“That’s foreboding,” I said.
“Indians,” Clell said. “This is Skull Lake. Sacred ground. Mrs. Jess, you said we weren’t gonna go through here.”
The livery owner fussed with the gun at her side. “I must have navigated wrong.”
“Best keep forging ahead,” Cassandra said. “Nothing to do about it now.”
Dusk came, and my leg started throbbing again.
“Lydia?” whispered Cassandra, batting away a fleet of mosquitoes.
“Get ready,” I said. “All of you.”
We’d seen snakes and gators as we’d progressed, but when the water started bubbling fierce, we knew the time had come.
My heart pounded in my chest, and I scurried to lower the scythe rudders and reels into the water. My leg started aching, and the hair on my arms went up as that creeping sense of being watched came over me again. It wasn’t dread so much, but curiosity that came over me.
Biting the inside of my cheek hard enough to draw blood—and help me focus—I put down the anchor and took position behind Cassandra. The boat was sturdy, made to glide softly across the water, but with all the bubbling around us it was far more precarious a position than I’d have liked. I’d fought on rail cars before, even on horseback. But never on a boat. Falling into the water didn’t just mean vines, it meant meeting scythes, too.
Cold sweat trickled down my back and Clell yelled, “Got one!”
The pole I’d put together consisted of a simple hook at the end of a long wooden dowel, and if twisted just right the hook would close on the prey; in this case, it would grab the vine.
“Bring it here,” I said. Clell complied and I fed the vine down through a loop on the side of the boat, and let it go; the spring had built up plenty of tension, and started pulling the vines toward us.
Wet leaves slapped against the side of the boat, and in the distance bleating started. Bleating and growling, followed by the wetness of vines coming at us from every angle.
Thankfully, the mechanism worked. Mrs. Jess screamed as the figure of one of the goats came into view, half dragging through the water, and the scythes engaged. The water around us frothed and the boat rocked as the blades cut through the vines encroaching on the port side.
Starboard, where the reel was doing its job, was another story altogether.
“There’s another,” Cassandra shouted, “being dragged behind this one—they’re roped together. Shoot when you can, Mrs. Jess.”
Cassandra let out two shots in quick succession, and the first beast’s head exploded some distance from us in a spray of black and white fluff.
“Not the head—the heart!” I shouted.
Cassandra shot again, Mrs. Jess following suit this time but her aim going wide. The trees rustled behind me, and I turned to see nothing but the darkening sky.
The water continued to bubble and gyrate, the detritus of the shredded vines rising up around us filling the air with the familiar stink of it. I should have been more afraid, but I was not trembling for fear. I was trembling for excitement.
The second beast propelled into view, and a third was behind it. I used the pole to secure another vine as the first sunk into the water, one of Cassandra’s incendiaries blasting it to bits below. I wasn’t sure how much more vine length the mechanism could take in on this side.
“Grenades!” I shouted, and Clell obeyed through a haze of fear.
The water sprayed up and around the boat, and I prayed that the venom from the severed vines in the water was too diluted to do any harm.
Overhead the grenades arced, raining down drops of blood all about us. Blood sprayed in all directions, sprinkling our faces. Not two heartbeats into the explosion of blood and the water began churning, a renewed frenzy. The vines sought us out, driven by the promise of fresh blood, and only Cassandra’s steady shooting kept us from being overwhelmed completely.
We summoned six beasts with those blood grenades, and we killed each and every one. Then, the water just stopped churning. The last goat snapped its vine as we brought it close, and it dragged no others with it. For a moment, we all stood, taking it in, taking in greedy breaths of air and waiting.
It was full night. Clell was half sobbing, half gasping. Mrs. Jess’s eyes reflected off the moonlight.
“Holy hells.” Cassandra was looking back behind me.
The boat shuddered, and I turned to try and dislodge the reels, but I froze.
Something rose up from the treed area before us. There was a passage in the lake, narrow enough to get us through, but the rising horror before us was blocking the way. We were all too tired for another onslaught of those goats, but this thing moved slowly. Smartly.
Then I threw a handful of quicklime forward. I had to have a better look, and wanted to surprise the creature, this Goat King, before we lost our chance.
In the quicklime’s brief glow at least ten legs flinched. A half dozen heads startled. Horns protruded near everywhere. But that wasn’t the worst of it by miles. It seemed that over time, this central beast had accumulated odds and ends from various warm and cold-blooded creatures, including gators, birds, and human beings.
Heads and eyes, hands and feet, claws and teeth, all turned toward us, vines keeping everything together in a hulking mass that continued to rise skyward.
“Clell! Fire!” I shouted.
I heard him pull the valve on the rudimentary tank I’d put together back in town. The acetone—which I’d distilled back in Marlow—was fed through a long pipe, and with Cassandra’s help, Clell ignited a ball of fire in the direction of the creature.
But seeing the Goat King again, this time brought to life for more than just a flash, was too much. Clell took one look and fell forward into the water and the scythes, and Mrs. Jess screamed after him. The fire died.
“You mush-head,” I called as he went down.
Mrs. Jess went to pick up her shotgun. I grabbed her shoulder as she dipped forward, just in time to see Clell’s face rise up to the top of the water, eyes wide open, mouth bleeding black and horrible.
Then went Mrs. Jess. She fell out of my grasp, losing her footing and crashed into the water, vines encircling her and then bringing her into the mass of the beast.
Another one. Gone, just like that.
Two of Cassandra’s deadly rounds had taken off chunks of the Goat King, but it was keeping its distance for now, rearranging its bulk to take another host into account.
The mouths on the Goat King began speaking and braying and bleating, a chorus of words I could not understand. Yet they spoke to me. Somehow, they spoke to me of terrible thing, of hidden, dark things. Of forgotten, monstrous things. I did not want to listen, yet could not prevent myself.
“Lydia!” Cassandra shouted, her voice bringing me out of my stupor.
It was just the two of us.
“I’m going to throw the tank,” I said, gathering what wits I had left. “Wait for my signal to shoot!”
I trailed off because the back of the boat was being wound round with more vines. Cassandra aimed her sights at the Goat King, who was slowly approaching the boat, waves of water coming from his hulking body. Something kept thumping against the bottom of the boat, and I didn’t dare to think what the scythes had done to Clell…
All the Goat King’s mouths screamed in concert; some were human voices, others animal. Beneath it all there the same buzzing, dying, hellish noise I’d heard the first time I’d encountered the vines.
“Lydia… I…” Cassandra was shaking. I had never seen her so afraid.
The presence was behind me again, waiting. Watching. Amused.
I threw the tank with all my might. It flew across the water, and for a moment I was certain I hadn’t put enough heft behind it. But it landed in the middle of the vined monstrosity, clocking one of the human faces right on the forehead and sinking further down.
I had some quicklime left over, and I threw it up into the air and disengaged the flame gun. The quicklime went vibrant
bright, flaring out and around, spilling light into every corner of the swamp. Bugs kindled in the air, and every face and tooth on that hideous Goat King came to view.
I screamed. I laughed. I was strong and sure, clever and brave. But I was being watched, I was being challenged.
Reeves was right: I was respected.
“Now! All out!” I shouted.
Cassandra didn’t hesitate. She shot at my order, but the tank would not explode.
The monstrosity lumbered toward us, waves of water crashing against the boat until we were shoved up against the tree line. Flames rose and smoked, the smell of meat and vegetable and burning all around.
It would fall on us, smother us to bits. I tried in vain to get the scythes moving again under the boat, but everything was waterlogged and jammed. We were almost out of ammunition, and the monstrous creature was gaining on us.
And still the chorus continued, that monotonous refrain of terror.
“No!” I screamed.
Then the acetone kindled. I fell back; Cassandra tumbled on top of me, her gun engaging somewhere up into the trees. Then my face burned with heat from the flames, as the creature burned. Behind it, nodes of fire flared up all around the swamp; I counted over a dozen through the trees and vines.
They burned. All of them burned.
Cassandra held me, weeping. I watched the fires turn to smoke, watched the hulking mass of the Goat King sink into the swamp.
If she had heard the words, she did not understand what they meant. But the fear was enough. God knows, the fear was enough.
But She was still there, still watching. Still waiting.
We drifted in the boat until morning, making ground by a long pier. In the distance I saw the lights of a passing train, heard the whistle, and welcomed it.
“We can’t go back to Marlow,” I said to Cassandra, who woke and was looking around bewildered.
“I know,” she said. She narrowed her eyes as we got off the boat, checking our guns and supplies. “Poor Clell.”
I sighed. Cassandra had found her heart again, it seemed. But I’d left a part of me in that swamp that would never come back. Could I tell her that I sensed something greater even than the Goat King? Some hovering presence that now and again whispered to me, that I could sense at the edge of my consciousness?
No. I had survived. And She, whoever She was, was larger and more unfathomable than any technological mystery.
We walked toward the train tracks, toward civilization.
Elizabeth, our eldest sister, would be waiting for us at our Aunt’s house in Savannah. She and Cassandra would make up. And we’d go back to Arizona where we’d resume our duties until we all got old enough and the world changed.
But I would never forget the one in the swamp. Not the one we killed, but the one that watched.
Infernal Devices
Kenneth Hite
A shotgun hangs on the wall of Veterans of Foreign Wars Post 393, in Lebanon, Montana. It measures a little over five feet in length, with a wooden stock and grip of carved beech (with stag-horn inlays) running almost to the end of the barrel. Or rather, barrels, as it has two of them, mounted in an “over-under” configuration. In modern terms, its bore would be considered a little larger than 12-gauge, but its wheel-lock mechanism—or again, mechanisms, as each barrel has its own lock—is far from modern. A typed card mounted below it identifies it as the “Donation of Staff Sergeant Lewis Parchwell, of the 13th Infantry Regiment, taken in battle on November 28, 1944.” Elias Hornby, the Recording Secretary of V.F.W. Post 393 for nearly thirty years, and a self-taught hoplologist who had presented papers not just at Montana State University but at the regional Gun Collector’s Show in Denver, dated the gun to 1531 based not only on certain specifics of the mechanism common to early 16th-century arquebuses, and on the absence of the characteristic flared “blunderbuss” barrel end (which appeared only tentatively in the 1530s but became much more common later), but on the letters “AN.DOM.MDXXXI” carved into the left side of the stock near the butt.
For several months his dating, though duly published in the minutes of the Colorado Firearms Collector’s Society newsletter the following fall, rested in undeserved if unsurprising obscurity. Then, by chance, it drew the attention of Dr. Anthony Fetterman, the staff historian at the National Firearms Museum, at that time (1971) located in Washington, D.C., and then (as now) operated by the National Rifle Association as a means of, among other things, inculcating a proper respect for firearms history among the American public. After a hasty correspondence with Recording Secretary Hornby, Dr. Fetterman flew to Butte at his own expense, catching the bus to Lebanon the next day. Upon his arrival, the anxious historian set immediately to work making his own examination of what, if Hornby’s dating was correct, would be the oldest shotgun known to exist in the world, predating the Saxon fowling-pieces on display in Birmingham and Augsburg by several decades.
His examination triggered (unfortunate pun aside, there really is no other word for it) a heretofore unprecedented rift between Post 393 and the National Rifle Association, a rift that tore throughout V.F.W. posts all over eastern Montana as tempers flared and enthusiasts took up sides. Based on the remarkable preservation of the high-carbon iron barrel and the bronze fittings, to say nothing of the nearly pristine steel lock mechanisms, Dr. Fetterman concluded that the shotgun was a museum replica not much older than 1930. He was wise enough to publish that conclusion only upon his return to Washington, but he did so in the pages of the National Firearms Museum’s historical journal, The Arsenal. In response, the officers and members of V.F.W. Post 393 closed ranks around their Recording Secretary, rejecting the implicit argument that Hornby was a fool or a hoaxer. After some persuasion, Hornby wrote a lengthy rebuttal of Fetterman’s findings to be published in the same journal: to wit, that Dr. Fetterman had made no actual chemical analysis of the gun, that no museum would commission such an unusual piece as a replica, that the backs of the barrels (and to a lesser extent, the priming pan) were scorched and scored to a degree indicating repeated heavy fire, and that the steel of the lock was of a variety unlikely to have been easily to hand in 1930.
The controversy eventually led to the return of The Arsenal to a biannual publication schedule, to fourteen lifetime N.R.A. memberships being ostentatiously cancelled in Montana, and (rumor had it) at least one protest vote for George McGovern in 1972, McGovern having (unlike Dr. Fetterman, as a Montanan unkindly pointed out upon hearing the rumor) actually served in combat during World War II. Dr. Fetterman’s request for renewed access to the gun for chemical testing having been indignantly (and unanimously) rejected by the members of V.F.W. Post 393, his final letter to The Arsenal contained little but querulous restatement of his earlier findings, unconvincingly leavened with unctuous assurances of his own unvarying faith in Elias Hornby’s good character.
There the controversy, for lack of further fuel, finally banked and, like George McGovern’s presidential ambitions, eventually faded into nothing more than a rancorous memory.
At first, Hulda Richter thought nothing wrong when the man in black appeared in the clearing, accompanied by a shaggy, horned figure holding a long staff. Of her ninety-one winters, she had spent nearly eighty holding esbats and sabbats in this clearing, for the surrounding forest was one consecrated by massacre to She Where Three Roads Meet, and the ring of stones to the Lurker at the Threshold and to the Treader-Out of the Stars. In those winters, and in that forest, she could smell when something was wrong, smell it deep in the squirming marrow of her bones, in the places where her skull itched to elongate and deform like a basket at the bottom of a tarn.
And nothing was wrong, or rather, nothing was Wrong. There was no singing agony along her jaw and forearms and pelvis heralding the coming of the Black Ram of Haddath, no wave of corruption on the wind flowing from Her Thousand Mouths. Only the sound of Latin, on the night breeze off the pines, and a sudden alarum of bird-calls. And then a crack like a thunderclap, and the
spatter of Horst’s blood and pulverized bones on her skin.
It would be overstating the case to say that Albert Kohl barely felt the recoil. He was a big man, almost six feet tall even ignoring the fringed and antlered hunters’ hide he wore. And much of him was muscle, but that just let him handle more gun. The gun kicked like a horse losing patience. But Albert had been kicked before, and his feet were well planted, and he postponed noticing the blow until another time. For now, he pulled the barrels back into line before Doktor Wiese got to “maleficium” in his peroration, and tried again to aim at the old crone glinting at him with a gaze that glittered and shone like moonlight on marsh water. He slowly tugged the little iron bead on the front of his gun toward the witch with the Evil Eye.
Albert had carried this fine fowling piece with Doktor Wiese for three years. Before that, he had carried a glaive, and before that a boar-spear. Whatever the weapon, in those many years he had not earned his share of the rewards nervous burghers gave to witch-hunters by leaving the task of discerning true witches solely in the hands of the good Doktor. Well he knew the difference between some rat-ridden beldame who the village simply wanted out of the way, or a thumb-fingered herbalist whose potions had worked too surely on the wrong patient, and the true witch-servant of Satan. To be sure, the towns paid the same weight in silver to dispose of any and all of them, so Albert seldom applied such fine distinctions to the matter at hand.
But the Evil Eye was serious business, because it had seen visions the Devil had shown it, and it could look on you and send you to Hell. And for the real witches, the initiates of the primal cult that both Catholics and Protestants desperately strove to burn out of the lands they warred over, the Evil Eye was just the beginning of their vileness. So whereas in most cases, Kohl let the Doktor get all the way to the third “anathema” before even pointing the gun at anyone who looked like trouble, when the Evil Eye winked at him, he fired without thinking about recoil or anything else.
Shotguns v. Cthulhu Page 19
