Life goes on, the two of us now drinking inexpertly filtered lake water tea from the same bottle. We eat from the same cans of pie filling, sometimes walk around the park together too. But he still won’t speak. He hardly ever looks at me, and when he does, his eyes are twin voids. Sometimes I think I’ll go crazy, having him here and yet not here. But at least I can feel the crazy now. I think I wasn’t right for a long time and didn’t even know it. I avoid looking at the sky and try to think for both of us.
The things left me a message last night. I heard the clicking, closer than ever, and in the morning there was writing on the sidewalk next to the car. I don’t know what it was written in. Something black and gooey, blood maybe, although that seems silly given the context of the message: BLOOD SACRIFICE it said. I dragged Justin out of the car to see it. Grabbed his head and twisted his neck until I was sure that he was focused on it. But he didn’t react. It was then that the thought came to me: maybe he wrote it. Was he saying that he had been sacrificed? That he would kill me? That I should kill him? Too many possibilities. I shook my head, let his head drop to his chest, and embraced him for the first time since he had come back. I don’t care if it isn’t really him, not anymore. I didn’t make him roll up his sleeves, didn’t look for fresh cuts on his hands. I don’t want to think anymore. It’s time to act.
I saw one of them last night, one of the things that walk the city now. I was still awake after dark, the purloined map on my lap illuminated by a full moon. I had found it, along with several candy bars and some cans of pineapple chunks, during a foray to an abandoned convenience store a couple of blocks away. I was plotting, routing our escape from the city.
The thing was big, bigger than a truck, ungainly, oddly graceful. It had long, segmented, crab-like legs, a thick, tick-like body, and nothing but a circular row of waving red cilia surrounding a squid-like beak where a head should be. It was ghastly, almost to the point of being beautiful. I was filled with terror and awe, and continued to watch long after it’s unstable outline had disappeared in the distance. I didn’t wake Justin.
And then, to my surprise, I continued planning.
We leave today, as soon as the sun is completely up. We aren’t taking the car. Even if we could find gas for it, it makes too much noise. I’m convinced now that the reason I’m still here is that I’m hard to notice. I’m sure the things know about me, but I don’t make much trouble for them. There must be others like me, camped out in apartments and trailers and under off-ramps, surviving, blending in. I wish I knew what happened to Maybe-Justin. It might give me a clue about navigating the streets.
But we’re leaving anyway. It’s going to take days to walk out of the city, and who knows what we’ll find in the countryside. I’ve marked out a route past as many green spaces as possible. I’ve gotten this far by not trusting parking garages and other enclosed underground spaces; parks seem safer. The sky still looks wrong, still burns at the corners of my vision. We still haven’t preformed any sort of blood sacrifice. But we’re going. As soon as the sun is up, we’re going.
-
-
Corinna Sara Bechko is a writer of both prose and comics who can’t shake her zoology background. She was short-listed for the Aeon Award for her story Sooterkin and has had horror published in All Hallows and Reflection’s Edge. Her graphic novel, Heathentown, was published by Image/Shadowline in 2009. More of her comics work can be seen in anthologies from Marvel, Image, and Double Feature. She shares her home with a black cat and a brilliant illustrator. You can follow her adventures at thefrogbag.blogspot.com.
Illustrations by Gabriel Hardman and Galen Dara.
Return to the table of contents
NOTE: Images contained in this Lovecraft eZine are Copyright ©2006-2012 art-by-mimulux. All rights reserved. All the images contained in this Lovecraft eZine may not be reproduced, copied, edited, published, transmitted, borrowed, duplicated, printed, downloaded, or uploaded in any way without my express written permission. These images do not belong to the public domain. All stories in Lovecraft eZine may not be reproduced, copied, edited, published, transmitted, borrowed, duplicated, printed, downloaded, or uploaded in any way without the express written permission of the editor.
The Lord of Endings
by John R. Fultz
I found the old hermit sitting like a stone in the desert. His skin was grey as granite, pitted by the timeless winds. His ramshackle hut stood between two boulders deep into the great, dry plain where the pale-skinned invaders never go. I drank the last of my water the day before, and I was thirsty. The old man gave me wellwater and dried lizard flesh. He seemed to know why I had come.
As I rested in the shadow of the boulders, he brought me a small vial carved of black stone, perhaps basalt. A curiously shaped pebble served as a cork, and the symbols of a language I had never seen wound across the container’s smooth surface. I gave thanks to the Great God, but the old man did not seem to like that. He covered my mouth with his gnarled, dusty hand and whispered a single word in my ear. A word that I had never heard before, yet one whose meaning I understood. It was the secret name of that which I sought.
Weariness overcame me, and I fell asleep in the lee of the big rock. When I awoke the moon had risen, and the old man was gone, his hut abandoned. I think he wondered deeper into the desert. But he had left a canteen of water for me, and it sustained me until I made it back to the outskirts of town.
The pale devils in their green-and-brown uniforms stared suspiciously at me as I passed, shifting the weight of their machine guns on their shoulders. How I hated them. They were from a land far away, where green things grew everywhere and water flowed so freely that they wasted it. They were the conquerors of my land, the unworthy inheritors of our empire of sand and sun. How ironic that they could never survive more than a few days in the desert, never understand the rules of life here among the people born to this harsh and beautiful land. Yet they came years ago with their bombs and their guns and their bone-crushing machines. With their shackles of steel on our wrists, they call themselves liberators. Pale devils.
When I reached the small, filthy room that I called my own, I ate sparingly and washed the desert from my skin. Then I opened the stone vial that the hermit had given me. I sniffed at its open mouth, smelling strange, faraway odors. A sweet decay filled my nostrils like the thick smoke that pours from a bombed-out apartment building. Then, without another thought, I drank the tasteless fluid within, pouring the last of its oily drops down my throat. A great wave of fatigue swept across me, and I lay down on the worn cot that served as my bed. The room began to spin, and I smelled the distant odors again. I fell deep into slumber.
I opened my eyes in a flame-lit cavern, surrounded by walls of gleaming subterranean rock. Figures of gods and monsters spilled across the cavern, visions of an ancient world carved by ancient hands. Twin braziers of dancing flame hung from golden chains, and at my feet lay the moldering skeletons of two men, their beards and hair still growing from desiccated flesh. Their robes had once been rich, the color of silver and gold, now faded to the shade of dust. One of the dead men held a jeweled scimitar in his bony fingers. I would need it more than he, so I pried it free and took his leathern scabbard as well.
The old man’s potion had worked exactly as I had been told it would. I stood at the threshold of a strange and wonderful place. Beyond a broken set of sphinx-carved doors, a stairway wound downward into darkness. Without a torch, I followed the stairs deeper into the dreaming realm, aware that it was not my physical body that descended, but a living manifestation of my very soul. My skin tingled with excitement in the dream, and perhaps it tingled as well where my body lay on that cot in the distant waking world. If this much were true, perhaps the rest of it would be. Perhaps the one I needed to find lay somewhere at the bottom of these winding steps.
Passing through another shattered gate, I emerged in a twilight realm of waste and shadows. The husks of trees lay about me like the bones
of fallen giants. A sweet-smelling wind blew across the remains of a once-mighty forest. Something had crushed this wilderness, and a sea of rotting leaves spread across the devastation like a brown blanket. Here was the source of the strange odors I had smelled from the stone vial: the decaying remnants of a land ripe with death-colored fungi. The full moon floated above like a golden sphere, obscured by vapors of green and violet and scarlet, the shifting auroras of an unearthly sky. Alien constellations glittered, and a stray comet passed across the inky vault, a streak of burning sapphire.
I walked through the remnants of the dead forest, where not a tree remained standing. Shadows swirled from the rotting leaves, watching me with luminescent eyes. Perhaps they were the ghosts of the creatures who once lived among the colossal trees. Eventually I came to a great hill, and I climbed through drifts of grey dust until I stood at its summit. I stared across the vast lands beyond.
What I saw reminded me of my homeland so impossibly far away. A sweeping landscape of dunes. Yet these sands were pale as powdered bone. A black river wound like a snake through the withered field, and I could tell that this land had once been green and fertile, perhaps not so long ago. Like the shattered forest behind me, it had once been a paradise to rival the ancient realm between the Tigris and Euphrates. Now a cold wind filled the air, and the stars quivered as if touched by a nameless fear. I saw a great bat glide across the moon, or something similar to a bat whose body was distorted and swollen beyond all proportion.
I walked into the rolling fields of white sand and saw the skeletons of men and women lying half-buried in the drifts. I headed for the black river and the sand-choked ruins of a small town. Two more sets of ruins sat further along the river’s course, so I made my way toward the nearest.
A thing like a crippled spider rose out of the sand, staring at me with the head of small child, eyes swollen like boiled eggs gone rotten. Mandibles clacked in its distorted mouth, and it drooled a dark fluid. The tips of its eight spindly legs were the hands of infants. I raised the stolen scimitar as it scuttled toward me with a cry of desperate hunger. I slashed it with the weapon, and it fled across the bone-colored waste, a trail of steaming blood in its wake. I was glad it had feared me, for I was not sure I could have killed it. Yet still I heard its horrible, whining cries ringing through the waste as I approached the ruined town.
Cottages and warehouses had crumbled inward or fallen to splinters, and sand filled the basins of dry fountains. Gardens floundered beneath thriving curls of thorn and bristly weeds, and fruit shriveled into black husks along bony vines. Human skulls littered the streets, alongside the smaller bones of delicate four-legged creatures. A black shape leapt from the shadows to perch on a block of crumbled masonry. Immediately, I knew what the smaller skeletons were. A lithe, black cat stared at me with piercing eyes of green. It hissed at me. I could see that it was starved, for its skin stretched tightly across its protruding ribs. I don’t know why I pitied the poor creature, but I did. I discovered that I carried a pouch of dried fruits, so I gave it half a fig and poured a little water from my canteen for it to drink. I noticed the canteen in my hands was the same one that the old hermit had left for me in the desert of the waking world. As I moved through the dead village, the cat followed me like a shadow in the pallid moonlight.
I reached the river, where the sluggish current barely moved. The dock was splintered, and a riverboat lay shattered on the bank. Three emaciated villagers in rags rushed toward me from the shade of the broken vessel. One carried a twisted staff, one was an elderly woman, and one was a boy barely old enough to shave. The stink of death hung about them. I thought of the refugees who fled across the deserts of my homeland to escape the wrath of the pale devils.
“Hail, Man of the Waking World,” said the staff-bearer. By his curious beard I could tell he was a priest. “Long has it been since your kind have walked this way.”
“What happened here?” I asked. I hoped they would not ask me for food or water, for I did not have much to give. The black cat leapt onto my shoulder, as if it had belonged to me for years.
The bearded priest lowered his head as if reluctant to speak. The boy hid behind his mother. I knew then that the youth’s mind was not intact, for his actions were those of a frightened child.
“Once, in a kinder age, this was the sweetest of towns,” said the priest. “Peace, prosperity, and wisdom ruled here until…”
I stepped closer to him. “Tell me,” I asked. My eyes commanded him.
He turned toward the river, which reeked of dead fish. “See now the River Skai, once a font of crystal clear waters. See how it carries the black blood of the Dreamlands along its length. See the distant, frozen slopes of Mount Lerion, from whence the river flows. Once the mountain was green and fertile as were all the lands here: Bold Hatheg and Solemn Nir. Those who survive say even bright Celephais has fallen to ruin. Along the southern river route, the towers of mystic Dylath-Leen have crumbled, and that city’s far-ranging galleons sail no more. Now only the spirits of roaming dead live in these lands. So it has been…since he came.”
“Of whom do you speak?” I asked.
“His names are many,” said the priest. His voice was a rasping whisper. “But should not be uttered. He is the Lord of Endings.”
I remembered the single word the old hermit had whispered in my ear.
The woman and her dim-witted son wept softly now. I took pity on them, and gave them each a fig from my pouch. With such kindness I pried more information from the bearded priest. He told me that the Lord of Endings came bearing the wrath of the Outer Gods, those ultimate beings that dwell beyond space and time.
First, the Lord of Endings came to the monolithic palace in distant Kadath where the Gods of Dream lay in decadent splendor. For their arrogance, or perhaps on a cosmic whim, the Lord shattered the castle of the dream-gods, and strangled each of them. One by one, the Lord broke their bodies against the stones of their fallen palace, and he scattered their bones to the wind: Karakal the Fire-god, Nasht the Wise, Tamash the Trickster, even Zo-Kalar the Master of Life and Death. Lobon, the God of Peace, died on the Lord’s flaming spear. And there were many more whose names I do not remember.
Without the power of the gods to sustain their green and fertile domains, the Dreamlands began to wither and decay. The bones of the slain gods turned to dust and fell from the clouds to bury the land. This was the source of the white sand. The rivers all ran black with the blood of dead gods, deadly poison to drink.
“What of the Lord of Endings?” I asked. “Where did he go when his destruction was complete?”
“Men say he raised a palace for himself in the West, among the Gardens of Nightmare. There a legion of spirits and fiends flocks about his eminence. They say he awaits the coming of something, or someone. Perhaps he waits for this land to be reborn, that he may one day destroy it again.” The priest looked at me with a glimmer of hope in his sad eyes. “But I see a strange fire burning in you, Dreamer. Do you seek the Lord of Endings?”
I nodded, and the bearded priest smiled.
“Cross then the black river,” he said. He grabbed my shoulders, stared deeply into my eyes. Then he saw the scimitar I had stolen from the dead man whose beard was similar to his own. “You bear the power of the Waking World within you,” he said. “Avenge us, Dreamer. Be our champion, Man of the Waking World! It is you the Lord waits for, I know it. He waits for his own ending. Go now, seek the Gardens of Nightmare. There you must slay the Bitter Lord with this holy blade that you bear, the Sword of Kaman-Thah, whose bones now rest in the Cavern of Flame. Go and avenge us!”
The old woman kissed me and the mindless boy hugged at my waist. The three pitiful survivors wept as I walked down to the black water’s edge. The cat screeched and leapt from my shoulder as I waded into the River Skai. I was careful not to drink any of the black water. There was almost no current, and I could see dimly the grey waste of the far shore. The swimming was easy, but I felt massive, slimy forms
brushing against me under the waters. Once a tentacle wrapped about my leg and threatened to drag me under, but I pierced its spongy flesh with the scimitar, and it let me go. I reached the western shore exhausted and lay down on the bone-colored sand to sleep.
I thought of the Lord of Endings as I lay there, and of the single word the old man had whispered in my ear. I wondered if, when I slept here in the dream-world, I would awaken in my squalid room and have to start my journey all over again. But the potion I had drank was powerful. I awoke from a dull oblivion to find myself hot and dry on the western shore of the River Skai.
The sun had emerged from roiling clouds of blood and soot. The heat shimmered across the blistered bone-sands. Accustomed as I was to the stifling heat of my homeland, this did not bother me. I drank a bit from my canteen, ate a tidbit from my pouch, and began my walk into the West.
I passed armies of skeletons fallen across the sand, both human and demonic of aspect. Carrion birds the size of men picked at beasts whose blood had dried to crimson powder. I walked among the husks of broken cities, pillars of graven gold smothered in the dust of godly bones. In empty lakebeds I saw the skeletons of fantastic serpents and fish-bodied men. Trees stood here and there, petrified into obelisks of black stone, hanging thick with dried skulls like over-ripened fruit. I wondered who had left such grisly totems, for there was no sign of anything living about me.
Mine was a timeless journey through a land of murdered beauty. Had the old hermit traveled here years ago, when these barren wastes were luxuriant forests and plains of golden wheat? Had he drank the alien wines of these broken cities and frolicked with veiled dancing girls between columns of veined marble? The ghosts of dead dreams flickered in the air, lost and abandoned on the hot winds. Whole families lay fleshless and scattered across the dunes. Bones rattled and tumbled. I wept often during this journey, cursing myself for wasting bodily fluids. How long would this endless day last?
Lovecraft eZine Megapack - 2011 Page 33
