something hungry. I can feel it, reverberating through the dark.” His head twitched, like a cat that’d caught the chirp of a bird, just out of its line of vision. “The vaults of Yoth were sealed from this side. Whoever did it would have had to come from below.”

  “N’kai,” Sarlowe whispered. The darkness felt stifling all of a sudden. The agoraphobia was replaced by increasing claustrophobia, as if the unseen walls of the cavern were closing in. He blinked and stepped back from the edge. He heard something, a soft, wet sound, an insistent susurrus that echoed from all over the cavern. “Is that—that’s smoke, right? Cold, that’s smoke moving out there in the darkness, isn’t it? It’s just smoke,” he said, trying to convince himself.