“Darkness,” Menshov said. “Not to mention, everyone except you is missing.”“They’ll come back.”“I’m not so sure.” Menshov gestured for Patsjuk to hurry with another drink. “Demons and dark forces are in this place, you hear? It’s crawling with the unclean ones.”
Kovalevsky looked at Patsjuk, who busied himself pouring a murky drink from a large glass bottle, and appeared to be doing everything in his power to avoid eye contact. Kovalevsky guessed that he probably played not a small part in straying Menshov off the straight and narrow.
“What led you to that conclusion?” Kovalesky asked.
“Cats,” Menshov said, and waved his arms excitedly. “Haven’t you seen them? Giant black cats that walk on hind legs? These are no cats but witches.”
Kovalevsky felt a chill creeping up his spine, squeezing past the collar of his shirt and exploding in a constellation of shivers and raised hairs across the back of his head. He remembered the nightmare weight of the cat, and Olesya’s smolder stare, her hands as she cut the poppies, how they bled their white juice... He shook his head. “There was a cat in your house?”
“Last night.” Menshov slumped in his seat. “The awful creature attacked me as I slept—I woke and was quick enough to grab my inscribed saber. I always have it by my bed.”
“Naturally,” Kovalevsky said.
“The cat—and it was large, as large as a youth of ten or so—swiped at my face, and I swung my saber at its paw. It howled and ran out through the window, and its paw... it stayed on the floor. God help me, it’s still there, I didn’t have the bravery to toss it or to even touch it. Come with me, I’ll show you, and you’ll see that this is a thing not of this world—that it has no right to be at all.”
Kovalevsky followed, reluctant and fearful of the possibility that Menshov was neither drunk nor addled. The fact that he even entertained the thought showed to him how unhinged he had become—then again, months of retreat and the trains crawling with lice would do it to a man. He wondered as he walked down the dusty street, large sunflowers nodding behind each split rail fence, if the shock of the revolution and the war had made them (everything) vulnerable—cracked them like pottery, so even if they appeared whole at the casual glance, in reality they were cobwebbed with hairline fissures, waiting only for a slightest shove, a lightest tap, to become undone and to tumble down in an avalanche of useless shards.
Menshov stopped in front of a fence like every other, the wood knotted and bleached by the sun, desiccated and rough, and pushed the gate open. It swung inward with a long plaintive squeal, and Kovalevsky cringed. Only then did he become aware of how silent the village had become—even in the noon heat, one was used to hearing squawking of chickens and an occasional bark of a languid dog.
“You hear it too?” Menshov said. “I mean, don’t hear it.”
“Where’s everyone? Everything?”
There was no answer, and one wasn’t needed—or even possible. The house stood small and still, its whitewashed walls clear and bright against the cornflower-blue of the sky, the straw thatched roof golden in the sunlight. Kovalevsky knew it was cool and dry inside, dark and quiet like a secret forest pool, and yet it took Menshov’s pleading stare to persuade him to step over the threshold into the quiet deep darkness, the dirt floor soft under his boots.
He followed Menshov to the small bedroom, vertiginously like Kovalevsky’s own—square window, clean narrow bed covered with a multicolored quilt—his heart hammering at his throat. He felt his blood flow away from his face, leaving it cold and numb, even before he saw the grotesque paw, a few drops and smudges of blood around it like torn carnations. But the paw itself pulled his attention—it was black and already shriveling, its toes an inky splash around the rosette of curving, sharp talons, translucent like mother-of-pearl. If it was a cat’s paw, it used to belong to one very large and misshapen cat.
“My God,” Kovalevsky managed, even as he thought that with matters like these, faith, despite being the only protection, was no protection at all. His mind raced, as he imagined over and over—despite willing himself to stop with such foolish speculation—he imagined Olesya leaving his house that morning, the stump of her human arm dripping with red through cheesecloth wrapped around it, cradled against her lolling breast.
“Unclean forces are at work,” Menshov said. “And we are lost, lost.”
Kovalevsky couldn’t bring himself to disagree. He fought the Red and the Black armies, and he wasn’t particularly afraid of them—but with a single glance at the terrible paw, curling on the floor in all its unnatural plainness, resignation took hold, and he was ready to embrace whatever was coming, as long as it was quick and granted him oblivion.
He tried to look away, but the thing pulled at his glance as if it was a string caught in its monstrous talons, and the more he looked, the more he imagined the battle that took place here: in his mind’s eye, he saw the old man, the hilt of the saber clutched in both hands as if he became momentarily a child instead of a seasoned warrior, his naked chest hairless and hollow, backing into the corner. And he saw the beast—the paw expanded in his mind, giving flesh and image to the creature to which it was attached. It was a catlike thing, but with a long muzzle, and tufted ears and chin. It stood on its stiff hind legs, unnaturally straight, without the awkward slumping and crouching usually exhibited by the four-legged beasts, its long paws hanging limply by its sides for just a second, before snatching up and swiping at Menshov.
Kovalevsky always had vivid imagination, but this seemed more than mere fancy—it was as if the detached paw had the power to reach inside his eyeballs somehow and turn them to hidden places, making him see—see as Menshov staggered back, the saber now swinging blindly. He propped his left hand against the bedpost, gaining a semblance of control, just as the monster reached its deformed paw and swept across Menshov’s bare shoulder, drawing a string of blood beads across it.
The old man hissed in pain and parried, just as the creature stepped away, hissing back in its low throbbing manner. With every passing second, Kovalevsky’s mind imagined the creature with greater and greater clarity, just as the still-sane part of him realized that the longer he stared at the accursed paw, the closer he moved to summoning the creature itself.
He clapped his hand over his eyes, twisting away blindly. Whatever strange power had hold of him deserved the name Menshov gave it—it was unclean and ancient, too old for remembering and cursed long before the days of Cain.
Menshov’s mind was apparently on a similar track. “If we die here,” he said, quietly, “there’s no way for us but the hellfire.”
“Would there be another way for us otherwise?”
Menshov stared, perturbed. “We’ve kept our oath to the Emperor. We fought for the crown, and we fought with honor.”
“That’s what I mean.” Kovalevsky forced his gaze away from the paw and turned around, as little as he liked having it behind his back. “Come now, let’s see who else can we find. And as soon as we do, we best leave—if they let us, if we can.”
They searched for hours—but no matter how many doors they knocked on, only empty shaded coolness greeted them, as if every house in the village had been gutted, hollowed of all human presence, and left as an empty decoration to await a new set of actors. And the more they saw of it, the more convinced Kovalevsky grew that the buildings must’ve been like that—empty, flat—before they have moved in. Where were the villagers? And, most importantly, where was Olesya? Was she just a vision, a sweet nightmare created from his loneliness and fear, aided by the soothing latex of the poppies in the yard and Patsjuk’s dark green tea?
“Was it always like this?” Menshov said when the two of them finally stopped, silent and sweating. “Do you remember what this place was like when we first got here?”
Kovalevsky shook his head, then nodded. “I think it was... normal. A normal village.”
He remembered the bustling in the streets, the peasants and the noisy geese, bleating of
goats, the clouds of dust under the hooves of the White Army’s horses when they rode in. Did they ride in or did they walk? If they rode, where were the horses—gone, swept away with everything else?
And then he remembered—a memory opened in his mind like a fissure—he remembered the view of the village and how quiet it was, and how he said to a man walking next to him (they must’ve been on foot, not horseback) that it was strange that there was no smoke coming from the chimneys. And then they walked into the village, and there was bustle and voices and chimneys spewed fat white smoke, and he’d forgotten all about it. “Maybe not so normal,” he said. “I remember not seeing any smoke when we first approached.”
Menshov nodded, his gray mustache shaking. “I remember that too! See, it was like an illusion, a night terror.”
“The whole town?” Kovalevsky stopped in his tracks, his mind struggling to embrace the enormity of the deception—this whole time, this whole village... It couldn’t be. “What about Patsjuk and his tavern? We were just there. Is it still...?”
“Let’s find out.”
As they walked back, the dusty street under their feet growing more insubstantial with every passing moment, Kovalevsky thought that perhaps this all was the result of this running out of land—running out of the world. After all, if there was no place left for the White Army, wouldn’t it be possible that some of them simply ran and tripped into some nightmare limbo? It seemed likely, even.
The tavern stood flat and still, and it seemed more like a painting than an actual building—it thinned about the edges, and wavered, like hot air over a heated steppe. Illusion, unclean forces.
Patsjuk sat on the steps, and seemed real enough—made fatter, more substantial by the fact that Olesya perched next to him, her round shoulder, warm and solid under her linen shirt, resting comfortably against the tavern’s owner’s. Both her hands were intact, and Kovalevsky breathed a sigh of relief, even if he wasn’t sure why.
She grinned when she saw Kovalevsky. “There you are,” she said. “See, you took my medicine, took my poison, and now you’re lost. The loving goat-mother will absorb you, make you whole again.”
Menshov grasped Kovalevsky’s shoulder, leaned into him with all his weight. “Why?” he said.
A pointless question, of course, Kovalevsky thought. There were never any whys or explanations—there was only the shortage of land. By then, the ground around them heaved, and the dead rose, upright, the nails of their hands still rooting them to the opened graves, their eyes closed and lips tortured. The streets and the houses twisted, and the whole world became a vortex of jerking movement, everything in it writhing and groaning—and only the tavern remained still in the center of it.
Kovalevsky’s hand, led by a memory of the time when he cared enough to keep himself alive, moved of its own volition, like a severed lizard’s tail, and slid down his leg and into his boot, grasping for the horn handle of the knife he always had on him. He hadn’t remembered it, but his body had, and jerked the knife out, assuming a defensive, ridiculous posture. He swiped at the air in front of him, not even trying for Patsjuk’s belly, then turned around and ran.
His boots sunk into the road as if it were molasses, but he struggled on, as the air buzzed around him and soon resolved into bleating of what seemed like a thousand goats. Transparent dead hands grasped at him, and the black thing, more goat than a cat now, tried to claw its way out of his skull. Kovalevsky screamed and struggled against the wave of ancient voices, but inhuman force turned him back, back, to face the horrors he tried to run from.
So this is how it is, Kovalevsky thought, just as Olesya’s face stretched into a muzzle, and her lower jaw hinged open, unnaturally wide. Without standing up, she extended her neck at Menshov. The old man grasped at his belt, uselessly, looking for his saber, even as Olesya’s mouth wrapped around his head.
On the edge of his hearing, Kovalevsky heard whinnying of the horses off in a distance, and the uncertain, false tinny voice of a bugle. The Red Armies were entering the town of N.; he wondered briefly if the same fate awaited them—but probably not, since they were not the ones rejected by the world itself.
Kovalevsky closed his eyes then, not to see, and resigned himself to the fact that his run was over, and at the very least there would be relief from the sickening crunch that resonated deep in his spine, from the corpses and their long fingernails that dragged on the ground with barely audible whisper, and from the tinny bugle that was closing on him from every direction.
Biographies
Natania Barron is a word tinkerer with a lifelong love of the fantastic. She has a penchant for the unusual, and has written tales of invisible soul-eating birds, giant cephalopod goddesses, gunslinger girls, and killer kudzu. Her work has appeared in Weird Tales, EscapePod, Steampunk Tales, Crossed Genres, Bull Spec, and various anthologies. Natania’s first novel, Pilgrim of the Sky, released in December 2011. She is also the co-editor of Bull Spec. When not venturing in imagined worlds, she can be found in North Carolina, where she lives with her family. Her website is www.nataniabarron.com.
Steve Dempsey lives in England with his wife Paula and more books than a house should sensibly hold. In their spare time they attend esoteric lectures and poke around in second-hand bookshops, just in case someone has a tome they don’t already own. Steve is a government analyst and when he’s not correlating the contents of restricted databases, he plays games and writes short stories. The one in this anthology is his first to be published.
Dennis Detwiller is a writer, artist, tabletop game designer and video game producer. His tabletop games have won major industry awards; his video games have sold millions of copies worldwide. Along with John Scott Tynes and Adam Scott Glancy he co-created DELTA GREEN, the widely acclaimed setting of modern-day Cthulhu Mythos horror and conspiracy.
Larry DiTillio has been a professional media writer since 1973. His script work has appeared on Babylon 5, Hypernauts, Captain Power and the Soldiers of the Future, The Hitchhiker and Murder She Wrote. He also writes animation and has scripted over 130 teleplays in that genre including He-Man, She-Ra, Princess of Power, Conan the Adventurer and Beast Wars: Transformers.” He’s also (gasp!) a gamer and wrote the classic Call of Cthulhu scenario Masks of Nyarlathotep. Philosophy of Life—To live is to undo your belt and look for trouble. “This story is dedicated to my dear friend Maurice ‘Mac’ McMahon, High Priest of Games, lover of people and all things Cthulhu. Rest in Peace.”
Chad Fifer is one of the minds behind The H.P. Lovecraft Literary Podcast (hppodcraft.com). Each week on the show, he and co-host Chris Lackey take a critical and irreverent look at one of Lovecraft’s stories, using atmospheric music and talented guest readers to breathe unnatural life into the work. Chad is also the author of the coming-of-age novel Children in Heat and was the resident humor columnist at criticism magazine The Simon for eight years. He co-wrote animated feature film The Chosen One with Lackey and is currently developing a number of film projects. He lives in L.A.
A. Scott Glancy had played the Call of Cthulhu roleplaying game for decades before co-authoring DELTA GREEN, a gaming supplement that married the gritty spy thrillers of John LeCarre with the cosmic horrors of H.P. Lovecraft. He joined Pagan Publishing in 1998 to work full time developing new Call of Cthulhu products. Delta Green remains his first love. Little is known of Mr. Glancy’s career plans prior to his joining Pagan Publishing, save for his cryptic references to the collapse of Soviet Communism as “the day those drunken Bolsheviks fucked my employment plans into a cocked hat.”
Dave Gross was born in Michigan but grew up in Virginia. After earning a Master’s degree in English, he worked as a technical writer and teacher before moving north to edit magazines for TSR in Wisconsin. Later he moved west to do the same for Wizards of the Coast and Paizo Publishing in Washington, writing fiction on the side. He is the author of the Pathfinder Tales novels Prince of Wolves and Master of Devils. With Elaine Cunningham he co-authored Winter Witch. Dave now l
ives in Alberta, Canada with the best things in life, his wife and their small menagerie. You can track Dave @frabjousdave on Twitter or at frabjousdave.blogspot.com.
Dan Harms is a librarian and author living in upstate New York. He is best known for his books The Cthulhu Mythos Encyclopedia (Elder Signs) and The Necronomicon Files (Weiser). He has written numerous pieces for the Call of Cthulhu game and served on the editorial boards of such august publications as Worlds of Cthulhu and The Unspeakable Oath. At this time, he is finishing work on an annotated edition of The Long-Lost Friend, the author of which is the protagonist of “The Host from the Hill.” Dan’s blog, Papers Falling from an Attic Window, can be read at http://danharms.wordpress.com.
Rob Heinsoo obtained a pseudo-classical education as a first-wave D&D gamer in the 70’s and studied social anthropology in college to obtain his intellectual poaching license. His game design credits include Epic Spell Wars of the Battle Wizards: Duel at Mt. Skullzfyre, the upcoming 13th Age, Three-Dragon Ante, D&D Miniatures, Dreamblade, Inn-Fighting, lead design of the 4th Edition of Dungeons & Dragons, and pieces of Shadowfist and King of Dragon Pass. He lives in Seattle with his wife Lisa and is lead game designer at Fire Opal Media. You can find him storytelling and discussing new fiction projects at robheinsoo.blogspot.com or follow @robheinsoo on Twitter.
Kenneth Hite has designed, written, or co-authored more than seventy roleplaying games and supplements, including the Star Trek Roleplaying Game, GURPS Infinite Worlds, Day After Ragnarok, Trail Of Cthulhu, and Night’s Black Agents. Outside gaming, his works include Tour de Lovecraft: the Tales, Cthulhu 101, Zombies 101, Where the Deep Ones Are, and the graphic illustrated version of The Complete Idiot’s Guide to U.S. History. He writes the “Lost in Lovecraft” column for Weird Tales magazine, and his essays and criticism have also appeared in Dragon Magazine, Games Quarterly Magazine, National Review, Amazing Stories, and in anthologies from Greenwood Press, Ben Bella Press, and MIT Press. He lives in Chicago with his wife Sheila, two cats, and many, many books. He blogs at http://princeofcairo.livejournal.com.
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