The Iron Thorn

by Caitlin Kittredge

  My stomach lurched as the pain crested, and Dean yanked me out of Cal’s reach as he swiped at me. His hands were huge, and tipped with black claws that flexed and retracted.

  “He’s not hallucinating,” Dean whispered in my ear. “He’s a ghoul.”

  Trapped in the half-dark, I clung to Dean while Cal convulsed on the cell floor. “Cal …” I reached out an experimental hand, and Cal snapped at me. His teeth had multiplied and lengthened, and his bones protruded from under his skin like a mountain range.

  I jerked my hand back. Cal wasn’t Cal any longer. He snarled at me, and I flinched as if I’d been slapped. How could I have not seen this? Cal had fooled me, more than even Draven.

  “Keep away from him, princess,” Dean said. “Ain’t anything more we can do.”

  “No,” I said, wriggling free of Dean’s grasp. “He’s still Cal.” I was mostly talking to talk myself into believing the thing on the floor was still my friend. I couldn’t deny he had changed. There was precious little of him left to the naked eye. Just the thing I’d been told my entire life was the embodiment of terror. Only the fact that I couldn’t see much in the dark kept me from screaming.

  Keeping myself clear of his claws and jaws, I crawled over to Cal and forced myself to touch the clammy, loose skin hanging from his newly hollow ribs. “How could you not tell me?” I demanded. My voice rose, anger echoing off the cell walls. “How could you?”

  Cal hacked and trembled, and reached for me. His claws put furrows in my wrist. “I had to. I had to. He came down and he found me and he told me that if I didn’t follow you, he’d burn us out of our home.”

  “What?” I said. “Someone made you spy on me and pretend to be my friend?”

  “Aoife, you should get away from him now,” Dean said. “If he’s changing, that means he’s going to feed.”

  “Don’t tell me what to do!” I shouted at Dean. “I want to know why my best friend in the world’s been lying to me!”

  “It was Draven,” Cal croaked. “He found me two years ago. The Proctors would have burned me out, but I had something he wanted. I can take human skin, and he said … he said if I went to the Academy, watched you … I had to keep you under my eye.”

  “Cal, why?” I gripped his shoulders, shaking him. I could feel bone and gristle, the foreign physiognomy of a ghoul instead of Cal’s skinny frame, and it made my skin crawl. I held on, anger overriding disgust. “Why did you pretend to be my friend?” I whispered.

  “Because of what you are,” Cal said. His voice wasn’t Cal’s voice anymore. It was guttural, a growl of hunger rather than the person I knew speaking. “Draven told me that if you ever found out who you really are … what you can do … it would be … a disaster.”

  “You’ve been bird-dogging us,” Dean said. “The ravens on the bridge. Alouette calling in the Proctors on the airship. Every bit of bad luck since we met.” He curled a fist, flexed it like you’d pull back the hammer of a gun. “I should smash your ugly face in. Do you realize what you’ve done? It’s your thrice-damned fault we’re in here.”

  “No more.” Cal’s breathing was shallow and rapid, his limbs jittering and twitching of their own accord as his nerves played their last notes. “You found your Weird, Aoife. In the crypt, when my brothers tried to stop you. I played dumb because I hoped I could still salvage this and make you go home, but I failed. Two years watching you, pushing you away from the truth, two years being the most horrid, intolerant, party-line-spouting excuse for a human being I could be to keep you in check, and I failed.” He let out a shuddering gasp, a wheeze bubbling from his lungs that sounded dire. “Draven put me in here to kill you, I expect, when he gets what he wants from your pop. And then rot away from hunger myself.”

  I sat back on my heels. My only friend, the gawkish boy who loved The Inexplicables and Gunsmoke, who helped me with engineering assignments tirelessly, was a monster.

  In my chest, a cold ball of iron formed and expanded and turned into resolve. I would pay Grey Draven back for what he’d done to me. If I had to die to do it, I was going to expose the Bureau of Heresy’s lie.

  “I won’t hurt you,” Cal managed. “I … won’t. You don’t deserve this.”

  “You’re damn right I don’t,” I said. Cal shied away from my voice.

  “Understand,” he begged. “It was this, or watch my nest burn alive. My whole family. You, with Conrad … you’d do the same, wouldn’t you?”

  “There’s a difference.” I hadn’t known my voice could hold so many ice crystals. “I wouldn’t have betrayed you over Conrad, Cal.”

  “Doesn’t matter, anyway,” he said. “They’ll use you to bring your father out of hiding, and interrogate both of you until you forget all about me. And I’ll die, and the world will go on.”

  “Star and stone, Cal,” I said. The anger trickled out, replaced by the solid ingot of defeat. “You’re just giving up. The Cal Daulton I knew wouldn’t give up.”

  “The Cal you knew is fiction,” Dean said. “Just like his trashy magazines.”

  “He’s not.” I kept my eyes on Cal. “He was my friend, my best friend, and he wouldn’t just curl up and die. He’d help me, because he’d know we aren’t getting out of here any other way.”

  Cal let out a long, shuddering sigh. “You changed my mind about humans, Aoife. You showed me they’re not all roaches. But we’re not getting out of here.”

  “You’d better hope we are,” I said. “Because Draven needs me alive for now. He gave the order to beat you senseless himself. You’re expendable.” I scooted closer to him, implored him with my gaze. “We need each other, Cal. No matter what you really think of me, if you want to keep breathing, we have to run before they come back. Now, you’ve been here at least once before. What can you tell me about Ravenhouse?” Below the water table as we were, trapped in the bowels with layers of Proctors above us, my little trick of opening doors wouldn’t do any good. I needed variables, options, a plan.

  I heard Cal’s tongue flick out, tasting the blood on his lips. I tried to ignore his small, starved groan. “There’s a sewer main under the cell block,” he said. “Old main. Before the Army Corps dug the new underground. I used to hunt there … with my brothers.”

  “Boss,” Dean said. “And we’re locked above it in a concrete cell with an iron door and two hundred Proctors who want us fried on the other side.”

  “Give me meat,” Cal harshed, “and I can get us out.”

  Dean looked at me. “You really want to help this critter get stronger?”

  “He knows he’s just cannon fodder to Draven,” I insisted. “And he has as much to lose as we do staying here.”

  Dean whistled through his teeth. “I just hope this plan is better than your last one.”

  I gave him a dirty look even though he couldn’t see it. “Why don’t you find him something to eat?” I could tell by sound that there were many more living things in the cell than Dean, Cal and me. I held Cal’s head cradled in my lap, stroking the few strands of hair left on his lumpy skull to keep him awake, trying not to pull away from the feel of his clammy new skin. Dean felt along the floor of the cell and came up with a squealing, thrashing rat. “Just what the doctor ordered.”

  I shied away. “Don’t make me touch that.”

  Dean crouched next to Cal. “Fresh meat, buddy. Open your trap.”

  Cal reached up feebly and grabbed for the rat. It screeched, and disappeared into his gullet in two bites. I had thought my gag reflex was exhausted, but it clamped again at the sight of the wriggling tail between Cal’s lips.

  After a moment of chewing, Cal sat up shakily. He opened his mouth, unhinging his jaw by degrees, and dug his clawed hands into the floor. “You feel it, Erlkin?” he growled at Dean. “Below our feet?”

  Dean’s brow quirked, and he placed his hand against the cell block floor. “He’s right. Something’s down there.”

  Cal lay down, his cheek against the floor. He let out a low wail, notes spi
raling and twisting. The dirge changed, lilting and high, then moaning and low. Cal sang, and my shoulder began to hurt, a twinge I was beginning to recognize as the shoggoth venom responding to its fellow monsters.

  It was a beautiful song, the ghoul’s song, full of pain and loss and hope.

  When Cal finished, my eyes were hot with tears. Dean coughed once. “That helps us how, exactly?”

  “Just wait …,” Cal cooed. “My blood will answer me.…”

  A rumble came from below, a thud, and the drain in the floor lifted out of its seat. Cal scrabbled at it with his claws. “Help me!”

  A ghoul paw burst from below, and Cal grabbed it.

  “Carver.” The throaty voice was like Tanner’s back in the crypt, but lacked the cruel edge of starvation. “Is that really you?”

  “Me, Toby,” Cal said, as the floor around the drain collapsed with a rumble of stone and mortar, splashing into the water below where an old sewer main laid bare. “It’s really me.”

  Outside the cell, a guard shouted.

  “Go,” Cal rasped at Dean and me, gesturing to the hole. “Run for your lives.”

  I snatched at his bare arm. His skin was loose now, papery like that of a man decades older, and his face was hollow-eyed and grim. A rictus grin showed off his teeth. Not the Cal I knew. Except in the eyes. His eyes were still Cal’s.

  “You’re coming with us. You have to.”

  “Get your cute little rear down that hole!” Dean shouted. “More Proctors are coming!”

  Cal stared back at the door. It rattled as the guard struggled to cycle the hatch. “He smells like fear.”

  “If you kill him,” I said, “Draven will be right. You’ll just be an animal on his leash. Come with us, Cal. Forget Draven.”

  The longest seconds of my life went by while Cal crouched at the edge of the hole in the floor, staring hungrily between me and the door.

  Then he jumped into the hole next to me, and Dean followed him. “Move, Aoife! That guard will shoot you in one more second!”

  “Wait!” I cried, realizing that I was missing something. “The book! The witch’s alphabet and the tools are still back there with Draven!”

  “No time!” Dean jerked me farther into the sewer. I thrashed, fighting in earnest against him.

  “I have to get the book!”

  Dean met my eyes. “It’s too late, Aoife. We have to run. Now.”

  Sick at my failure, I followed him down the tunnel. Wood and brick dust dropped into the slowly trickling water below.

  Behind us a Proctor bellowed for us to halt, in the name of reason. Dean squeezed my hand. “I’m right behind you.”

  I ran into the dark without looking back.

  The City Under the World

  THE SEWER MAIN was ancient and close, cold running water up to my shins. Dean caught me and held me up when I turned my ankle on the jagged bricks that hid beneath the fetid water.

  Cal and the other ghoul loped ahead of us, panting. “This way,” Cal growled. “Two lefts, then a right.”

  I followed his bobbing head until the sounds of the pursuing Proctors faded, and then climbed out of the slough and huddled against the wall. It was too much. Cal, his true face, this escape with more of the same monsters who had tried to devour me in Arkham—I had to stop and regain my equilibrium before I lost it for good.

  I felt the madness, stronger than ever, scraping at the back of my brain. No math could will it away now. Especially since I knew it wasn’t infection, but something I couldn’t name or control.

  Cal stopped as well, and kicked off his shoes and socks. His toes curled under, and he climbed out of the slough using claw and nail. He slithered rather than walked, and I scooted away.

  “We have to keep moving,” Cal said. Even his voice was foreign, and I tried to look nowhere but his eyes.

  “Not until you tell me where we’re headed.”

  Cal lowered his lumpy head and gave a snarl of frustration, but I didn’t back away. Cal-the-ghoul wasn’t the worst thing I’d seen today.

  “The lady’s got a point,” Dean said. His breathing was ragged, and he felt his pockets for a cigarette but produced only a squashed, empty pack. “You planning on adding us to your ghoul buffet, cowboy?”

  Cal scritched behind his ear. His hair was the same autumn straw but thinner, longer, wilder and spattered with dirty water. “I’m taking you home. My home.”

  The second ghoul came loping back from his position in the rear. “Men in the tunnel. Men with lights. Got to move.”

  “Aoife, Dean,” Cal said. “This is October. My nest mate.”

  “You call it brothers,” October said. “Are we ditching the meat or taking it along?”

  “Don’t,” Cal warned him. “They saved my life back there.”

  “Bah.” Toby flicked his tongue out, tasted the air. “No intruders in the hearth. We don’t make friends with meatsacks, we eat them.”

  “Toby,” Cal growled. “Enough.”

  The tall, blue-skinned ghoul grunted. “Enough when I say it’s enough.” With that, he loped down the tunnel ahead of us. I hung back, not sure that I wouldn’t be turned into supper if I followed Cal’s brother. Cal shook his head sadly.

  “I apologize for him. Not all of us can take the skin—look human—and he’s not used to people.”

  “No need to apologize for your brother not being a rat-fink liar like you, Calvin,” Dean said cheerfully. “Or, not Calvin—it’s Carver, right? Fits a slimy, ground-dwelling nasty like you.”

  Cal bared his teeth, but he brought up the rear as we hurried away from the underside of Ravenhouse and the Proctors and their shouts.

  I gave Dean a look, one he answered with a shrug. I didn’t really blame him. I was furious and frightened, but most of all I just couldn’t believe Cal had deceived me so thoroughly. That I hadn’t seen, in all his toothy grins and odd habits, the ghoul within. I was supposed to be smarter than that.

  The slog through the sewers and forgotten places of Lovecraft was arduous and wore on endlessly.

  Eventually, we reached an abandoned metro station, a subterranean jitney car still sitting on its tracks. The windows were smashed, the station number in the glass above the driver’s seat was obscured by decades of dirt, and bright round eyes watched us from the shadows under the seats.

  Lovecraft had shut down the Metrocar after the ghouls came into the underground, nearly fifty years ago by my count. The station was as it must have been the day the Proctors bolted steel plates over the entry stairs and cut the aether feed. The sign worked into the tile of the wall read DERLETH STREET STATION, and the long, echoing drip of water all around confirmed we were close to the river.

  “You feeling all right, doll?” Dean said as we crossed the tracks and ducked into a hole broken through the scarred, sooty tiles of the jitney tunnel.

  “My shoulder hurts,” I said. The Proctors hadn’t lied about the ghoul infestation. Just about everything else.

  “This is a terrible idea.” Toby clambered up the wall and walked along the ceiling, suspended overhead like a great spider. “They’ve both got blood in the wind. They’re food, Carver.”

  I flinched at the hunger underlying Toby’s words. Everything I knew about ghouls screamed at me to run before I was in six pieces, but everything I knew came from the Academy. They’d lied about the necrovirus … what else had they been wrong about?

  Cal sighed. “Toby, shut up. I told you, I owe Aoife a debt, one of blood, and she’ll be safe in the nest.” He fixed his brother with a glare. “One way or another.”

  Eventually the tunnel became brick, older than the Metrocar line, and mud sluiced around my ankles. Toby dropped back to the floor, his way across the ceiling blocked by glowing stalactites of fungus.

  “Carver paid a heavy price for your skin, girl. He’s still paying it.”

  I instinctively flinched away from his humped form and gravel-grinding voice, then felt myself flush. Whatever he was, whatever he though
t of me, Toby had saved our lives.

  “I—I had no idea about Draven and his assignment,” I said. “Cal told me he had a family, but obviously I didn’t know his … situation.”

  “His situation is that he’s bringing humans to the nest,” Toby snarled. “In case you’re dumb as you look, that doesn’t happen. Not with live ones, anyway.”

  “Toby, I know that Cal had to do what he did,” I said gently. “But he helped us escape and I bear him … you … no ill will.” I hoped he couldn’t tell I was only marginally sure he wouldn’t eat me.

  “How about you?” Toby jerked his pointed chin at Dean. “You smell like the wind and wet. You’re no more human than we are … you going to be trouble?”

  “You know, you can keep walking down that road, friend, but you sure as hell aren’t going to like where it ends,” Dean told him. “ ‘We ain’t got a quarrel unless you’re fixing to start one.” He glanced behind us, back down the tunnel.

  “The Proctors won’t follow us beyond Derleth Street,” Toby said. “The tunnels beyond aren’t clear.” He grinned at me, and it was like looking at a basketful of razors. “The tunnels north of Derleth Street belong to us. The people of ghul.”

  I turned away from his grim smile and fell back to walk with Cal. I forced myself to look at his face—his new face—and his hunched body with his plate-shaped hands and black razor claws. What could a girl possibly talk about with a ghoul?

  “Have you …” My voice was rough and squeaky, and I abhorred Cal thinking I was frightened of him, even though he unsettled me. I cleared my throat behind my hand. “Have you always been able to turn into a human?”

  “It’s called taking the skin.” Cal’s tongue darted out and over his lips. “It’s shape-shifting. I’m not human. Isn’t that what you’re trying to say?”

  I tossed up my hands. “Hell, Cal. You’re a monster that mothers threaten children with and you’re still touchy as an ugly girl in a pretty dress.”

  After a moment, I heard a gentle snorting in the dark. The snorting turned into chuckling, Cal’s laughter, familiar and safe.