“You can’t just bind a bunch of unicorn pictures together and call it a magical sacred text. What is that cover made of anyway?”
“My dad was throwing out some skin samples from his lab, so I asked and he gave them to me.”
“Your dad is awesome. I wish my dad gave me skin and stuff,” Isaac said, missing the greater significance of the conversation.
Kayla punched Isaac in the chest and scolded him for being an idiot.
Seeing his chance, Cyrus sprang to his feet and lunged for the duffel bag. The six-shooter beckoned to him from within. LIFE, the gun called, SHOOT TO LIVE.
He went to it even as the ugly fists beat him back.
Only after the chamber clicked empty could he open his eyes, but the squid mask had slipped down and he could not reach up to adjust it. The fists were still alive, swinging a whole lot harder.
Then the ice began to crack.
Franz lost a lot of leg hair removing the Necronomicon from his crotch. Vampires were not supposed to grow leg hair, but Franz had a strain of barbarian in his genetic pool. He tossed the book on the frozen dirt floor of the shed, pulled his pants up, and crouched down beside Lola. “Okay, how do we do this?” he said.
Lola opened the Necronomicon and studied the first page intently. “First, slide Lion Man off the meat hook.”
“Are you reading from the book or making this up? Because that looks like a different language to me.”
“Just do it,” Lola snapped.
Franz obeyed. He slid their baby off the meat hook and laid the headless body beside the Necronomicon. “What next?”
Lola flipped back and forth between several pages, muttering to herself. She sighed, frustrated. “I give up. The book has detailed pictorial instructions on sacrificing virginal firstborns, but says nothing about what to do with the virgin after you’ve sacrificed it.”
“Let me look.”
Lola pushed the book in front of Franz.
The meaning of the words was lost on him, but with the aid of the gratuitous, anatomically accurate images of virginal firstborn sacrifice, he deciphered the general meaning of the text. He nodded, studying the pictures for some key that would unlock Cthulhu from the depths.
He turned page after page, learning more about virginal firstborn sacrifice and not much else.
“Any luck?”
Franz grunted. He was too absorbed in the book, too close to the key.
When he reached the last page, the Necronomicon was still describing virginal firstborn sacrifice.
He looked up at Lola, smiling.
“What?” she said. “It’s not a big joke, is it? Did Gaul give us the wrong book?”
“It’s the easiest book in the world,” Franz said. He brushed his black hair out of his face and dragged Lion Man closer to him. “Unless I’m totally off the mark, the book should become a totally new book every time we do what it says. Right now, it’s telling us to sacrifice a virginal firstborn.”
“And we already did.”
“But it’s a book. It doesn’t know that.”
“So how do we tell the book we’ve sacrificed a virginal firstborn?”
“By spilling blood. Just how we’re reading the book to glean information, the book demands information from us as well. The book reads our actions as information, but it can only read our actions if we put them down on the page.”
“What does it want?”
“Right now it wants a sacrifice. It could want anything next.”
“So we need Lion Man to bleed on the page?”
Franz nodded. “If I’m correct about all this.”
Franz and Lola dragged Lion Man’s headless body between them. He no longer expelled the heat of a dead vampire. He was frozen solid.
Franz and Lola clawed at him, breaking their nails against his icy flesh.
“There’s no way we’re going to draw blood,” Franz said.
Lola stood and hurried to the tool shelf at the far end of the cellar. She returned with a chainsaw. Revving its motor, she shouted, “Get back!”
Franz jumped out of the way as she lowered the blade to the baby’s torso. This was why he and Lola were so perfect together. While he could figure out the puzzles she might never solve in a million years, she knew how to handle the problems of the physical world that he was helpless against. Together, they could conquer anything.
She used the chainsaw to make a circuit of wide, shallow cuts, removing the icy outer flesh and relying on the chainsaw’s motion to thaw Lion Man’s blood.
Slowly, ice blood turned to slush. Lola killed the chainsaw. Franz dipped his hand into the gored pool of his son’s belly. He dribbled blood onto the open face of the Necronomicon.
He and Lola leaned over the book, waiting for something to happen.
“Maybe it wants more blood,” Lola shrugged. She scooped blood into her cupped palms and spilled it over the book.
Still, nothing happened.
“Maybe we were supposed to kill the virginal firstborn ourselves,” Franz said.
“Do you think the Necronomicon knows the difference?”
“It seems pretty thorough,” Franz said, thumbing the pages of the thick, flesh-bound book.
A pain erupted in his hand.
He cried out and withdrew his hand, cradling it against his chest.
His thumb fell off.
He looked to Lola, seeking pity, hoping she would tell him that everything was fine, but Lola had yet to notice that his thumb had fallen off.
Her eyes were fixed on the Necronomicon.
The pages touched by blood rose in a mass of bubbling, leathery boils. When they popped, the book boils coughed up waxen cobwebs that smelled of sea salt and newborn baby.
Franz forgot his severed thumb, enraptured by the scent of the cobwebs. He had not smelled that newborn baby smell since the first days of Lion Man’s brief life. By the end of his second week as a living, breathing vampire, Lion Man’s pure and natural odor had diminished, replaced by the odorous cornucopia of the cold world around him.
The boiling pages melted away. The cobwebs disintegrated. All that remained were new words on old pages. The book was different, not destroyed.
Lola finally took notice of his thumb. She picked it up and stared at Franz worriedly. “Are we going to lose a body part for every step we complete?”
He shrugged. “Maybe. Do we have a choice?”
“I guess you’re right. Does it hurt?”
“Not anymore.”
She kissed his severed thumb and set it down beside her. “I’ll sew it back on later. Remind me to fetch my sewing kit from inside.”
“We’d better move on with the summoning,” Franz said, staring at his thumbless hand with an empty expression.
Lola turned the Necronomicon back to the first page, which was blank, excepting a red circle. Lola flipped to the next page, and the next. They discovered the same red circle on every page.
“This one is easy,” Franz said.
“Let me guess. Magic circle.”
“Exactly.”
Franz picked up his severed thumb and drew a circle around them with the bloody end. After closing the circle, he used the thumb to trace one of the red circles in the Necronomicon. He withdrew his hand before the book slammed shut and the mouth on the cover opened up. A dusty tongue of wrinkled paper unfurled from the mouth. The paper tongue latched onto the thumb and pried it from Franz’s grasp. The book swallowed his thumb, licked its fleshy lips, and the strange, flat mouth fell dormant again.
Franz tweezed the upper corner of the cover between two fingers. He threw open the book with a shudder.
Now words were running on the pages, words pursuing other words, a letter train dissolving into formless voids beyond the confines of the frame.
“Do you think we’re supposed to read?” Lola asked.
Franz nodded his head. “But how?”
Lola unsheathed the dagger gartered to her leg. She stabbed through the pages, pinni
ng certain words in place. The words screamed out as they were swarmed by other words, words that fed like vampires.
Lola dragged the wounded words across the page. The frenzied eaters followed. She pressed her cupped hand to the edge of the book and flicked the dagger-pinned words into her palm. Ravenous, the others jumped.
Off the page the words fell dead.
The sinister message that they formed left Franz and Lola silent.
Saint Caution, his dim panic, fled into a box of dead beliefs. Now the squid god returns for the sad-faced husband, Saint Caution. There will be no asylum. No escape behind the narrow houses. No escape in the sepulcher of the sea. No escape between the pages of the flesh-bound book. No escape underground. Death is a monolith of faces, winged and all-seeing. Saint Caution unearthed the silence. Now the squid god is sky-flung aboard his ship of stars. The tentacled madness Cthulhu will arrive with the dawn of new dark, and make a fiend of the icy earth. Geometry, thrown into chaos, correlates the delirious architecture of the Cyclopean city R’lyeh, with the abandoned town. The god of R’lyeh rises, awoken by the science of the high priests, and the awakener, Saint Caution, must give in to the stars, or their light will smote his bat-winged wife.
Like a beacon in the sky or the result of a mysterious call on a payphone, the fat, depressed squid god instantaneously transformed into a megalithic, cyclopean, raging warrior at the beckoning of the Necronomicon. He increased in size by twenty-three, exploded through the roof of the diner and declared, in reference to his favorite internet website, “I can has power up!”
Kayla and Isaac stood over Cyrus, breathing heavily in their bird and goat masks.
The ice had cracked from added pressure and they’d floated away from shore on a little island. None of them knew how to swim. There was no turning back. They would either kill each other or die as friends.
“There’s no easy way out,” Cyrus said. “Even if you kill me, you’ll die.”
“We’d planned on dying all along,” Kayla said.
“But without the Necronomicon—”
“I have it right here.” Kayla lifted the unicorn Necronomicon from beneath the folds of her rubber jumpsuit.
“Let’s kill this suck-face,” Isaac said, swinging the sledgehammer over his shoulder. It was the only weapon that had not sunk or been left behind on shore.
“We’re doing this together,” Kayla said.
Isaac looked at her with a confused and frustrated expression. She ignored him, kneeling down beside Cyrus on the ice and opening the flesh-bound book across her lap.
“What about the sacrifice?” Isaac asked, outraged.
“We’re all dead anyway. We’re all the sacrifice,” Cyrus said, gazing longingly at the shore.
“Sit down, Isaac,” Kayla said.
“No,” he said, and brought the sledgehammer down.
Before he completed his swing, a beam of light flashed down from the sky and severed his right arm at the shoulder. The sledgehammer thudded against the ice as he fell to his knees. He clutched his wounded shoulder, screaming.
The darkness around them smoldered and in places blinked away. Kayla cast the book into the sea, stood, and lifted up the sledgehammer.
Cyrus watched helplessly as her eyes flitted between him and Isaac. She was deciding which one to sacrifice.
And ultimately it didn’t matter.
He would die by drowning, bludgeon, or evisceration in the light.
So he knelt there—barely breathing because the squid mask constricted breath—to let her make the big decision.
And in spite of everything, he loved her more than ever.
“Who is Saint Caution?”
“It’s me,” Franz said. “At least I’m guessing it’s me.”
“I was afraid of that.”
“Gaul never said a word about the summoners being sacrificed.”
“He probably didn’t know.”
“Or he feared we’d wimp out.”
“There’s no point thinking about it now. We’ve already summoned Cthulhu.”
“Have we? Maybe I have to give in to the stars first, like the message says, and if I don’t, then no Cthulhu. The light will come and make the planet’s surface uninhabitable, but we’ll survive. We can live underground for the rest of our lives. That’s not such a bad ending, right? At least better than one of us dying.”
“Franz, it’s too late for that. Look.”
“How can you say that? I’m going to die.”
“I mean look out!”
Lola tackled Franz to the floor as a fat white worm with razor-toothed jaws struck out at them. The worm recoiled, hissing, preparing for another strike.
They looked beyond the white worm to the sunken corners of the cellar. Shambling ghouls rose out of the darkness where the walls became the floor.
Franz groped around for Lion Man, wrapping his fingers around the baby’s ankle. The white worm made a second strike and he swung Lion Man like a battering club. The white worm flew backwards and landed, lifeless, at the amorphous feet of the things shambling closer.
Lion Man shattered into a million gelid pieces that scattered like marbles across the floor of the cellar.
“Run!” Lola screamed.
She helped Franz to his feet and they turned, hand in hand, toward the stairs leading to the cellar door.
An invisible wall blocked their advance.
They surged ahead only to be dead-halted once more.
The invisible wall was rising from the magic circle.
“We were tricked. We painted a circle in reverse. It won’t let us out.”
“Will it let those things in?”
Franz nodded his head. “I’m afraid it will.”
“Good,” Lola said.
She bent over and picked up the chainsaw.
The nearest ghoul whipped its elephantine trunk across the circle’s border.
Lola sheared off the nozzle at the base. The maimed creature howled as bubbling black ooze gushed from its jagged bone-hole.
Before a second creature attacked, Franz slipped his right arm into the severed nozzle of the shambler. He stood, barely able to lift his giant arm. He felt the trunk sucking on him and hoped he would be able to remove it later.
An entire horde of shambling ghouls swarmed at once.
Confined to the reverse magic circle, Franz and Lola fought shoulder to shoulder against the infernal cosmic beasts.
When all the shambling things were down, Lola tossed the chainsaw aside and marched over the dismembered bodies, a bridge across the circle.
“Aren’t you going to take that?” Franz asked as he struggled to remove the nozzle of the shambler from his arm.
“If we’re moving underground forever, I’d rather bring my clothes.”
The corpses were bubbling down to nothing, so Franz left the circle before his path across the backs of the dead creatures disappeared.
“I suppose Cthulhu must be out there somewhere. Do you suppose he’ll save us still? Were these ghouls a test? Or did we just unleash an unspeakable evil?”
“Am I supposed to answer that?” Lola said, lugging the two heavy suitcases up the cellar stairs.
“You were,” Franz muttered.
He started to follow after her but remembered his thumb. He turned back but then remembered that the Necronomicon had swallowed it. He looked down at his new arm and wondered if the mutation was going to spread throughout his body, spread and turn him into a nightmare. He climbed the stairs, saying goodbye to his shattered son as he closed the cellar door for the final time.
She was a lantern of ghostly delight. Cyrus felt happy standing beside her. He was happy not to have drowned. Kayla and Isaac, they both drowned. When the ice cracked and the three of them fell through, Isaac was swinging at him with his remaining arm. Kayla held in her hands the hulking sledgehammer. Kayla had swung to hit either Cyrus or Isaac and there would never be any way to tell. Perhaps she’d hoped to sink them in this way. All of this
hardly mattered to Cyrus. He had this new girl now.
“So what’s your name?” she asked.
“Cyrus Lugosi,” he said, surprised to hear his own voice underwater.
“Everybody calls me Burn Girl.”
“Burn Girl. That’s nice.”
“Are you from the surface?”
“Yes, I am. Do you live down here?”
“I do a good deal of traveling.”
“I’m glad we can have a conversation. I didn’t think communication was possible underwater.”
“Are you hungry? You look famished. There’s a great diner not far away and I love to go there. In fact, I was just leaving there when I bumped into you.”
“If you were just leaving, why would you want to go back?”
“I am always coming or going from the diner. There’s not much to do down here, if you can imagine.”
“Let’s call it a date,” Cyrus said, charmed by this sudden upswing in his life.
Perhaps he would live under the sea with this darling Burn Girl forever.
He wondered if she listened to black metal.
Since their aerial return from Gaul’s mountain, the darkness had abated. Like tea in which too much water has been poured, the dark grew weak, becoming almost nothing.
“We’ll never make it underground in time,” Franz said.
Lola responded by dropping her suitcases and running out of their fenced-in yard. Franz stumbled after her, his weight off-balance due to his new giant arm. He thought Lola must be serious if she was leaving her clothes behind.
They traveled the road that led to the Bat Cave as the darkness, ever lighter, illuminated the melting ice.
“If the ice melts entirely, the underground will flood,” Franz panted. He struggled to keep stride with Lola. “And what if more of those shambling things come after us? For all we know, they can manifest anywhere.”
Cthulhu Comes to the Vampire Kingdom Page 5
