The Book of Cthulhu 2

by Lockhart, Ross

  The crowd lurches towards me.

  “Any chance you could do this faster?” I don’t mean to be ungrateful, but there are a lot of crazy people charging me.

  Kayla starts climbing. The crowd starts running. Kayla reaches the top. The second hand ticks.

  Kayla hammers at stone with her blade. Her arms blur. Stonework cracks and creaks.

  The crowd hesitates as one. Looks back. Looks up.

  Limestone explodes away from Kayla’s blade. Shards shower the crowd. The clock tower leans wildly. The second hand spins away from the clock.

  Kayla breaks from her work, steps back, kicks the wobbling stone monument. She smiles. “Timber.”

  The Nyarlathotep Event:: Case File #4 :: Portal

  Oxford, England. Not a good day.

  Some days, I think, I really need to ask for a transfer. You get told you’re going into a department called MI37, and you think, oh that sounds cloak-and-dagger exciting. They charge you with defending the realm from all things supernatural and tentacle-y, and you think, well that could be exciting.

  Then you find you find yourself in the middle of Christ Church College facing a pack of yellow-robed cultists standing around a bubbling rip in reality.

  “Not good,” I say to Kayla, my equally up-shit-creek co-worker.

  The cultists are chanting, of course. Limited options on the daily duties for a cultist, I imagine. Chant or sacrifice. And for all my bitching about my employer, at least working for MI37 isn’t tedious.

  Take the portal, for instance. If I don’t close it in the next three minutes, all of Oxford is going to be permanently infected by another reality constructed of humanity’s collective fears.

  Likely a suicidal task, but not a boring one.

  Unfortunately Kayla and I lack the appropriate color coordination, so cultists catch on to us pretty fast. Three break from the circle, pulling large knives.

  I really wish I hadn’t dropped my gun earlier. But things tend to get distracting when an entire city goes insane. Still, this is where Kayla comes in. No need for a gun when the woman next to you can make a champion sushi chef look like a sloppy amateur with a blade.

  “All yours,” I say.

  Which is when the smoking grenade of crazy gas comes at her. It’s a futile throw, of course. Kayla bats it out of the air without blinking. But the problem with a gas grenade designed to shatter is that it shatters as soon as you hit it.

  Kayla disappears in a cloud of red mist. There is a scream from its depths.

  “No!”

  I step towards it. Then leap back as Kayla emerges. She’s clawing at her face with one hand. She sweeps viciously, blindly back and forth with her sword in the other. I duck a blow, another.

  “Kayla!” I yell at her. “Kayla!” But she’s gone, far gone. I don’t think she even hears me.

  And at that point, some cultists deign to leave the comfort of their fraternity and come to hand my arse to me.

  The first cultist swings at me. I duck, grab a piece of shattered clocktower, use it to shatter most of his jaw.

  That gives the other two a good time to sneak round behind me. One slices at me. I roll with it. My jacket takes the hit. The second cultist gets a good kick in. There’s a better range of movement allowed by ragged yellow robes that you’d think. I double over, wheezing.

  They come at me from opposite directions, knives held high. I do the best I can and collapse.

  Knives whistle over my head. I use the rubble to crush one cultist’s foot. He drops away howling. Meanwhile the other knife comes down and opens up my shoulder so I have some howling of my own to do.

  I go at the guy angry then. Fighting is not exactly my forte. I resemble an off-balance ballerina pinwheeling across the Christ Church quad. Fortunately the cultist’s hectic chanting schedule hasn’t left him much time for self-defense classes. He swings the knife low. I stagger-step out of the way. My tie become noticeably shorter, the end fluttering away. The cultist becomes noticeably less conscious, my chunk of rubble colliding with his left ear.

  And all that would be great if there were only three cultists. But three more separate from around the circle, which draws tighter.

  I close fast. My shoulder connects with one before he gets his dagger free. I step into him, whirling wide with the rubble. A second cultist comes in low and hard, head slamming into my stomach, knife nicking my thigh. I bring my knee up into his nose. He drops away. The other grabs me from behind. The knife comes up. I slam my head backwards. His nose crunches. He drops me. I spin, the rubble held tight in my fist. More of his face crunches.

  The guy on the floor is thinking about getting up. Me and my rubble encourage him not to.

  Behind me, Kayla is on her knees, sobbing.

  Three more cultists, but the circle is tight now and I’m close.

  I break into a run, slam past one, spinning round but still moving. One goes to trip me, I hurdle desperately, mis-step, sprawl, roll.

  I connect with the legs of a cultist in the circle. He trips, crashes forwards. Forward into the portal.

  An ugly ripping sound. Then the cultists are down one member. The chanting falters. The cultists stare in a tiny moment of shocked silence.

  Except… Not quite silence.

  With a sound like a wet fart, the portal collapses in on itself.

  Strike one for the good guys.

  Now if only I hadn’t just given twenty angry cultists nothing to do but use me like a pināta…

  The Nyarlathotep Event:: Case File #5 :: Nyarlathotep

  Christ Church College, Oxford, England

  One thing I’ve always liked about Kurt Russell movies is that they end.

  That sounds wrong…

  I like that they conclude. Evil is defeated. The good guy wins. A sunset is ridden into.

  In real life you face down a horde of angry cultists, close an interdimensional portal, get attacked, find out your incapacitated sword-wielding partner is now… capacitated?… watch her get rid of the rest of your problems, and then you find out there’s a seven-foot tall avatar of fear and chaos who’s all pissed about it and manifested behind you when you weren’t looking.

  In real life this shit never ends.

  Having never faced an interdimensional avatar of fear and chaos before, I go with the nearest weapon to hand and throw a rock at him.

  Apparently this avatar—Nyarlathotep is his name—is made of sterner stuff than that.

  So: plan B.

  It may not be overly heroic to run and hide while getting your friend to do the fighting, but Kayla virtually has superpowers and I don’t, so this may not be as bad as it initially looks.

  Kayla smiles. She points her sword at Nyarlathotep. They stand opposite each other, a frozen tableau for just one second, two… Kayla darts forward almost faster than the eye can see.

  And then Kayla flies eight feet through the air and lands in a crumpled heap. Sort of the opposite result to the one we were going for there.

  God, I wish I’d thought of a plan C.

  In its absence, I stick to cowering. Nyarlathotep steps toward Kayla. He stretches out a robed arm. The impression of a hand and its end—a claw, black leather skin, yellow nails—and then gone, or denied. On the floor, Kayla screams.

  What would Kurt Russell do? Possibly not the smartest question, but it’s stood me better than you’d imagine in times of need.

  Except Kurt Russell would probably charge the guy yelling. The man alone. Guns blazing.

  A stupid, stupid plan.

  Except I don’t have any better ideas.

  There’s a broken chunk of wood on the floor, one end a jagged ruin of splinters. It looks sharp.

  I grab it, brace myself, burst from cover. I level my weapon. I charge.

  As it turns out, the key to a good battle cry is timing. Too early and, well…

  Nyarlathotep turns, swings his arm from Kayla to me. Kayla finally lies still. And then—

  Fear breaking over my skin
like water, drenching me, drowning me. I can see it all. The inevitability. The end. He’s here. Our harbinger. Our prophet. Our Nyarlathotep. He comes bearing this truth: this world collapsing under its own ragged weight, burying us in flesh and concrete; we will chew on our friends, our families—a desperate, animal need to consume, to feed, to survive. An utterly ridiculous, utterly futile urge.

  I’m standing inches from him. Just standing. Weeping. Knowing how foolish this all is, how much madness it is. I stare at the wood in my hands. Better I just end my own life with it. Better I chew off the hands holding the wood. Better I claw out my eyes. Better I gut myself and feast on my own—

  “Ooph!”

  Breath bursts out of me. Something heavy and hard colliding with my back, sending me stumbling, staggering towards, towards…

  The wood strikes Nyarlathotep’s gut. It slashes through the robes. Reams of cloth without end. Still the weight drives me forward, drives the wood in. And it feels I’m crossing some terrible boundary, as if I’m wounding myself. Then: a glimpse of skin—black, yellow, green with pus. I gag, and then the wood carries on, and on, and in, and the figure, the god before me, Nyarlathotep, convulses, heaves, collapses. And the wood goes on, and in, and before my eyes, he dies.

  A feeling like a whip crack inside my skull. And Jesus, did I… was I…

  There’s a pile of red rags on the floor next to me. I’ve fallen down. Kayla is on top of me. I’m holding a charred stump of blackened wood.

  “Get the feck off me.” Kayla stands up dusting herself off, blinking.

  “What did you—?” I ask. Questioning Kayla is always tricky. I’m always concerned the answer will involve her gutting me.

  “In my head.” Kayla blinks a few more times. “Think I was trying to stop you from killing him.” She squints at me. “Normally better at stopping people.”

  I am afraid I cannot sympathize with her injured professional pride. Instead I shake my head, try to clear the shrieking madness Nyarlathotep put in there. And I see the rags on the floor. Empty. Dead. Nyarlathotep… concluded.

  I smile. Because that’s an ending I can really enjoy.

  The Nyarlathotep Event:: Case File #6 :: Sweet Dreams

  Christ Church College, Oxford, England

  Some days I really get the vastness of the universe. I’m tiny. It’s big. I don’t matter. I get it.

  Then, some days, you save the world—you know, for example you close an interdimensional portal infecting the world with madness, kill an avatar of fear called Nyarlathotep when armed only with a bit of two-by-four—and you think the world should really pay more attention.

  But no. Instead, Oxford remains a twisted fun house version of itself and the populace remains howling at the moon.

  Kayla—my sword-wielding partner in government-sponsored world saving—and I exchange a look.

  I put a finger to my ear. “Tabitha,” I say to our handler back at MI37, “any chance you know what’s going on?”

  “Dimensional portal’s definitely closed,” Tabby says. “QED Nyarlathotep’s not as dead as he looks.”

  Twenty or so of Nyarlathotep’s cultists are scattered around us waiting for the concussion to kick in. Except one of them starts to laugh.

  “You really thought just stabbing him would work?” He laughs harder.

  And to be honest I rather had. But I don’t want to give the bastard the satisfaction of hearing me admit it.

  “Crap,” says Tabitha. “Outside of his home reality. Can’t kill him.”

  Wait… Now we realize this?

  The cultist is laughing harder now. “And you closed the portal.”

  So we can’t even get him. “Oh bugger and balls.”

  “Just point the damn phone,” Tabitha tells me. So I dial the office, and I point it, and there are a few half-heard words. And then time and space bend. Like a bubble rising through viscous liquid.

  “Ta-dah,” Tabitha says.

  The cultist stops laughing.

  It should be a satisfying moment, except—

  “Wait,” I say. “We seriously have to go into a dimension representing humanity’s collective fears and madness?”

  “Well,” Tabitha says. “Something about beaches. The travel brochure said.”

  It’s not exactly sporting, but I relieve some of the stress by kicking the cultist in the head and sending him back to the dark sleep of unconsciousness.

  “Also,” Tabitha adds, “top him, get back, and close the thing in thirty minutes or less. Otherwise permanent world buggering. OK?”

  Perfect. Just bloody perfect.

  “Tick tock.”

  I brace myself and step through.

  Another time. Another place.

  As it turns out, humanity is afraid of pretty weird stuff. At least that’s the only reason I can think of that a giant version of Snuggles the teddy bear is trying to kill me with a meat cleaver.

  We’re in something that looks like an airport terminal. Stepping through the portal put me six feet above the floor. With a feeling like slipping out of jello, I fell to the floor. And there was Snuggles. Six feet tall, eye buttons dangling on threadbare strings, a cleaver the size of my chest balanced in one hand.

  “Passport!” he giggles and takes another swing at my head. I duck. He buries the blade into a cement pillar. He tugs it free with an adorable chuckle. A stitch bursts in his arm at the effort. Stuffing spills loose.

  This is typically the point at which I cower and wait for Kayla to carry out violence that makes her seem more like a walking missile launcher than most people you meet. Except, when I look over Kayla is sitting with her hands over her eyes, screaming.

  Seriously? This is Kayla’s personal hell? Really?

  Snuggles takes another swipe at my head. I duck, roll, come up behind him. Snuggles wrestles the cleaver out the floor. Another stitch pops while he giggles madly.

  And I am not particularly good at this whole fighting thing, but at times like this you do what you have to do.

  I kick at his loose arm. More stuffing spills. I kick again.

  Snuggles looks back at me, his cotton line drawn up in a smile. “Playtime is over,” he says as sweetly as can be. He heaves on the cleaver. I kick one last time.

  Another stitch pops. Snuggles heaves. The whole joint gives way. He staggers back uttering things no beloved children’s character should ever say, still laughing between the curses.

  At this point, opportunity and the cleaver are same thing so I grab them both. I stagger under the massive weight. Snuggles’ detached arm still clings to the cleaver. I swing madly, spin round and round.

  And then the blade buries itself in Snuggles’ gut, and he chuckles one last time and lies still.

  I stand up sweating hard. And now would be a great time for me to snap Kayla out of it. Because I can see the Care Bears coming and they have machine guns.

  The Nyarlathotep Event:: Case File #7 :: The I in Team

  Every time I fight unspeakable horrors from alternate realities, I am reminded of the value of teamwork. Say, for example, that I am forced into a dimension of fear and madness to act as the government-sponsored assassin of its avatar, Nyarlathotep, then back-up is about my favorite thing in the world.

  So now, forced into a dimension of fear and madness and acting as the government-sponsored assassin of its avatar, Nyarlathotep, it’s really not an awesome time for my partner to lose her shit.

  But Kayla MacDoyle, MI37 field agent, misanthrope, dangerous psychopath, and virtual superhero is lying on the ground whimpering, while I’m stuck with defending us from a reality gone awry.

  Untethered nightmares come at me. Balls of blades, steely and sharp; beings of arms and bone, scratching, clawing; creeping insectile horrors; nuns with switchblades; rats the size of terriers; tentacular masses, sticky, viscous, and clutching. I scavenge weapons, improvise barriers. I duck blades, catch punches, wrestle limbs. I am beaten, blackened, bruised. I come up with something in my teeth. I am an anim
al. I am pissing terrified.

  Space ripples and changes about us. Maybe we are traveling, some dream logic carrying us along like a current through rooms of living flesh, of bone, of chitin, rooms threatening to drown us, rooms I cannot bring myself to describe.

  I can feel it slipping in behind my eyes. After-images of travesties that clamber into my brain and breed. I lose track of what is real in a place where everything is unreal. And I need to pull back. I need to get him good and grounded. But there is no ground. There is just Kayla, just me. Circling. Falling. Falling again.

  I land. A plain. Some tundra. A dust cloud on the horizon. I pick myself up. And Kayla is still there, right next to me. And I know something big is coming. I just need to get to him, to get us both away. I start to run, but dream rules apply. My limbs do not obey me. Each step is a tottering nightmare of minimal increments.

  And the cloud. The cloud is fast, is impossible in its speed. Closing. Closing. And in the dust I get an impression of hooves, of horns, of teeth.

  “Kayla,” I yell. “Kayla!” I’m begging her. She has to help. I was never built to be the man alone.

  Finally I am at her side. I steel my courage, slap her, shake her. Her head lolls. Her eyes roll. “Come back,” I whisper. The cloud comes closer.

  She is not going to snap out of it. She is gone. I am alone.

  I gather her up in my arms. I stagger. Another step of glacial slowness. The cloud’s thunder shakes this world.

  And it would be so easy to slip away, to give in, to let the madness take me, to be consumed by this reality.

  But there is a home, a place to get back to, friends and family. And Kurt Russell movie marathons. And bacon.

  And screw this. Kayla and I are getting out of here with Nyarlathotep’s head on a bloody platter.

  I turn. I face the cloud. It’s almost on me now. Massive. Thundering.

  Just a cloud, I tell myself. Just dust and wind. I don’t know the rules of this place, but I know the rules of dreams. Of nightmares. And I pray that they apply.

  The cloud breaks over me. Just dust. Just wind. It scours my cheeks. Hoof-beats crash around me. Just echoes. Just the boom of the wind.