A second later, she fell heavily to the floor, and the vaporous horror that had violated her body reassumed its insect shape in the air above her. It spread its mandibles, released a string of unfathomable shrieks and clicks, and then simply vanished, leaving behind a horrific odor, like formic acid and sulfur, which seared our nostrils and brought burning tears to our eyes.
I rushed to Kathryn’s still form, took her wrist, and searched frantically for a pulse. There was none.
“Captain Tupper to Navcom,” the PA rang out. “Zero-nine-zero. Captain Tupper to Navcom. Zero-nine-zero.”
For several moments he did not move. No one did. I squeezed Kathryn’s hand, unable to comprehend or accept that she might be gone. I kept saying her name, expecting—hoping—to rouse her from a merely tormented slumber, my eyes willfully shutting out the sight of her twisted neck, her slack, broken jaw.
I was not aware of Captain Tupper bolting from Audit One, or of hearing the call to prepare to break orbit, or the panicked cries of those who saw the strange colors that seemed to ooze from the monstrous structure on Pluto, turning its empty sky a hue of silver-black-crimson-violet that resulted in the almost immediate blindness of those who were watching through the open view-ports.
I knew none of these things because I was collapsed over Kathryn’s corpse, weeping behind clenched eyelids.
The next time I opened my eyes, it was thirteen months later. I could see, but I had no memory of having been escorted to my stasis bay, locked in, and sent into hibernation. The majority of the Akhenaten’s crew had witnessed the phenomenon on Pluto through the holopanels only, which apparently filtered the alien spectrum. Sadly, it was the geo crew, stationed in Audit One, that had been most affected. Fully two-thirds of its number had been struck blind.
Once fully revived, I made straight for Navcom, where I found Captain Tupper seated at his command station, his beard long and streaked with gray, his eyes cold and weary, his once-ruddy face now pale and gaunt. At the moment, he was alone in the chamber. On the panels, I could see the distant, blue-and-white-marbled disc of planet Earth swimming in the star-speckled black velvet sea. We were still at least two days out from Ashur Five, our orbital docking station.
Tupper barely acknowledged my presence. He simply sighed heavily and nodded at the panel.
“They’ve followed us,” he finally said.
“What?”
He switched the main panel to aft view. It took a moment, but I soon noticed several silver-gray dots of distinctly familiar, ominous configuration drifting among the stars. Tupper zoomed in on them, and something in my chest lurched as the contours of the insect-things became clear. I should not have been surprised, yet I felt the same pangs of disbelief and anger as when Kathryn’s life had slipped from her body. I counted at least a dozen of them, and trailing at some distance was a host of suggestively shaped dots, surely numbering in the hundreds.
“I picked them up yesterday,” Tupper said. “But they must have been behind us all along. They only came into visual range when our retros fired.”
“Yesterday?” I asked. “When did you come out of stasis?”
He shook his head. “Never went back to sleep. I didn’t dare leave Tarec to oversee operations, especially the stasis bays. And it was the right decision. Tarec is scrambled for good.”
“You’ve been awake for the whole year?”
“Ellis too. If we hadn’t, you—and everyone—would be dead now.”
I swallowed hard, my throat suddenly too dry to speak.
“But Ellis is dead. Since a month ago. Went out an airlock.”
“Suicide?” I managed.
He nodded. “Don’t know what came over her. Loneliness. Hopelessness, maybe. Anyway, there was no warning.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I’ve not been able to regain contact with Earth. Communications…completely fried. I’ve been flashing emergency codes with the external lights, but I’ve no idea if they’ve been picked up. No sign of commerce out there yet. Maybe in the next twelve hours. Except…”
“What?”
Tupper directed my attention back to the aft-facing panel. “It’s clear that the creatures are following us. That being the case, one might consider it reckless to lead them straight to our home world.” He set the panel for maximum magnification and set its focus on what I recognized as Pluto’s orbit. “Especially since I feel we’re facing an even graver situation.”
The panel now displayed the area of space we had left behind during the past few months, and again my heart felt as if it were exploding in my chest.
“This became visible shortly after the incident that left your crew blinded. It appeared in a quadrant of space light years beyond our solar system. Yet in the past few months, it has passed into our system and has reached an area near the orbit of Mars. At the rate it is catching up to us, I estimate we have only a few days. At first, I thought it was following us, but it’s actually the creatures themselves, I think. Anyway, it amounts to the same thing: if we continue on course to Earth…”
The thing on the panel display must have been bigger than the earth itself. I recognized it immediately as the entity that the structure on Pluto had represented: something immense, alive, and sentient, something that could destroy worlds with a strike of but one of its fingers, thousands of which now groped and seethed and writhed like solar prominences from its incomprehensible mass. One thing the insects’ depiction had failed to replicate was the congeries of luminous globes that blazed from its center section, globes that I could only take to be eyes, all of which were now focused plainly on us.
“Our observatories and tracking stations will have detected this thing,” Tupper said. “The code I have been flashing for the last few months warns against any recon, any investigation, anything that will draw the thing’s attention away from us. I have advised a global blackout as it comes into range. I can only hope they’ve seen my message.”
I looked around at the empty, all but silent chamber. “You didn’t wake anyone else, did you?”
He shook his head. “At first I intended to let you stay asleep until the end. But I have a decision to make, and I don’t think too clearly anymore, Sykes. I’m…tired.”
“What is it?”
“Our emergency pods will hold only two-thirds of the crew. You’re aware of that, right?”
I nodded, having known all along that, in the event of a catastrophic emergency, I, as one of the senior execs, would have to go down with the ship. One of those practical cost-saving measures the Murata Corporation had implemented for our journey.
“We have the opportunity to save the majority of the crew. But you and I are not among them, Sykes.”
I felt the first cold fingers beginning to work their way down my back. All I could do was nod again.
“However, we are being observed. If we launch the pods, I reckon that thing is going to see them. And if those pods go to Earth, it’s no different than if we take the ship right on into Ashur Five.”
It took no great leap of the imagination to figure out what he was planning. “The Akhenaten is going to bypass Earth altogether. Hopefully leading that thing away with us.”
“I don’t believe I can risk saving any of the crew, Sykes. What do you have to say about that?”
I looked at the monstrous image on the panel and soon my eyes began to burn. For all I knew, it might be emitting the same blinding colors as the artificial thing that had summoned it across the light years.
“A hard choice, Skipper.”
Tupper reached across to his instrument panel and entered some codes. “Those bugs. They’re broadcasting signals we can pick up on certain bands. I suspect that’s what’s actually drawing that horror down on our heads. Don’t you think?”
The sounds that rose in my ears reminded me of crickets and frogs chirping and buzzing on a midsummer’s night, modulated into a droning, repetitive rhythm:
“Yagh-Zaddagh, Yagh-Zaddagh, Yagh-Zaddagh, Yag
h-Zad-dagh.”
“You have no way of knowing whether anyone has seen or deciphered your codes,” I said. “What if ships have already been sent out there? What if that thing is already aware of Earth?”
“Then it doesn’t much matter what we do.”
I nodded morosely, trying to keep images of Kathryn’s dying moments out of my head. Finally, in a voice that barely escaped my lips, I said, “I don’t believe we can risk the pods. sir.”
He looked at me for a long time, his eyes burning almost as intensely as the brilliant orbs out there in the depths of space. Finally, he turned to his controls and began entering his data, which he had obviously prepared well in advance. When he was finished, he slowly, painfully rose from his chair and disappeared for a time. When he came back, he had a bottle and two glasses.
“I’ve put us on maximum power, which may buy us a few more days. I don’t think I want that thing to catch up to us before we go into the sun.”
“Understood, sir.”
He handed me a glass, and I took a long swallow of the rum. It was old and good, and for several minutes I actually felt contented and at peace. I knew I would never have a chance to regret my decision. Our decision.
“Thanks, Skipper,” I said. “In a way, I’m guess I’m glad to you brought me out, rather than go to the end oblivious.”
“You say that now, but you still have plenty of time to think about it. Just say the word, and I’ll put you back in stasis. Or…offer you another alternative.”
I looked at the vidpanel, and the horrible thing that seemed to have grown larger even in the last few minutes. I shrugged. “I don’t know. I guess I’ve got this time to make my peace. How about I let you know?”
He looked at the distant, seething devil, and shuddered visibly. “Yeah. We’ve got time.”
I nodded.
The sun’s gravity had pulled the Akhenaten past the point of no return when Yagh-Zaddagh began to slow as it approached Earth. I was not aware of this at the time because, without my knowledge, Captain Tupper had narcotized me, returned me to hibernation, and launched my stasis capsule in an escape pod, apparently only moments before it was too late to do so. All I knew was that I woke up some weeks later in the sickbay of the Vardinoy, a freighter that had joined the fleet of surviving Earth ships and set about rescuing any castaways that might be found in the navigable space lanes. I was lucky because the Vardinoy was just retiring from its final recon flight when it picked up the faint signal from my pod’s transponder.
I say I was lucky. I wish the skipper had taken me with him on his final journey. I don’t know why he did what he did; I suppose he felt it was some final act of kindness, his way of atoning for whatever transgressions he felt he had committed in this life.
Yagh-Zaddagh had already cleared he earth by the time I returned to consciousness. Of that cosmic monstrosity, there was no more sign than there was any indication that humankind had once been the dominant species on the blue and white marble the Vardinoy and fleet were leaving behind for destinations unknown. While the fate of the Akhenaten’s remaining crew would probably have been no different had Captain Tupper opted to spare as many as he could before it hurtled into the sun, the irony, I believe, is that the horror from beyond our solar system had never been following us specifically. Its target had been the Earth all along, and it was simply happenstance that we happened to be where we were when the insects from Pluto began their long voyage across the solar system.
I believe this is so because, on the Vardinoy’s holopanels, which will continually scan the Earth for as long as it is in range, we can see that the insects have set to work building a new gigantic likeness, this one amid the ruins of the eastern Asian continent. In the last month, as our little fleet has approached the orbit of Mars on its reach for the stars, we’ve watched the structure grow and spread steadily, almost as if it were building itself. It appears different from the one on Pluto; far larger, and somehow even more terrible, more malignant.
Soon I will enter hibernation one more time. Hopefully, I will awaken in a place where I can live out my remaining days before Yagh-Zaddagh comes.
CULT OF THE DEAD
Lois H. Gresh
Lois H. Gresh is the six-time New York Times best-selling author and USA Today best-selling author of 28 books and 60 short stories published in 22 languages. Titles include Dark Fusions: Where Monsters Lurk! (PS Publishing, 2013) and Eldritch Evolutions (Chaosium, 2011). Current stories are in Black Wings III, The Madness of Cthulhu, Searchers After Horror, That Is Not Dead, Expiration Date, Darke Phantastique, Mark of the Beast, Eldritch Chrome, A Mountain Walked, Mad Science Café, and others. Lois has received Bram Stoker Award, Nebula Award, Theodore Sturgeon Award, and International Horror Guild Award nominations.
THE LIGHT WAVERS, THEN TWITCHES ONTO A RIBCAGE, one of dozens studding the wall. A femur trips her, and she stumbles, clutches at the ribcages—all small, must be children— and recoils as her fingernails scrape bone. She almost drops the flashlight along with her sack of tools, but steadies herself—living with the dead for six years, been dead all my life, what’s there to be afraid of?—and ducks beneath the arch encrusted with bird shells. She claws her eyes, but the itch just won’t go away. It’s as if the garua fog follows her everywhere. Outside, it’s the brume exhaled by the brown-shit sea, a foul breath that smothers all of Lima. Inside it’s a paste, like the white of an old man’s eyes as he dies, and the cold penetrates straight to her bones.
She wobbles forward, glances into the right pit at the thousands of fibula arranged with skulls to form flowers. Beautiful. Then she glances into the left pit at the flattened dust of the family buried hundreds of years ago. Crook of an elbow, baby held close, skirt etched in grime, husband huddled nearby; what was it like for this woman to have a family? Quilla Saparo can’t imagine, she with her burning eyes, her orphan past, her miserable now, her nothing tomorrow.
Whatever she heard, possibly a small animal, whimpers again. There’s no way anyone could have slipped past her. Nobody, not even Diego Toribio, administrator of the Lima Monastery, has ever ventured beneath the first level of the catacombs. This second level is Quilla’s private sanctuary, her home.
No time to waste. She has to find out who, or what, is down here with her.
She crawls into the tunnel that she has carefully excavated over the years. As she enters, the tunnel shudders, and then it wheezes; and it’s like sliding into the mouth of a beast, one that has swallowed something alive, something that now sounds like a little boy—
“Go away,” he whines. “Leave me alone. Let me go.” Quilla can’t quite place his accent. Hers is from a mountain village outside Cusco, the result of thousands of years of Incan Quechua language merged with modern Peruvian slang. She escaped at thirteen to become a guide in the catacombs.
She flattens to her belly and wriggles through the passage. It slopes downward, twists left, straightens, then slopes again toward the third subterranean level. Bones jut from the walls, the bones of Spanish Catholics.
She can’t imagine how the boy got into the lower levels. Nobody is allowed down here without a guide. People come in small groups, no more than ten at a time. It’s all carefully controlled.
This boy could expose her and cause trouble. If Diego learns that Quilla stole the keys to the catacombs, dug beneath the first level, and worse, sleeps here, he’ll call the police and have her imprisoned, beaten, raped, maybe even killed. You don’t fool around with the Lima police.
She crawls past holes filled with toe phalanges, illiac fossa bones, hip joints, metarpals, and ulnas, everything arranged in intricate patterns. Eyes, tentacles, flying cats, three steps leading to four windows, then four steps leading to three windows. These are the patterns of the paracas mantles, the funerary blankets wrapped around the corpses of the royal Incans.
The boy is crying now, terrified, and she pictures him being smothered by the garua.
The tunnel groans and contracts, then spa
sms and squeezes her again. She tries not to breathe, to make herself smaller, but it’s as if she’s being swallowed by a snake. Her ribs hurt, any moment, they’re gonna crack.
The garua swarms around her, and it squirms into her eyes. The tunnel hisses like a steam vent, and from far ahead is the clap of a thunderstorm. She starts wriggling backward, but something crashes up ahead—a boulder?—and bone powder roils down the tunnel and consumes her, and she chokes. She’s completely blind now, straining to hear the child. Is he dead?
“Fertility, sacrifice, and the cult of the dead. The three things that matter. Humans, the dead royals who are supernatural gods, and the realm of ordinary dead. The three layers of being.” A voice scratches like an old record and reverberates down the passageway. The words are in the ancient Quechua language.
The powder of a thousand bones dissipates and settles to fine gray dust, and Quilla claws again at her eyes. Three meters ahead, skulls leap from the dirt walls and clatter into heaps, and in their midst stands a creature, clearly not human. The body is a bloated grape covered in tufts of hair the color of scars. The face is oval, the nose flat, the eyes black: almost Incan. Naked, its genitals hidden by abdominal folds, the creature is covered in tattoos, the patterns the same as in the bones Quilla passed. Bird claws, flying cats, tentacles, sun rays tipped with serpent or octopi heads.
The garua coagulates, the larger lumps tinged green like infected pus. Her eyes ache, if only she could shut them …
Behind the creature, the boy’s arms flail, his body trapped in a thicket of bones. His skin is brown, his eyes dark, his face flat, his nose wide: indigenous Incan.
Quilla inches closer, one eye barely open. She is at the lip of a large hole from which shoots the garua. The creature bristles, its scar-hair erect like porcupine needles, and Quilla smells a death more ancient than any death in the catacombs. “Are you—” Her voice cracks. “Are you human, dead, or supernatural god?”
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