Swords v. Cthulhu

by Jesse Bullington

  “Who are you?” I asked. “What’s happening?”

  “You may call me Alia, and I was a prisoner in that other ship,” she said, pointing to Beldur’s vessel, “and he is still a prisoner here. Will you help me to get to him?”

  I felt strangely detached, as if I were two people, one living through the events of the last few hours, the other watching everything from afar, aghast and fascinated. Her nonchalant manner brought these two together, making the horror and insanity of it all seem very present and very real, and I grabbed her by the shoulders, burning for answers. “Were you in the corsair ship last night? Do you know what happened there?”

  She shrugged, and realizing how firmly I had seized her, I released the woman, but she just echoed my question: “What happened there?”

  “Didn’t you see? The deck, like a mirror… ”

  Silence. Then I recalled the emptiness, the vacuity I’d felt as the hungry darkness that had hid in the knight had slowly consumed me. Perhaps the same devilish thing had been set loose on Beldur’s ship, gulped in everything down to the lowest speck of dust, turning the ship into a shining desert?

  “Were these demons, these… shoggoths… there?”

  She looked at me, seeming a little puzzled, her head cocked to the side. “Why… yes, of course.”

  I picked up my cutlass and one of the longswords. “Your husband is near, you said. Let’s find him.”

  I am not usually keen on meeting strangers aboard ghost ships, but the thought of having another able-bodied man around was reassuring. Supposing he was indeed hale, and not a mangled, tortured husk, but I chose not to focus on that possibility.

  “I know where he is.” She pointed toward the forecastle. “They were trying to keep me from going there.”

  We walked slowly up the deck. I was apprehensive, watching the scattered corpses closely: the lack of blood in the two knights I’d fought and her mention of the dark devils “using corpses” left me with little option but to imagine that any of the dead bodies around, sailor, warrior monk, or corsair, could spring to its feet and attack. At any moment I expected more shoggoths to come slithering from the shadows.

  She stopped abruptly, some three steps behind me. “I cannot go on. There is a barrier here.”

  “What are you talking about?” I asked, looking nervously around the stained, sunlit deck. “There’s nothing here.”

  She pointed to a line etched on the planks at my feet, an almost imperceptible curve that went all the way from starboard to port. “I cannot cross these, not while the book remains open.”

  It was too much. Fighting real monsters was bad enough. Having to deal with what I thought were imaginary barriers and silly taboos was unbearable. I was almost frantic, and screamed: “What are you talking about?”

  “I am a consecrated virgin and wife. I cannot cross this… this… line. Not with the book open. My husband, he… you must close the book.”

  This made no more sense than anything else she had told me, but I also saw that there would be no use arguing: there was sweat on her brow, and her eyes were wide, staring ahead at something only she could see.

  “Okay,” I said. “I’ll go for your husband, you just wait here.”

  The words had barely left my lips when I was struck by an intense feeling of foreboding. Was this a trap? Was she sending me toward… what? Should I dare to turn my back on her?

  Alia shook her head.

  “No. None should wake him up but me. He looks for me at night, in his dreams. His dreams are powerful, but we can only touch after the closing of the book and the undoing of the barrier.”

  “You are Christian, yes? I respect your religion,” I said, even if I knew very little about the exact beliefs of Christianity, or how they lived in Christian countries. But I’d heard something about married virgins, or virgins married to the Christian God, or giving birth to God or to proxies of the God, or whatever, and I thought I understood part of her misgivings. “But whatever your beliefs, we are wasting precious time. If your faith won’t let you walk over lines on a ship, I’ll go there myself and free him, and you can pray this thing out later… ”

  There was a flash in her eyes — was it fear? hatred? — and I imagined her spitting, casting a curse on me. Instead her emotion seemed to pass, and Alia said, “You shouldn’t go alone. What if there are more shoggoths? They can hurt you, but remember they cannot stand my touch.”

  Yes, the virgin touch. I hadn’t forgotten that. I felt the ship lurch under my feet — the heeling was getting worse; I got the impression that the vessels might crash into each other at any moment — and it added to my already intense unease.

  “I guess we should close this ‘book,’ then. Do you know where it is?”

  “I believe I can feel it… ” She stared past me. “It is also out of my reach, sorry.”

  She pointed toward a dark space in the forecastle’s shade, under an ugly wooden-sculpted falcon that supported one of the ends of the balustrade above. It was some fifteen paces to the right of the brig’s door.

  I walked nervously toward it, shivering as I stepped over the line scratched into the deck. As I approached, something rustled in the dark place; there was a tent in the shadow. My heart quickened, but it wasn’t another walking corpse or a shoggoth, just an old man, wearing heavy purple robes and a matching skullcap. He stepped into the sunlight and addressed me in Greek. I signaled that my understanding of the language was poor, and he switched to Arabic.

  “I cannot let you come any closer, son. You are under her spell.”

  “I’m with the woman because we were the only two living people here,” I answered, not at all liking his use of the word “spell.” “Now there are three of us, and I don’t see why I should prefer one to another.”

  “But you will let her go to her husband?”

  “That was the idea,” I said, glancing nervously back at Alia and considering: am I bewitched? Then I remembered my recent exasperation, and I thought it unlikely. “I’m not one to stand between a husband and wife.”

  “So, I cannot allow you to pass.”

  My patience was wearing thin. Any moment I expected another shoggoth to erupt out of the darkness behind him. I wondered if the strange old man was a wizard, perhaps the demons’ conjurer. I felt the weight of the sword in my hand, the cutlass in the other.

  “I don’t see how you would stop me,” I said warily.

  His lips twisted in a melancholic smile. “There is a curse on my bones, seaman.”

  I stepped past him, ready to shoulder him out of the way if necessary. As I did, he drew a dagger from the sleeve of his robe and jumped me.

  Alia cried a warning, and I was already half expecting an attack. I whirled as his arm descended, the dagger glittering like a white tooth. My cutlass caught him on the wrist, and his hand, still clenched around the hilt, spun away in a spray of blood. Sending the sword point into his heart was a matter of moments.

  He teetered, then toppled, but before his body hit the deck came the sound of a tree splintered by lightning, and a rending of flesh, and then I had before me a monstrous thing. It was not unlike a giant insect, but built, somehow, around the old man’s corpse.

  His bones had been cursed, all right: the legs of the creature were made from his suddenly overgrown ribs, and the space where his right hand had been was now occupied by a hooked stinger of contorted ivory, the two bones of the forearm entwined into a single hooked point. His skull was bursting out from the skin, dull teeth falling out to make room for needle-sharp fangs, the neck elongating, coiling, crawling.

  I attacked, but the bone hook parried. The obscenely wide jaw lunged at me, and I dodged the bite, clipping it aside with my elbow. The impact hurt. Then the hooked stinger came in low, and I had to jump aside, falling back. Falling back wasn’t good, the thing quick on its rib-legs, and vicious.

  The head bobbed menacingly at the tip of the neck, which obscenely stretched further and further from its disgusting body.
I got the impression that it might soon be long enough to coil around me, and when next it darted in, I tried to sever it with the longsword. It deflected the blow with the thick chitin of its forehead, the skull as heavy as any shield. My arms were aching, and the stinger constantly menaced me. The monster creaked like an old wheel in need of oil, but its movements were quick and eerily elegant.

  I threw my cutlass at it, and the monster easily twisted its head to follow the whirling blade, ready to use its skull-shield to deflect it if necessary. In doing so, however, it took its eyes off me for a moment, and a moment was all I needed. Now gripping the longsword in both hands, I lunged forward and slashed at the exposed vertebrae. I managed to cut clean through the neck, decapitating the fiend, but even as its head fell to the deck, that terrible stinger arced down to impale me. I threw myself out of the way, my feet slipping out from under me as I narrowly avoided the attack. As I landed on the deck beside the grotesque severed head, I saw new bone pushing upward from the fleshy stump of its neck.

  Yet this horrific development did not distract me for long, since I was now between its jagged rib-legs. They danced frantically around my body, trying to impale me. Without much alternative, I thrust the sword up into the belly of the old man, which had become the nucleus of the creature. The pointed legs went wild, jabbing at me as I wriggled beneath them and kept cutting. Thick, oily innards began falling from the wound I had carved, gelatinous blood raining upon me, and suddenly the whole mass collapsed, folding inward on itself like a dying insect, and I rolled away to avoid being crushed.

  I rose shaking to my feet, exhausted but alive. The stench was unbelievable, an acrid rot, more vegetable than animal, that made me cough.

  “The book,” Alia called plaintively from her vigil on the far side of the so-called barrier. “Go to the book. Close it.”

  Thinking dark thoughts about her lack of concern for her savior, I moved toward the shadow of the falcon-carved balustrade. Now that my eyes were out of the sun I saw more distinctly the small tent of purple cloth erected in the falcon’s shadow, and ducked inside. There was barely room to stand, and the only furnishing was a small bronze tripod supporting an open book. It wasn’t very impressive: quite small, just a little bigger than the palm of my hand, with wooden covers. The pages were of thick paper, covered with geometric drawings and a text that employed some Arabic characters but was not actually that language at all.

  Never one to waste time, I reached out with the tip of my sword and flipped it closed, and was immediately assaulted by a perfume — a sweet scent that drowned even my own foulness. It was the same musky bouquet that I had noticed on Alia, and now I remembered where else I had smelled it — it was the same perfume that had leaked from the broken jar in Beldur’s ship.

  I didn’t want to have anything else to do with that book. I stepped out of the tent and saw Alia striding toward the brig, no longer bound by the barrier that had kept her away. The already heeling ship lurched starboard with an ominous creak. I nearly went tumbling, but Alia didn’t stumble. I called to her, but she didn’t slow, looking back at me with a rapturous expression and calling out, “I think it best that you leave now.”

  I had the same impression, but after all I had witnessed, I was too curious to just flee without some answers, so I followed after her. She raised her eyebrows, doubtful, but said nothing more. Her fingers brushed the heavy door of the cabin and it flew open. Instead of darkness, a green-gray light shimmered within the doorway.

  The perfume that came from her hair, her body, was now overpowering. I had the strange idea that the scent was not upon her, but of her — that she was naught but perfume herself, imprisoned in the jar like a jinn until the clay had cracked, freeing her.

  As I imagined this, the nature of the perfume seemed to change. Before, its sweetness had been enticing, relaxing, but now it made my skin creep and my hair stand on end. It was not that the scent had changed into something unsavory, for it was still quite a pleasant smell, but rather that its power touched a chord in my brain. This chord reverberated with ultimate dread, with unlimited fear. All around me, the ship was groaning and trembling like a hurt animal.

  And just like that, I ran to the railing and jumped into the sea. My desperate flight hardly seemed of my own volition, but more as if a puppeteer of horror had taken control of my soul’s strings with an irresistible hand.

  My weary arms and legs churned the deep blue water, swimming frantically away from both the cursed Maltese ship and the polished wreck of Beldur’s. Then I heard a terrible crash and crackle, and unable to resist, looked back the way I had swum. As I watched, eyes stinging from the brine, both vessels burst open like rotten fruit. And then… and then I believe I saw Alia’s husband. The word that occurred me, the only word that still comes to mind when I think of it, is Argos — not the mythical ship of the Greeks, but the other one: the dragon with one thousand eyes.

  “He looks for me in his dreams,” Alia had told me, and it was to dreams that I fled then, my mind rejecting any world that would allow such horror. I had assumed that the demons, those “shoggoths,” had eaten up everything on the deck of Beldur’s ship, but as I took sanctuary in the realm of nightmares, my fevered brain provided other explanations…

  There is now very little to add. I awoke on a beach, upon a small island, and the curious people I found there and how I ultimately escaped them is the subject of another tale. But there is one final detail: when I came to on the sand, there beside me was the little book, and it was once again open — a dagger shot through its pages and spine, keeping the covers apart, an amputated, skeletal human hand firmly clasped around the hilt. I stared at the book, remembering my fight with the purple-robed wizard, and his words... then I clambered to my knees, then my feet, and walked away, leaving book, knife, and hand to be reclaimed by the hungry surf, to rejoin the accursed skeleton in the deep.

  Of All Possible Worlds

  Eneasz Brodski

  My heart plummeted to my sandals.

  “Titus…” My throat tightened, strangling my words. “This isn’t what I was expecting… ”

  The Ludus Matutinus trained and housed the Bestiarii gladiators, as well as the animals they slaughtered. In its stables, I gazed down at a wretched human form chained in a dusty cart. A stunted thing, barely four feet tall, with knobby joints and not a single hair upon him. His wrinkled skin was scrawled with tattooed lines, cutting him into odd segments. He was the furthest thing from a horned, six-legged bear I could imagine.

  “You promised me a horned, six-legged bear,” I protested. I could see Titus’s face grow dark, and fear crawled up my spine. If I could make him laugh… “He’s ugly enough, but Gracus was really excited about that horn thing —”

  Titus’s open hand struck below my temple. The pain wasn’t as bad as the humiliation, the knowledge that he could do what he wanted with me.

  “You forget your place, Marad.” He spit out my foreign name. “There weren’t any giant bears. This barbarian wizard will do.”

  He would not do. Gracus had charged me with procuring beasts for the games. All damn year I’d been waiting for that bear. The legion had returned with plenty of regular, boring animals, but the horned bear was to be the centerpiece. I’d promised Gracus a monster battle.

  “I can’t pay for this,” I said, avoiding Titus’s eyes. Looking lower. He was clean-shaven, as befitted his station, and my own salt-and-pepper beard felt all the more damning in contrast. He stepped forward purposefully, one hand resting on his sword’s pommel, the other pressing flat against my chest. He pushed, following as I retreated, until I was up against the stable wall. His breath assaulted me, inches away.

  “You’ll pay full price,” he rumbled.

  “Guards!” My voice broke, the bastards were standing right there. They marched over but didn’t lift a hand to restrain him. It didn’t matter that Gracus paid them to protect me. In the weighing of Roman Centurion versus Jewish Slave, there was no contest.

/>   Titus grinned and ran his hand down my chest, to my belt, and slipped his fingers into my money pouch. I turned my face aside, praying my bladder would hold. He fished out several denarii.

  “I’ll be back for the rest.”

  A moment later he was gone, and I was sliding to the floor, trembling. The so-called wizard in the cart wheezed out laughter. I glared at him. His mocking eyes met mine, a glimmer of madness flashing behind them.

  “Go ahead and laugh,” I muttered. “You’ll be dead soon enough.”

  I gave the diminutive barbarian to Balthar to put into one of his dwarf fights. I regretted it by the next morning. With his flattened head and hunched form, the savage looked more like a poor Scythian monkey than a human. He couldn’t be blamed for his insult any more than an animal could.

  The festivities were midway through their first day. The morning’s beast shows were over, but I stayed at the Colosseum, waiting for the noon spectacle. I had a duty to watch the barbarian die, the way I watched each of my animals die. Someone should witness their passing, and mourn it. Someone should counterweigh those cheers.

  When the tattooed form of the savage was thrust onto the arena floor, it was with two dozen other dwarves, all armed with tiny stilettos. Opposite them stood two gladiators, one armed with a spear and shield, the other with a massive battle-axe. It was to be a slaughter then.

  “I am sorry,” I whispered toward the old barbarian. He couldn’t hear me, of course; this was for my benefit. I spoke these words to every animal I sent to its death. “You must die so that I may live. I don’t ask your forgiveness; this is the way of life. But know I wish this world was different.”