World War Cthulhu: A Collection of Lovecraftian War Stories

by John Shirley

  “No,” Cold said. His head oscillated. “No, it’s not smoke.”

  “It sounds like the ocean,” Sarlowe said quietly.

  “It’s not that either,” Cold said. He sounded amused.

  Sarlowe’s hand found the amulet and despite its warmth, he clutched it tight. He didn’t ask the obvious question. Whatever had come up out of N’kai, the K’n-Yani had bombed their own cities into oblivion to kill it, from the looks of things; a millennia-old Cold War gone suddenly hot. If they hadn’t done the job, that didn’t bode well for those of them in the penthouse. “We have to go. Protocol—” he began.

  “I am well aware of the Yoth Protocols,” Cold said softly. He turned towards Sarlowe. “I devised them myself. No one in, or out, if they have been exposed,” he said. He reached out and tapped the amulet beneath Sarlowe’s shirt. “As long as you wear this, you will be fine.”

  “And what about you?” Sarlowe said.

  “What about me?” Cold said. “But you are correct. We must leave. I—”

  Whatever he’d been about to say was lost in the sudden roar of a pistol. Sarlowe jerked back as Cold was knocked backwards, over the lip of the balcony. He didn’t bother to stretch out a hand. Instead, he turned and sprinted for the archway.

  He didn’t reach it. Two shapes, clad in fatigues, glided forward and the blows came hard and fast. They were trained, and better than him. The stock of a PPS-43 machine gun smashed into his stomach. He hit the ground hard, his body aching. He scrambled to his feet as they circled him. As he stood, a third shape materialized before him, and the heavy weight of a revolver crashed down across the side of his head. Sarlowe went down again. This time he decided not to get up.

  “Get his gun,” someone croaked, in accented English. The world spun, and he thought his nose might be broken. Rough hands clawed open his coat and jerked his automatic from its holster. He looked up into a face that had seen the wrong end of a punishment baton more than once, with small eyes and steel-capped teeth that glinted in the weirdling light of the cavern. The teeth flashed as their owner said something; Russian, Sarlowe thought as if the teeth hadn’t been a dead giveaway. “Yes, leave the amulet. They are not as foolish as all that are they, American? Only you can use it, yes?”

  Sarlowe blinked, trying to clear his vision. He didn’t reply.

  Someone sighed. “I am speaking English for your benefit, my friend. Please do me the courtesy of replying,” the voice said.

  Sarlowe pushed himself onto his hands and knees and then rocked back onto his rear.

  “Who are you?” he said.

  “My name is Grigori Petrov. Maybe you have heard of me?” He said it expectantly, as if he expected Sarlowe to gasp or sit up straight. He was a thin, scary-looking old man, with strange tattoos on his face and neck and hands, and wearing a greatcoat that was two sizes too big for his shrunken frame. His goons had the same look—their fatigues hung off them. They’d been big men, once. Now they looked like concentration-camp survivors.

  “No,” Sarlowe said.

  “Ah, well, such are the fortunes of war. Look at me, please.” Sarlowe did. “Waste is a great sin, according to the little red book,” Petrov said harshly. He looked old in the weird light of K’n-Yan, all skin and bones and bent under the weight of invisible chains. Sarlowe fancied he’d been a big man, and wolfish looking, when he’d been younger. Now he was a scarecrow of flesh and bone. The automatic in his hand didn’t waver despite the seeming fragility of the hand that clutched it. “I would hate to kill you, if it were not necessary.”

  “Especially since I’m the only one who can get you past those wards, isn’t that right?” Sarlowe said, brushing blood out of the corner of his mouth with the heel of his palm. “You need me alive if you want to get out of here.”

  Petrov inclined his head. “Your summation is accurate, if unnecessary.”

  “Russians,” Sarlowe said, trying to play for the time he needed to think, “What the hell are Russians doing down here? Don’t you have a fucking plateau to play with, or are the Chinese being selfish?”

  Petrov didn’t reply. He looked at steel-tooth. “Get him to his feet. It is long past time to climb to a healthier atmosphere.”

  Steel-tooth dragged Sarlowe to his feet while his buddy watched the stairway warily, the PPS-43 cradled in his hands like a talisman. Sarlowe wondered if Cold were really dead. Petrov looked like a Siberian shaman playing dress-up as a communist commissar, which he might well have been. Uncle Sam wasn’t the only one with pet necromancers. He might have had a clip full of blessed bullets for all Sarlowe knew. That’d explain Cold going down like a sack of potatoes. The goon shoved him forward. Sarlowe staggered. His head was still jangling. Petrov was strong for a senior citizen.

  “You have an automobile aboveground,” Petrov said as he took hold of Sarlowe’s lapel and dragged him along towards the archway. It wasn’t a question. “We will leave you to walk back. That way you will not alert your comrades to our presence until we have a—how do you say—‘head start’?”

  “You’re not going to kill me?”

  “Why waste a bullet, when what may yet follow us up into the light will do the job just as well?” Petrov said, with a shrug. “If you would not see it before your time, I would walk faster, yes?”

  Sarlowe stumbled along, brain trying to catch up to his feet. “What the hell were you even looking for down there?” he said. He heard something scrape, somewhere in the darkness. “You couldn’t have come through K’n-Yan. That means you had to have come through …” he trailed off.

  “N’kai,” Petrov said. His voice wasn’t as steady as it had been. Sarlowe glanced at him. The old man looked even more skeletal than before, and his flesh had a washed-out, waxy look in the faint glow radiating from the archway. His goons had similar washed-out looks to them, as if they’d flown a glider over hell, and gotten the smoke in their lungs. He wondered how many of them there’d been when they’d started out; probably not just the three of them.

  Sarlowe licked his lips. “The Voormithadreth Corridor,” he said. He caught sight of something, out of the corner of his eye. He wanted to turn, but didn’t. The shadows were alive with movement. He heard the ocean again, and louder. He wasn’t the only one to hear it either—Petrov paled. “There are doctors—quarantine—we can help,” he began. If he could dart through the archway first, they’d be trapped. Granted, they could still shoot him. There was a downside to every plan. But they couldn’t be allowed to get out.

  God knew what they’d been exposed to, let alone what they’d done, especially if they’d opened the vaults of Yoth. That was why there were protocols in place—there were too many colors, too many unknown radiations, too many chemicals unknown to science. If you didn’t have quarantine protocols, you started getting malformed deer and invisible, elephant-sized twins. Or worse, you got squatters.

  Petrov cackled. “We have been down here for four months,” he said. The goon with the machine gun scratched at his cheek. His skin looked dry and flaky and gray in the weird light of the archway. As he scratched, flakes fell away. Sarlowe felt a thrill of disgust. He’d seen men die of Gardner Syndrome before. Better a bullet than that. The darkness closed around the goon, as something caught his attention, and he stepped out of the light.

  Sarlowe fell silent. There was no help for them, and both he and Petrov knew it. Petrov gave a ghastly smile. “I warned them. Untenable, I said, to take men and machines through—and for what? To annex a territory of horrors, just so you Americans couldn’t have it.” He jabbed Sarlowe with the automatic. “But that is the game our masters play, is it not? Check and mate, round and round we go. That is why your government wastes money on lucid dreamers and trying to recover the Zann Concerto. That is why my masters spend men like bullets, feeding them into the maw of Leng, or on ventures like this. Check and—”

  “Mate,” Cold said.

  Cold stepped out of the darkness, holding the PPS-43 casually. Sarlowe hadn’t heard or
seen a whiff of him taking down Petrov’s man. Maybe he didn’t, he thought, maybe something else did and he just took advantage. He pushed the thought aside and lunged for Petrov’s gun, as the latter swung around, face stretched in shock.

  Steel-tooth whipped around, a pistol coming up, but too slow. The PPS burped and steel-tooth did a little dance and fell down. Sarlowe caught hold of Petrov’s wrist and jabbed the old man a quick one in the kidney. Petrov backhanded him. Had he been twenty years younger, Sarlowe thought the blow might’ve snapped his neck. As it was, it dropped him hard to the floor. Petrov turned, firing. Cold ducked back, vanishing into the creeping dark.

  “Hello, Grigori,” Cold said, from somewhere out of sight. “It’s been quite the while, hasn’t it? When was the last time we saw each other? Was it ’44, perhaps? It was Berlin, I know that. You’d finally made peace with the Party, and come out of the cold. I was pleased for you.”

  “Quiet, you reeking sack of maggots,” Petrov growled. He kicked Sarlowe in the gut. “Come out so I can blow a hole in that thing you call a face.” The old man stepped back, catching Sarlowe’s hand beneath his boot heel. Sarlowe yelped. Petrov sank to his haunches, his eyes still on the dark where Cold had vanished. There was definitely something moving in it, though whether it was Cold or something else, Sarlowe couldn’t say. Petrov snatched the amulet from around his neck. “My apologies, but I require this just now,” he hissed.

  “I’m the only one who can use it,” Sarlowe gasped, trying to shove Petrov’s foot off of his hand. Petrov brought the gun down on his head.

  “At the moment, I am willing to hope that is not the case,” he said, glaring at the darkness. “You hear me, Indrid, yes? You hear me, maggot-man? I go. If you follow, I kill him. Maybe I kill you too.”

  “Oh, Grigori, you know the old saying...’that which is not dead’ and all that,” Cold said. Rocks clattered somewhere close. Cold’s voice seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere all at once. “Just as you know that I cannot let you leave. You’ve been exposed to some terrible things, and we simply cannot have you carrying the contagion upstairs. Gardner Syndrome, Grigori,” Cold said. “How many little piles of gray dust did you and your men leave in your wake, as you trudged through those lightless abysses, pursued by the things you freed?”

  Petrov’s face had lost all of its color. He swept the automatic back and forth as he rose to his feet, Sarlowe’s amulet dangling from his free hand. “I will not stay down here,” he snarled.

  “Afraid of what you’ve let out of its cage, are you?” Cold said. “Understandable. Only those amulets around your neck are keeping them from your throat. How long has it been since they polished off the indigenous population? A month or two, I’d wager. There never were very many of the K’n-Yani down here, their claims to the contrary. And the formless spawn of the depths are ever hungry.”

  “Then you stay down here and take the edge off of their hunger,” Petrov said as he backed towards the archway. Sarlowe rolled away as soon as Petrov’s foot left his hand, but the Russian gestured with the gun, stopping him before he got to his feet. “You as well,” Petrov said. Sarlowe tensed. He didn’t think he was quick enough to beat a bullet, but some deaths were preferable to others. Rocks clattered down from above the archway. Petrov froze and then turned. Sarlowe looked up.

  Cold clung to the wall above the archway like an enormous spider, limbs bent at impossible angles, the machine gun dangling from his neck by its sling. His grin was still as fixed as ever. Petrov cursed and raised his weapon. Even as he fired, Cold was pushing himself away from his perch. He dropped onto the old man like a hawk striking a field mouse. Sarlowe flinched away, as the sound of bones snapping, and Petrov’s scream, filled his ears. He’d heard the stories, but until you saw it up close, it was hard to credit them.

  When Cold rose to his feet, he was holding a handful of amulets, including Sarlowe’s. Petrov was babbling and cursing in Russian as he tried to crawl towards the archway. His legs and his spine were bent wrong and he left a smear of red in his wake. Cold turned his grin towards Sarlowe. “Good thinking. Keeping them distracted like that.”

  “I couldn’t let them get out, could I?” Sarlowe coughed.

  “No, we couldn’t have that.” Cold looked down at Petrov. “What was the plan then, Grigori? Let Tsathoggua’s children loose to leap and play and do your work for you? Only you discovered that you couldn’t escape the way you’d come, or this way, and so you were caught. How long you and your men must have sat here, waiting for someone to come down, to investigate. How long you must have huddled, your numbers decreasing with every day until…” Cold trailed off. He turned and looked out at the cavern. The distant, ruined cities were barely visible in the dark. He slumped slightly, as if in exhaustion.

  “They were among the last, you know. Of the truly old ones,” he said, to no one in particular. “And now they’re gone.” For a moment, Sarlowe thought that Cold had forgotten him. Then Cold looked at him and said, “But I’m still here.” The grin never wavered, but his cheek twitched and jumped as he spoke.

  Cold dumped the whole lot of amulets, save for the one Petrov had taken from Sarlowe, into the latter’s lap. Sarlowe looked up at Cold, and made to speak. Cold tapped his lips with a forefinger, and Sarlowe fell silent. Cold looked at Petrov. “And you, Grigori. You were always quite troublesome. But not for much longer, I think.”

  The darkness moved. The shadows bubbled and boiled like hot tar and polyps of obsidian stabbed from every direction at once. Petrov’s howls grew in volume and rose in register as each polyp struck home, hooking itself into him. Then, he was tugged up and back into the dark, like a fish hooked from the sea. His howls ceased abruptly, as he vanished. Cold waited a beat, then two and then sighed and said, “Poor Grigori. Then, I always knew he’d come to a bad end.” He looked at Sarlowe. “I’m sorry.”

  “For what?” Sarlowe coughed, getting to his feet. He still held the amulets. After seeing what had happened to Petrov without them, he didn’t want to risk it. “What the hell are those things?”

  “Hungry. But lazy,” Cold said. His smile twitched. “In a few decades, they’ll slither back down into the depths from which Petrov inadvertently freed them, and someone will come back down and replace the seals.”

  “You, you mean,” Sarlowe said.

  “Maybe,” Cold said. He fingered the bullet hole in his shirt-front. Petrov’s bullet had connected after all. Something white and squirming was visible for just a moment, before he prodded it back into place.

  “Evil the mind that is held by no head,” Sarlowe muttered.

  Cold looked at him.

  “What?”

  “Nothing/ Can we get out of here now, please?”

  “Yes,” Cold said. He turned towards the archway.

  Sarlowe saw that Cold still had his amulet dangling from his grip. He tossed the others aside and hurried to catch up with him. “Hey, aren’t you forgetting something?” he said, reaching for him. He felt the tingle again, his hoodoo senses doing a dance up and down his spine.

  “No,” Cold said.

  Sarlowe grabbed his arm. “My amulet, I can’t get out without it.”

  “I know,” Cold said. His grin twitched and stretched as he stiff-armed Sarlowe backwards. Sarlowe staggered back, and wiped his hands on his coat. He felt things moving beneath Cold’s sleeves. “I cannot return it, Sarlowe. I’m sorry.”

  “What are you talking about?” Sarlowe said. But even as he said it, he knew. His stomach lurched. The Valusian radiation, Gardner Syndrome … but he’d only been exposed for a few minutes. “No. I’m fine. If you get me to Binger...”

  “The protocols say that no one who’s been exposed comes in or out,” Cold said. “It’s SOP, Sarlowe,” he added, echoing Sarlowe’s earlier words. “You know that.” He stepped through the archway. Sarlowe took a step after him, hesitated, and stopped. If he tried the archway, he’d be dead.

  “You can’t leave me here,” he said. He loo
ked around. The darkness seemed to shiver in anticipation. Cold was watching him from the other side of the archway, his grin still in place. “Cold, please … I didn’t even want to come down here!” he shouted.

  “I know,” Cold said. “I’m sorry. I was too curious—a failing of mine. You were right.”

  “Don’t leave me here alone!”

  “I won’t,” Cold said. He tossed the PPS-43 through the archway to land with a clatter at Sarlowe’s feet. Sarlowe looked down at it, and then up. Cold was gone. He could hear his shoes clicking, as he ascended. Then, he heard nothing at all, as the darkness closed in. It obscured the archway and the statues. He snatched up the machine gun. He wished he’d kept hold of Petrov’s amulets. He wished Petrov had killed him.

  The last lights of distant Yath went out, one by one, like candles being snuffed.

  The darkness padded forward on a hundred paws.

  He’d been wrong.

  Up close, it didn’t sound like the ocean at all.

  A FEAST OF DEATH

  BY LEE CLARK ZUMPE

  1

  I stood atop the glassy plateau at the summit of a grim, narrow peak rising above the dense forest. After only a few moments, I trembled and sank to my knees beneath the mind-bending panoply spread before me. Such vistas, I thought, were not meant for the eyes of men. Of the countless atrocities I had witnessed over the last ten months, nothing rivaled this lurid tableau—nothing I had experienced since landing at the mouth of the Shatt-el-Arab gnawed at my sanity like this unbearable spectacle.

  How like reality this uncanny fever dream had been, how like an omen whispered from the deepest shadows of twilight.

  Nathan Longcroft, Interned by the Turks

  2

  “They’re coming down the lane now, Lieutenant Macready.” Corporal Guy Blacklock of the 6th Division stood beside a barred window that looked out across a little courtyard where two pear trees and an acacia offered small patches of shaded ground. “It’s the commandant, his interpreter and a German officer. Can’t say I recognize the Hun.”