“Um…only the main one, The Necronomicon.”
“Ah, yes. That is one of them.”
“One of…which? Are you saying that The Necronomicon is one of these Unlearnable Truths?”
“That is precisely what I’m saying, Mr. Hunter.”
“Oh,” I said. “Shit.”
“There are many other titles on the list. The Book of Azathoth, The Cloister Manifesto, The Book of Eibon, The Book of Iod, The Celaeno Fragments, The Cultes des Goules, The Eltdown Shards, The Revelations of Gla’aki, Incendium Maleficarum, On the Sending Out of the Soul, De Vermis Mysteriis…and a dozen others.”
“Shit,” I said again.
“Over the last five centuries the Brotherhood obtained many of these books, Mr. Hunter. Some were destroyed, others were locked away in the vaults of churches and other sacred places.”
“Why weren’t they all destroyed?”
“Because some can’t be destroyed.”
“Why not?”
“There are protections.”
“I don’t like that word much,” I admitted. “Are we talking magic spells or something?”
“Or something. It varies with each book.”
“Shit.”
“Which brings us to the purpose of my call,” said Acantha. “For the last century or so the Unlearnable Truths have been inert. Contained, you might say. Or lost. There were some tremors of course when the pulp fiction writers began naming them, and how and why they did that remains a mystery, but the books themselves did not appear. That, however, has changed. Limbus has learned that there are several parties actively seeking these books. Great money has been invested in finding them, and there are several competing teams.”
“Teams?”
“The Brotherhood, of course, and some groups of what appear to be special operators working for highly secret and deeply illegal groups within various world governments. That includes your own.”
“My own? You’re not American?”
“I’m not anything,” she said. “I work for Limbus, Inc.”
“Which means what?”
She did not answer that question. Instead she said, “It has come to our attention that one of the most dangerous of these books is being brought to America. It will arrive via cargo ship in a Baltimore port in a few hours. We want you to intercept the people who are in possession of the book and recover it for us.”
“Uh huh. Explain to me exactly why I should risk my ass to get a magical book and then turn it over to people I don’t know and, quite frankly, don’t really trust? You sound like a smart lady, Acantha…sell that to me.”
-4-
Mr. Priest
Town of Poliske
Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant Zone of Alienation
Kiev Oblast, Ukraine
Six Years Ago
“It’s probably unstable,” said Hiro as they gathered together at the top of the darkened stairs. “Let me go first. Nobody moves until I give the word, and then only where and when I say, okay?”
“Whatever, tovarisch,” said Boris with a snort. “Do you want to shake my dick when I take a piss, too?”
“Didn’t bring tweezers,” said Hiro.
Rink and Keppler burst out laughing. Boris shot them evil looks.
“You think that’s funny? How about you suck my dick and see if it’s too small to choke you.”
“I—,” began Rink, but Priest clapped his hands once, loud as a gunshot and everyone jumped. “Okay, that’s enough. Why don’t you all shut the fuck up, yes?”
Silence fell hard and fast.
Priest gave the group a single, curt nod. “Everybody’s here to do a job, and keeping us alive down here is Hiro’s. If he says be careful, you be careful. End of discussion.”
Boris said nothing but he wore a dismissive smirk. Rink and Keppler nodded. So did Hiro. Without another word he began descending the steps, following the beam of his flashlight.
“Careful, Hiro,” said Rink. “Those stairs could be totally rotted out.”
The urban explorer stopped three steps down, then crouched and touched the surface of the stair. Priest heard him grunt in surprise. “This is weird.”
“What?” asked Rink, shrinking back.
“No, it’s okay,” said Hiro. “It’s just that this is wrong. The floor plans said that the basement was framed in wood, which means the stairs would be wood, too. That’s normal, even for factories like this. The basement is supposed to be small, for utility only. All of the storage is on the first floor. But look at these steps.” He widened the beam of his light to show a broad set of dusty white stairs. “These are concrete. Heavy-grade, too. And look over there. See that ramp? That’s for forklifts.”
“So what?” demanded Boris. “So they did renovations. Big deal. My uncle Uri installed a fuck pad in his basement, with a vibrating bed, mirrors on the ceiling, and a fully-stocked wetbar.”
Hiro shook his head. “No, dude, what I mean is that this design is military.”
Boris grunted.
“Military?” asked Keppler. “How can you be sure?”
“See those big conduits on the wall heading down there?” asked Hiro. “Those are ultra high capacity electrical lines, phone lines, and bundled Internet cables. I’ve seen this all over the world. We do events at a lot of decommissioned bases, and this is how they build it when they’re setting up an underground installation.”
Boris scowled. “There was no military here except a standard checkpoint.”
“Oh yes there was,” said Priest. They all looked at him.
“Why?” asked Keppler, confused. “What is this place? The building upstairs is falling down but this…this looks recent.”
“Not recent,” corrected Priest, “but very well-made. It was built in 1934 but completely rebuilt in ‘85.”
“What was rebuilt?” asked Keppler. “I still don’t understand what this is or what we’re looking for.”
Priest walked down six steps into darkness before he turned and smiled up at them through the plastic faceplate of his mask. “The shoe factory was legitimate, at least at first. Ordinary structure, normal electrical needs. That changed, though, when this underground facility was rebuilt and repurposed near the end of the Cold War. This was the last great investment of money, resources, and technology in the hopes of salvaging the Soviet Union. Everyone knew that things were heading toward an inevitable collapse because of economic forces here and the rise of the Reagan military-industrial complex. The Soviets couldn’t keep pace and they knew it. They were becoming resource poor, too, which is why they turned their attention to what can best be described as ‘alternative sources’ for raw materials.”
“What is that supposed to mean?” asked Keppler.
Priest grinned at her. “That’s what we’re here to discover.”
Boris made a face and laid his hand atop the rifle that was slung across his beefy shoulder. “‘Discover’, tovarisch? We’re in a radiation zone. I can feel my sperm curling up and dying inside my balls. I don’t want to hear about ‘discovering’ anything. You said we were here to recover something. English may not be my mother tongue but I know the difference between discovery and recovery.”
“Relax, my friend,” said Priest, “call it a poor word choice. I know what we’re looking for and I have a pretty good guess as to where it is.”
Hiro mouthed the word ”guess.”
Keppler said, “If you know where it is, then let’s get a move on.”
But Priest did not immediately move. “Before we go down there,” he said, gesturing behind him to whatever lay in the shadows below, “I want you to prepare yourselves.”
Hiro automatically touched the seals of his suit. “Prepare for what?”
“For the impossible,” said Priest.
And with that he turned and ran down the rest of the steps.
They stared after him. Hiro cupped his hands around his mouth and yelled, “You do understand that preparing for the impossible is a
contradiction in terms?”
Priest’s laugh floated up the stairs at them.
“That’s just great,” sighed the urban explorer. He looked at Rink and Keppler, and they all shrugged.
“At least it can’t get any weirder than that,” said Rink.
It was a joke, but it fell flat.
Boris said, “Shit.”
They followed Priest down the stairs.
They caught up with him on a wide landing that had three doors. One was marked as a service closet and when they looked inside they saw brooms, mops, buckets, and shelves of cleaning supplies. The second was a security room that had a long bank of old fashioned monitors, clunky keyboards on a metal table, and primitive computers. Both of these rooms were abandoned and filled with the dust of decades. The third door, the farthest away from the stairs, was bigger and more strongly made. Hiro was able to pick the lock and open it in less than five minutes, but they soon discovered a second and much heavier door inside. It was two feet thick and made from titanium, with concealed hinges. A key code reader was mounted on the wall, but they ignored it. The thing wasn’t necessary because the door stood ajar, blocked from closing by the thing that lay across the threshold.
“Jesus Christ,” gasped Rink.
Keppler recoiled. “What the hell is that?”
It was gray and strange and looked entirely wrong. At first glance it looked like a huge and unusually thick canvas water hose, but that wasn’t what it was. This was something organic, something that had been alive, and it was massive, bizarre and terrifying. The skin—if skin it was—was mottled with the faded marks of a dark pattern that was like rattlesnake skin. It was not smooth but instead showed the wrinkled sacs of what looked like pustules, and from the center of each of these was a leathery spike of hair or horn. The smallest of these spikes was an inch long and the largest were six inches. The hide was crisscrossed with lines and marks that looked uncomfortably like the scars of teeth and claws, but they were so big that whatever had left those marks must have been even more enormous than whatever this thing was.
Hiro, Priest, and Keppler shined flashlight beams over the carcass, and slowly inched forward to examine it more closely. Rink hung far back, unwilling or unable to draw closer. Boris stood beside her, his rifle now held tightly in his hands.
“Akógo chërta,” he breathed. “What the fuck is this bullshit?”
But Priest was only marginally less surprised than the rest of them, and shook his head slowly. He had been told the door would be blocked open, but his source hadn’t said by what. The ancient texts he’d pored over, and the reams of commentary, had hinted at fantastic things but he had never once stood in the presence of it. Knowing that a thing exists and seeing it in the flesh were vastly different.
“I don’t know,” he said slowly, choosing the right lies and the right words of comfort to suit the moment, “but whatever it is—it’s dead. It’s not going to hurt us.”
“But what is it?” insisted Boris.
“It’s dead,” said Priest, “and that’s all that matters.”
Hiro studied it without approaching. “Looks like it got crushed by the door.”
Boris advanced cautiously toward it, keeping his barrel aimed at the center of its slack mass. The tentacle was caught a yard off the ground and drooped down on either side of the door. When Boris was a few feet away he lashed out with a kick, but all they heard was a dry rattle, like pieces of ivory in a leather bag. Dust puffed into the air and settled slowly.
Priest pushed Boris’s gun barrel away and knelt. The thing was long and it lay sprawled thirty feet into the landing, with more of it vanishing inside. When he touched it some of it flaked away into dust.
Hiro edged over and aimed his flashlight inside. “It’s torn off just a few feet on the other side.”
Keppler looked nervously over her shoulder. “Yes, but torn off from what?”
-5-
Sam Hunter
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Acantha sold it to me.
She sold it pretty hard.
“The Unlearnable Truths were never stored together,” she said. “Even those religious scholars who doubted—or claimed to doubt—their origins and nature did not risk creating a ‘library’ of such books. In church records there are accounts of catastrophic attempts to do just that. Three of them were stored in Pompeii, another four were in London in 1666. Do you know what happened in each place?”
“Yeah,” I said as I fetched a fresh cup of coffee and slumped back into my chair. “A volcano and a big fire. I watch the History Channel.”
“It became a duty of the Brotherhood of the Lock to keep the books separate and to keep them hidden. And, before you ask, this is why these particular books were never stored in the Vatican library. The cardinals overseeing the Brotherhood feared a disaster.”
“Why not weight ‘em down with rocks and drop ‘em into the fucking ocean?” I asked.
“Oh no,” she gasped. “That would never, ever do.”
“Why not?”
“They would be found too easily in the depths.”
“How? James Cameron going to grab them with that submarine thing he has?”
“There are things living in the deepest parts of the ocean that are sleeping, Mr. Hunter. If those books were dropped down they would cry out for those sleeping creatures and awaken them.”
“Now you’re just messing with me,” I said.
“I wish,” said Acantha.
“Balls.”
“I know.”
“Briny fish balls.”
“It is a larger and stranger world than you think.”
“Swell.”
“Once it became clear that the Unlearnable Truths needed to be separated,” continued Acantha, “Brotherhood teams took them to the ends of the earth and hid them away. Some, of course, had never been in the Brotherhood’s hands, but these had also been hidden away.”
“Hidden where?”
“It varies, of course. Some were buried along with saints or great warriors of the faith in the hopes that these champions would protect the world from the books. Others were hidden in inaccessible places and fiercely guarded by warrior monks, local tribes, or other sentries. This worked for many years…centuries in most cases, but that has changed. The development of archeological technologies and expeditionary equipment has left few places on our world inaccessible. The tombs of saints, kings, and other historical figures have been looted or excavated, the protective seals broken in the process. Tribes and ethnic groups shift and change as national lines have been redrawn. During the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries the maps of the Middle East have been radically changed. Wars, ethnic genocide, and political instability have left some sacred sites completely abandoned or left them open to misuse. In Syria, Egypt, Iraq, Yemen, and Turkey the rise of Daesh—what you in America call ISIS or ISIL—have been actively seeking out any sacred site connected to any religion except their warped and perverted form of Islam. They think that by destroying temples or burning libraries they are eradicating other religions, but they are very wrong. They are destroying the protections that keep much older faiths from returning in force to our world.”
“Okay,” I said.
“Mr. Hunter,” she said sharply, apparently having heard something in my tone, “skepticism of a thing does not mean that it is not real.”
“Yeah, sorry. It’s just that this is a lot to swallow.”
“I’m not asking you to believe everything I’m saying,” continued Acantha, “but since you have agreed to take this case you need to at least accept the possibility that this is real. Otherwise you may not apply yourself with the degree of commitment that has earned you the respect of the Limbus board of directors. We do not want you to do this strictly for the payday.”
I sipped my coffee. “Okay, I hear you,” I said. “I’ve got enough professionalism to guarantee that you’ll get one hundred percent of my skills, energy, and enthusiasm.
But actual belief isn’t something that can be bought or sold.”
The line was silent for a few moments. I swiveled my chair around to face the window. My view was of a bail bondsman, a leather bar, a tattoo parlor, and a diner. Yes, my office is in a cliché. A sad, low-rent stereotype of the kind of world-weary hard luck private investigator that looks great in movies. The truth is less charming. Most of my clients are half-crooked themselves, or they’re desperately afraid people who are trying to break their own hearts by having me tail their spouses to prove that life absolutely sucks. Most of the people I meet in my job are lowlifes, scumbags, thieves, junkies, or people who are so lost that they wash up like flotsam on the streets of this part of Philadelphia. There’s nothing noble about me or what I do. I don’t believe in a whole lot even though I know for sure that there’s more to the world than what can be measured or metered. The supernatural—or at least some of it—is real. I’m part of that world. My family has been part of it for a long, long time. But actual religion…? Jury’s been out so long on that, at least for me, that I don’t think they’re ever coming in with a verdict. If God is up there, then He’s either drunk, indifferent, or bugfuck nuts, because no one in any religion has ever been able to make a case—at least to me—that makes real sense of the universe.
Not that I’m an atheist or even agnostic. I don’t know what I am. I believe in something because I keep getting proofs that there’s something out there; but don’t ask me to tell you what it is. Maybe the great god of the universe is a maniac in four-point restraints in a celestial loony bin.
The stuff Acantha was selling was pushing me to the edges of credulity. It sounded like Dan Brown and Salvador Dali went out and got blue-blind paralytic drunk one night and cooked this up in the wee hours over Jager shots.
“Very well,” she said, “I suppose it’s unreasonable to expect you to believe everything about this. At least in the absence of firsthand experience. But I would at least ask that you keep an open mind.”
“I can promise that much,” I said, wondering if it was too early to put a healthy slug of bourbon in my next cup of coffee. Decided it wasn’t. “Tell me the rest.”
Limbus, Inc., Book III Page 23
