Finally, when my food and water were long gone, the sun completed its trek across the grey sky, and a bloated moon rose to replace it. I stared into the depths of its vast craters, where shadowy beasts moved and flourished among cities of lunar fungi. So far away seemed the golden moon, and beyond it the swimming stars of the dream realm.
The strain of an eerie music roused me from my moon-reverie. I stood, staring across the dunes, and saw a mass of dark shapes moving through the night. Hunched, twisted, and clawed, these marchers plucked bones from the sand like a maiden might pick the brightest flowers from a meadow. The procession sang a mournful song of low pitch and deep timbre, a dirge that chilled me to the bone. It called me toward the grotesque marchers. I walked toward the singers on numb feet as the chill of night sank deep beneath my skin.
Beneath the murky melody of their song I heard again the words of the bearded priest: “Avenge us! Avenge us!” I heard, too, the forbidden word the old hermit had whispered into my ear back in the waking world.
The marchers stared at me with phosphorescent eyes. Many wore tattered robes like shrouds robbed from graves. Their faces were the heads of great worms, eyeless and dominated by mewling, dripping mouths lined with yellow fangs. Others stood taller than a man, yet bent and terribly malformed. Their apish arms and giant hands plucked skulls from the sand and stuffed them into ragged sacks. Still others in the procession were lovely skeletons wearing the crowns of ancient empires. The flames of forgotten sorceries burned in sockets that living eyes had long abandoned.
At their midst, borne on a palanquin of dried skin hoisted by hulking, headless demons, sat a bloated entity wrapped in silvery silks. From the deep shadows of its hood, crimson tendrils snaked and waved like the feelers of an insect. These appendages seemed to conduct the procession in its somber song. When the hooded face, thankfully hidden from my sight, turned toward me, silence replaced the weird melody.
My hand went to the hilt of the scimitar. It seemed the spell of the music was broken. I expected the bone-gatherers to leap upon me, to tear me limb from limb and throw my bloodied pieces into their bulging harvest bags. Yet the thing on the palanquin merely quivered its scarlet tendrils at me in some curious pattern, and the lesser creatures motioned me to follow them across the cold sands. As they picked up their low song again, I found myself trailing behind them. Phantoms swirled about us as we walked, moaning in accompaniment with sad harmonies.
The procession topped a high dune, and the moonlight showed an expanse of dark vegetation. Stooping willows waved in the absence of wind. Enormous blossoms lifted their stamens to the light of the winking stars. Winged clusters of barbed flesh flitted through the air like desert bats. The great oasis did not smell of leaf and petal, but reeked of musty tombs. In the center of the valley stood a fantastic palace carved from massive blocks of ruby, emerald, opal, and beryl. It gleamed like a castle of Heaven, surrounded by the waving stalks of the nightmare gardens, and it sparkled with the refracted light of moon and stars. I followed the singing bone-gatherers toward its gates.
As they walked, the singers fed the hungry, grasping blossoms with treats from their bags of bones. Great petals closed to crunch skulls into powder. Claw-like appendages reached forth from behind black leaves to grasp eagerly at tossed bones. The sweating trees quivered, their trunks gleaming like mottled serpent-skin, branches waving like the tentacles of sea-creatures. The severed and living heads of beautiful women hung by their hair from the branches of twisted willows, gasping like fish to draw air into lungs that no longer existed. Their bulging eyes stared at me as I passed, accusing me of crimes not yet committed. They wept tears of blood which fell to the ground and fed the roots of the sighing trees.
Finally the singing procession led me to the threshold of the jewel-palace, a great portico surrounded by a mass of grinning skulls. The palanquin-borne creature gestured at me, and the singers divided about my person. Each of the fiends motioned me to enter. Could it really be this easy to find and enter the domain of the Lord of Endings? Perhaps the slayer of gods expected me, as the bearded priest had thought. Perhaps he had guided me all this way.
I drew the Sword of Kaman-Thah and walked through the skull gate.
A vast, domed hall opened above me, where the light of stars pierced the diamond-carved roof. Splendid women danced within, their naked skins all the colors of the rainbow, their veils translucent, their bodies virginal and pure despite the lewdness of their dancing. They swirled about a central dais where sat a throne of black metal. Chained to the throne’s base were several dying men, their flesh ripped and flayed, filling the chamber like the stink of rotting flesh and feces. The dancers moved not to the dictates of any ethereal music, but to the invisible melodies of the prisoners’ suffering, which hung thick in the starlit air. A great weariness fell upon me, and I shivered with the scimitar clenched tightly in my fist.
On the throne, draped in robes of spilled blood, sat the Lord of Endings. A giant he was, his skin pale as that of a maggot. He wore a crown of bleached skulls with living eyes that glanced nervously about the hall. The Lord himself had neither eyes, nose, or mouth. His mighty head was faceless, featureless, smooth as a pearl. His great, claw-tipped hands gripped the arms of his throne. The faceless head turned almost imperceptibly toward me. I felt his gaze despite his lack of eyes, for it fell upon me like a great heat or a freezing wind.
Again I heard the voice of the bearded priest in the back of my mind: “Avenge us! Avenge us!” I ignored it.
I spoke the word that the hermit had whispered to me in the waking world.
I spoke the secret name of the Lord of Endings.
“Nyarlathotep…” I laid my sword at his feet and bent to kiss the bloody floor.
He spoke to me then, in words that no living ears could ever hear.
At last, the gateway opens, said the Lord.
“Give me the strength I need to do what must be done,” I begged, weeping before him. The dancers swirled about me like a flock of restless spirits. The were so beautiful, their feet stained in the blood of the chained and dying men.
You shall have it, said the Lord.
I bowed low, offering my life to him.
####
I awoke back in my tiny room, a terrible taste in my mouth. The stone vial lay empty beside my cot and sweat drenched my body. I stood, filled with a dizzying strength. I wretched violently, spewing sickness from the pit of my stomach.
I vomited forth a black puddle of viscous liquid. It spread across the unclean floor of my room. Again I puked, unleashing more of the noxious stuff. And again, as if I were going to spill my guts across the floor. Eventually the wretching subsided. The pool of black slime bubbled and swirled before me. It rose, taking the shape of a dark-skinned man. He smiled at me, no longer eyeless, and I praised him once more with his secret name.
His caress sent electricity running across my skin.
I found for him a fresh robe and a white turban. As he dressed I sent word to my brothers. When it got dark, they came and took him away, showing him a deep respect that came unbidden into their hearts. They took him into the desert, where he could begin his duties as their new leader.
Early the next morning I carefully strapped to my body the explosives my brothers had left for me. Then I prayed, not to the Great God, but to the Lord of Endings, using his secret name. I asked him to provide my brothers with the great strength he had given to me.
I put on a long coat to hide the explosives upon my chest. I walked down the street to the hospital where the pale devils, the invaders, constantly stand guard. I saw one of their large, green trucks there, so I knew there would be many of them inside at this hour.
I walked into the waiting room and took my place among the wounded and ill. In the corners, pale faces stared at me from beneath desert-brown helmets. Piercing blue eyes that should never have looked upon our sands. I noticed a live newscast playing on the television.
A man wearing my own white turba
n spoke loudly on the screen. He spoke of striking against the invaders, of liberating our homeland from the pale devils. Of our Holy Crusade against the infidels.
Through the glare of the television screen, his glittering eyes stared directly at me. He was the Lord of Endings, and he announced his presence to the world. He had come to lead our struggle. Now the waking world would know his power as the dream-world had.
I watched his entire speech, sitting alone in a crowded hospital.
Now it is time.
I stand and pull the pin on the device strapped to my chest. As the hospital turns to flame around me and the screams of the dying fill the air, I whisper his blessed name one last time.
Nyarlathotep. -
-
John R. Fultz’s novel SEVEN PRINCES comes out in January from Orbit Books (US, UK, and Australia). His short stories have appeared in BLACK GATE, WEIRD TALES, SPACE AND TIME, LIGHTSPEED, WAY OF THE WIZARD and CTHULHU’S REIGN, as well as indie pubs like TALES OF LOVECRAFTIAN HORROR, CRYPT OF CTHULHU, and AL AZIF. His website is: johnrfultz.wordpress.com
Illustration by Mike Dominic.
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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.
Loaners
by Aaron Polson
Mariana lay with her head off the edge of the bed, hair dangling nearly to the floor, and imagined how much cocaine she could buy with twenty-thousand dollars. That’s how much the greasy-basement-dwelling-troglodyte offered for a first printing of Between the Folds of Our Time by Alistair Tinks. Tinks. Dinks. Finks. Snip snap snout with the business end of a razor blade, bye-bye tracking strip, hello blow. Or maybe a car and a couple tanks of gas. Go home. Right. Not fucking likely. Mariana giggled.
“What? What’s funny?”
Mariana lifted her head—too fast—and felt the blood shift around her skull. What was this guy’s name again? Barry? Larry? Lance? Jesus, he was like twelve years old, looking like he’d just been potty-trained and wearing his tighty-whities. It was getting old—she was getting old. Too old to hang out in a college town and pick up twelve-year-olds-from the bars. Or college freshmen. She giggled again.
“C’mon…let me in on the joke,” Tighty-whities whined.
Mariana crawled across the bed. One hand rubbed his chest while the other slipped down the front of his underwear. “Don’t be a child,” she said, still smiling.
Twenty-thousand was a lot of fucking money.
#
Mariana had no giggles in the morning, but she had plenty of light. Bright, fluorescent tracks of light in the basement of the public library, the sorting room for new books to be cataloged and interlibrary loans—the nerve center for rare books, her two-time payoff and about to be a third. She’d worked at the library since dropping all fifteen hours during the fall of her second freshman year—how long now? Ten—no eleven years.
Maybe she’d take the car after all. A used car with lots of miles and a little traveling coke.
Mariana rubbed her throbbing forehead and slid into the black office chair in front of her terminal. Three women worked in the basement. Mariana often joked that Fat Pat and Dixie must have each eaten a few volumes of the Oxford English Dictionary, an explanation for both women’s extra large size and obtuse vocabulary. Bother were ancient, too, with pale, tissue paper skin which could only be cultivated under the special lighting in the book bunker. The book ward. Security stronger than a nursery in a hospital.
Rare books.
“Morning Mary,” Fat Pat mumbled. “It appears we have a new Follet shipment today.”
Mariana nodded. Fat Pat always called her Mary. Like it was okay to call her Mary because Mariana was the age of Pat’s oldest fatling. In a family photo on Pat’s desk, only two members had one chin a piece, and they were the in-laws. Mary my ass, Fat Pat.
“Follet. Check. I’ll enter them after I handle this inter-library loan.” Mariana held up a request, a forged request from a dummy account. The book, Tinkie-Dink’s Time Whatsit waited in a padded envelope, sent from a library in South Dakota. How a dusty old tome of metaphysical nonsense ended up in South-freaking-Dakota was past Mariana’s imagination. She held her breath. The last rare book she’d liberated had been two years ago for a sum of five hundred bucks, and the damn thing nearly cost the job. But twenty grand? She couldn’t pass it up. Chance it.
Fat Pat stopped in front of Mariana’s desk. After a glacial moment, she nodded. “Right. Inter-library loan. I’m somewhat surprised people do that anymore.”
Mariana nibbled her lip. Move on, Pat, nothing to see here. Once Fat Pat lumbered away, Mariana sliced the padded mailer open, and pulled out a small, nearly flat cardboard box. A manuscript box. Really small. Working carefully, she cut tape holding the box closed, folded back the flaps, and lifted the precious cargo. Brown cloth cover. Gold foil embossed title: Between the Folds of Our Time. The name, Alistair Tinks, was pressed into the brown cloth under the title.
Twenty grand. Really? This book had like eighty pages, max. Mariana lay the loan order to one side and opened the back cover to search for the barcode. Every loaned book from a sister library had one, and with a little razor work and a liberal application of misdirection, she could manage to check out the book in a hapless patron’s name while hiding the real, untraceable object in her bag at the end of the day.
The aluminum handle of the knife chilled her hand. Snip, snap, snout.
#
Mariana walked from the library; she walked everywhere the bus wouldn’t take her now, after her rust-skirted Cavalier gave up its proverbial ghost back in August. On the walk, she passed Dumpster Dave, one of the local itinerants, a thin, sun-baked man who wore a sheet like a toga and carried a plastic doll he called “his dear one.” He hunkered at the open mouth of an alley. His ghostly blue eyes watched her, followed her.
“Just borrowing. Just borrowing,” he said and laughed.
Mariana shivered. Crazy old homeless guy. Doesn’t mean a thing.
“She’s coming for a visit. Just a little visit. A borrowed visit.”
The messenger bag, tan canvas with one latch torn free, leaned on her shoulder like it weighed a million pounds, like the book of eighty pages had been crafted of pure gold with lead covers for effect. She scurried away from the alley, holding her breath until traffic noise swallowed Dumpster Dave’s laughter.
The basement dweller with deep pockets, Wayne he called himself, lived in a legitimate basement, the lower apartment of an old corner house in the student ghetto. She circled the house on a stone path and found the door, just as he described. Wayne’s doorbell flickered. It was one of those buttons with the soft orange glow from inside, but instead of soft and orange, it flickered like a raw ball of electricity. Mariana’s finger trembled as she raised it.
Go on. Twenty grand.
Her finger touched plastic, and the door opened almost simultaneously.
He must have been watching. Freako.
“You have it?” A security chain cut his face into two halves. The streetlight from the corner lit his thin lips and small, dark eyes. “The book?”
Mariana patted the bag, hoping they could finalize the deal without bothering to remove the security chain. Wayne’s world was one she didn’t need to visit. “Safe and sound.”
The door slammed shut. Mariana’s heart dropped, but skipped to life again as the door popped open.
“Come in.”
Twenty grand.
She swallowed her breath and crossed the
threshold.
A large, flat screen computer monitor glowed from the opposite side of the room. Along with a small desk lamp, it provided the only light. Wayne’s apartment smelled odd—a combination of questionable male hygiene, sweat, an almost fungal odor, stale pizza, and something she didn’t want to identify as urine. It probably was urine. The room was warm, too, far above the comfort level for forced air heat. Maybe Wayne grew things in his basement lair. Maybe he had pet lizards. A ticking noise filled the dead space between her first footsteps into the basement and the moment her eyes adjusted to see more than the glow at the opposite end of the chamber.
Drawings and handwritten equations had been tacked, taped, or stapled to almost every inch of available wall space, along with several articles which looked like they’d been clipped from newspapers or printed from the internet. The walls were covered, except a large mirror next to the computer. For a moment, and perhaps her eyes played a trick, the mirror seemed to reflect another, almost twin mirror which must have been leaning against a half wall which divided the room.
“It’s not much,” Wayne said, and in so doing, dragged Mariana’s attention from the mirrors.
“But it’s home, right?”
Home for the hopelessly insane. He was even wearing an X-Files shirt. Who wore a fucking X-Files shirt anymore? What were the chances this guy even had the twenty grand?
“Can I see the book?”
Mariana’s hand stopped on the flap to her bag. Inside, she felt like shaking. She thought she might shake until all her bones came loose and fell to the floor in clump. Her fingers tightened on the canvas. “Can I see the money?”
Lovecraft eZine Megapack - 2011 Page 34
