Shadowrun - Earthdawn - Poisoned Memories

by kubasik

  The boy had stopped moving. Had hidden himself, no doubt.

  I heard something new. Moist. Ill. A sniffing, thick and full of decay. Beasts. But not from the jungle. Something new.

  "Stay within a hundred feet!" someone shouted. The voice of the hook. My memories reeled. I was a man on a tightrope suddenly seeing the woman he'd killed sitting in the audience.

  Mordom.

  2

  Dead fifty years earlier. Fallen onto spikes. Dead. Dead as flesh washed up from the sea.

  Ragged and tore. I'd seen the glitter of blood. No. I hadn't. I'd imagined that. There had been little light in the tunnels under Parlainth. But Mordom had fallen onto the spikes.

  That much I knew. The scream. The sudden silence. Dead.

  But, then, Death is imprisoned beneath a sea of lava. His power fragile. Things happen.

  Resurrection. Birth. Hope.

  Alive. Mordom was alive, here, now. Only a dozen yards away. I stifled a scream. Raised my worn, blotched hands to my mouth. Exhaled. Almost let the sound slip past my fingers. Memories crashed in all at once. The boy in danger. Me, the boy, now. Mother dead, father dying. Creature in my head. Garlthik, my mentor, traitor, torturer. Something had gone horribly wrong somewhere in my past. One ill planted seed and you end up with the branches of your mind gnarled and twisted.

  These questions plagued me, though. What had been my misstep? What had I done wrong?

  I lowered myself to the ground, the weight of years past pressing down on my shoulders, heavy and improbable. If I could simply sink low enough, he might miss me. They all might.

  I was past sixty! What was he doing here? He was a memory, the source of painful nightmares! He belonged inside my head, a phantasm of despair and questions left unanswered. He had no business taking on flesh and muscle, walking with the uncanny precision of bones. His being alive was comprehensible, barely. But why did he have to be near me? Our lives had parted. I almost jumped up, shouted, "Look. I've lived my life in terror of everything that happened when I knew you. I have no quarrel with you. Let me go. Take the boy. You'll have no more trouble from me."

  The boy.

  Now, not me. A boy in danger. Mordom nearby.

  His father dead? Mother insane? Stoned to death? Who knew? Horrible things happen.

  Wasn't there joy somewhere out there in the world? Hadn't I once seen a couple walk by, hand in hand, smiling? Wait. Hadn't I l done that? Where do these things go? Just how does one go about being happy? And when one gets it, how does one keep it? Air is easier to catch and retain.

  The strange, moist sniffing approached. "There's something nearby," one of the hunters said. Deep and gruff. A dwarf.

  Through tiny tunnels formed by branches and leaves, I saw Mordom and the dwarf.

  Fifteen feet away, visible in the light from the torch the dwarf held. If he wasn't dead, Mordom was old at least. Thin, hairless. In the crawling torchlight the deep ravines of his flesh churned red and black. A blasted soil, cursed. His eyes were different. No longer open and white and blind, the eyelids were now closed, sewn shut with thick purple stitches through his flesh. My fingers dug gently at the damp earth, casually, checking for firm reality. His hand was raised, as it had been so many years before, searching. In the palm, a green eye, turning left, then right. A blink. Garlthik's eye.

  Mordom's face wore an expression of malice. Too general a description, you might think.

  But no, it was malice, pure and simple. Imagine a sneer, then add to it such loathing as any name giver might feel. Then add some more. That was his face. Full of passionless hatred.

  The dwarf, standing to his left, leaned back. One hand held the torch. The other, with arm extended, held two leashes wrapped around the wrist. The strain from the animals at the other end turned his flesh red. The moist noise, a breathing, a hunger, came from behind the thick bushes where the leashes led.

  "Should I let them go?" asked the dwarf.

  "No, not just yet. They'll be difficult to retrieve. They have his fear. They'll find him."

  They have his fear?

  Horrors?

  Horrors.

  Mordom had handled Horrors well enough years ago. Now he kept them for pets. I hunched over, shamed by my lack of courage, trying to fold in on myself. The terror of the moment—the past smashing into the present—seemed worthy of such an extraordinary stunt.

  Through the gaps in the leaves I caught glimpses of the Horrors. Two of them, different.

  Both black, size of very large dogs. One with a huge humped back. The other nearly a skeleton covered with tight, wet fur.

  I could be safe. I could remain quiet, let them pass. They didn't want me. The creatures were leading Mordom and the dwarf past me toward the boy. Too cowardly? Compare me to a hero, and the answer is yes. But I never claimed to be a hero.

  The boy's breathing, again. A sniffle. Quiet. I turned just slightly. Beside me, a dazed, dead tree, its hollow innards cracked open, exposed. Inside the hole, a shadow shifted. A shaft of torchlight touched the boy's face momentarily, the flesh of his cheek smooth, uncorrupted by age and experience. A dwarf lad.

  "Over there!" the dwarf with the creatures suddenly called out. The sniffs of the creatures, heavy footsteps through mud, growing louder. One growled. A tendril of thought curled through my brain, probing. For a moment I stopped breathing, stifling all emotions. The probing mind moved on.

  "Listen," I whispered, leaning in toward the boy. "I can help you. We have to leave ..."

  He'd thought I hadn't noticed him, thought he was too carefully hidden in the tree. He screamed.

  I reached in, seized him under the arms with both hands. He kicked his legs against me as I dragged him out. "Leave me alone!"

  I pressed my face against his, our noses touching, and snarled, "SHUT UP!" He did.

  Behind us, the crashing of the Horrors through the bushes as they raced toward use freed from their leashes.

  3

  I dropped the boy to the ground, then, clutched his hand. It shook. He was crying. "Come on!" I said harshly. We ran.

  So much happened, pierced my senses. The thief magic was no help now. Mordom's presence had confused me too much. No longer could I envision the dwarf lad as a possible treasure trove. I wanted to help him. He was no longer himself, he was more than himself. He was me, threatened by Mordom decades ago. He was you and Torran, threatened by Overgovernor Pavelis. My mind slipped beats in the rhythm of life, as all our minds do at times. Often things are not what they are, but more. He was a little boy, but with his pudgy hand in mine, he was all little boys, lost in a jungle, pursued by enemies.

  The Horrors at our heels. The air become moist and hot, unnatural. A tongue of warm air descended, curled around me. The boy screamed again, and I knew why. The touch of the air lapped up against our flesh, began to melt into it. It disturbed my sensibilities.

  Something was in my skin.

  We ran on. Branches grabbed at my flesh, scratched out blood. The boy gasped for air, drowning in thick leaves slapping against his face. My forehead slammed into a low tree branch. I reeled backward for a moment, but then pushed forward once more, ducking slightly.

  Where were we going?

  Shouts again. The hunters followed the Horrors, who followed us. "There's someone else!" one of them cried. A Horror reached us, snapped at the boy's calves, its breath exhaling sharply; a snarl. I scooped up the boy in my arms, stumbled forward. Awkward, unpracticed, an old man suddenly cradling a child.

  The branches cracking against my body overwhelmed me. The exertions so draining I could not think of a plan. I could only focus on trying to keep my legs moving. If they failed me, all was lost. The strange, probing tongue of hot air moved into my body, sliding in and out of my organs. It took on a more solid texture, began to constrict, drawing my innards into a tight knot. I doubled over, nearly dropping the boy. In my arms his weight was extraordinary, stocky and solid. I gasped out loud. He, the boy, was crying again. I was false hope. A
tease of the mind: Things might be all right. Then: No, not so, not after all.

  I had been young once, strong. Now my muscles felt sore and weary. I longed for a rest, a long rest. Death. How had such a miserable creature as me managed to stay alive so long?

  I became light headed. Could I just fall? It wouldn't be my fault. Old, running, trying to save a boy's life. Killed by a Horror for a good cause. It seemed a nice way to go, worthy of a few kind words in memoriam. Something that might erase the horrible child's rhyme as my only possible epitaph.

  The rhyme wound its way through my head, and as I ran, its meter matched my footsteps:

  "Who are you?"

  "J'role, mad old clown;

  I've always been so

  Since my first sound.

  Father and Mother

  Crazy before me,

  Juggle a razor!

  Slice! Now you can't see!"

  I had just finished the rhyme when the ground dropped out from under my feet. The boy and I fell forward in utter darkness.

  4

  Surprise gripped our throats, shaking cries out of us. The river greeted us, its water cool in the night. Our clothes, wet, snaked around our skin, clinging. I knew of the river, normally so much smaller. A brook. I had forgotten that it would be swollen from recent rains. The current moved us along with countless, formless hands. The thing that had been in my body, the probing tongue, was gone, but a lingering stickiness remained in my nerves. At strange mucus oozing through my flesh. The boy splashed in the water, called for his mother, water half filling his mouth as he bobbed up and down. I grabbed him under my arm, turned him so he floated on his back. "Relax," I commanded, but he continued to slap the water, unable to stifle panic. The loss of all moorings had taken its toll; we think we know what life is, and then all that is familiar is gone, replaced by half formed shadows, phantasms of people and places we do not recognize. What can one do but move about wildly, try to somehow transport oneself back to the world known before?

  A splash from upriver. Above, the thick, leafy canopy blocked starlight; behind us only the low hum of rushing water. Something came toward us, swimming.

  Air. Breathing heavily. Moist. Hungry. I reached for my sword, which I had slipped into my belt in the house, but my hand found nothing. I must have lost it during the race through the woods or the jump into the river. Torches bobbed along the riverbank, following us, eclipsed and revealed between trees.

  I kicked wildly, throat tightening, the Horror splashing its way toward us as I tried to get us to the opposite bank. The dark air, the dark water, the floating, all put me in mind of being somehow already dead. Closer came the Horror, and I pleaded with the boy to be quiet. I didn't think silence would help us against it, but it might keep the hunters from knowing' where we landed on the bank. He settled down, aware he hadn't drowned yet his mind suddenly careless of the danger all around. Relieved. He sniffled, loneliness and homesickness wearing on him more now than anything else.

  The thing got closer, paddling. Even as I kicked the water wildly, I tensed, expecting the strange lapping, humid tongue to arrive again. When that didn't happen, I assumed that the Horror possessing that strange power was now leashed, following the hunters along the bank. The second Horror, the one in the water with us, remained a mystery to be revealed. They, Horrors, come in so many nightmarish forms and shapes, who could possibly catalogue them all?

  Its breath was clearly audible now, heaving. Snorting up water as it paddled closer and closer. Only a few yards away. The boy heard it, started screaming. It lunged at us, propelling itself forward, inspired by the boy's terror. The lunge fell short, sending water into the air, splashing over us. The boy, his pitch high, tried to shatter his fear with another scream. He failed. He struggled to free himself from my hold, grabbing my arm and trying to pry free of my grip. I held tight, but then the thing was on us.

  It came at met a shadow darker than the darkness around us. A flash? teeth, a blur. The wound, an epicenter of cut glass. The boy slipped from my arm as I screamed, rolled over. My mouth, gasping with agony as I turned, filled with blood stained river water.

  Paws, large, with nails like silver pins, pushed down on my back, driving me deeper into the water. The thing scrambled over me, paddling toward the boy. I became a non object, and it kicked me without thought as it passed.

  Around me, a void. No up, down. I floated without purpose. Lungs straining for air, eyes straining for sight. Then, a muffled scream. There, to the right. I broke the surface of the river. Coughing. The air I sucked in ripping heat through my lungs. The thing whirled before I had my bearings, a face—no. A mouth. The thing's head no more than a massive mouth, lips pulled so far back that only teeth and tongue showed. A peeled orange, and inside, nothing but a gaping void. The impossibility of the image froze my thoughts. The mouth lunged toward me. I fell away, rolling back into the water. The thing's nails drove down into my chest. A scream from me, and then a gurgling as water once again rushed down into my throat. I clutched at its shoulders, clawed for its neck, thinking without thought it could somehow save me from drowning. The two of us, the Horror and myseIf, submerged.

  Twisting, rolling deeper down through the river's thick, coursing water. We struggled to get a solid grip on each other. My fingers slid up the neck, brushing against long, fine fur that felt oddly luxurious. The neck was long, strangely long for the enormous mouth it supported. I gripped it with both hands, tried to snap it. It writhed in my grip, a snake. A child squirming for freedom.

  My mother's fingers on my chest. The ritual. The creature in my thoughts.

  Teeth sank down into my arm. The pain forced my mouth open. The world inverted.

  Water became my air, stuffing my mouth, throat. The natural response of a gasp meant death. My hands fluttered in the water, searching for the mouth, desperate to pry it off my arm. My right hand did not respond. Limp. Searing. The left found the teeth, sharp and deadly. Pried back the mouth, cutting the fleshy palm of my hand. Free. Images of death floated before; me, strange fish. My corpse floating down the river. My corpse flayed by Theran slave masters. My corpse, killed by my own hand at the suggestion of the Horror in my thoughts. How many times had I almost died? The lack of air made me dizzy. Time tightened, the work of a child, a ball made from a jungle vine, wound upon itself again and again. I drifted, uncertain of how old I was. Old, though. Old. Always old.

  Always?

  Always.

  Some of us, it takes us our whole lifetime to catch up with our age.

  Up, through the surface of the river. The torchlights distant on the other side. Alive! A moment of pleasure, the beauty of a still lake at dawn shattered by the ripples of the moment. The Horror. Mordom. The boy! Where was the boy?

  I was confused. The pain in my shoulder so hot I thought it was on fire. The boy I sought—which one? For a moment I thought I could find myself. Drifting, tumbling end over end in the flood waters of life. Thoughts of my past brought me round and I somehow was a stranger to myself. An unknown, mysterious savior to myself. Did my childhood still exist? Did it live somewhere? Could I rescue the boy I once was and change my present? The thoughts crept up the base of my skull and I feared I was about to lose my mind. It happened on occasion, the fear, the threat of losing my mind. Out of my mind. Thoughts spinning so quick, like a child held by the hands, by the hands of his fat the father spinning and spinning and spinning, the child laughing and laughing until the fateful moment the father lets go. An accident. A slip. Momentum, and the child goes flying. Off. Out. Gone.

  Lost my mind.

  I Feared I might truly come to believe that I wasn't myself as a child, that I was in fact two separate people. (From where came the idea? Where exactly do thoughts come from?) If I could believe that, if that belief came to pass, surely I would no longer know how to live in the world. I would wander the jungles of the land, living like a leopard, aware of the surroundings as things—a tree, an antelope, the sunlight— but my thoughts, the
thoughts of a name giver, would be gone. I would no longer know me as me.

  Suddenly the boy again. The dwarf boy, that is. "Get off!" he shouted. A glint of metal, faint. A bright star on a cloud covered night, piercing the veil. His small hand brought the blade down into the back of the thing's mouth. It roared in pain. I realized at that moment that I was dying. I floated away, an observer, delighted at the boy's blow and our common victory. Delighted, but certain I wouldn't be around for the celebration.

  5

  It whirled on him, the Horror, sending him a few feet off. A splash as the river swallowed him again. "What's happening?" someone from the bank shouted. We had made good time on them, the water sweeping us along past the tangle of trees and bushes that slowed them down. They stood twenty feet back from us. "I can't see!" chimed in another.

  "Where's the magician?" said a third. "Coming! He's on his way," said a fourth. A torch thrown by one of the hunters arced toward us. "There!"

  The flame's reflection spilled over the river's surface, a scarlet oil, a hot point of white at the center. For a moment I saw the boy, young, chubby cheeks smooth and beardless.