The Mammoth Book of Cthulhu: New Lovecraftian Fiction

by Paula Guran

  There weren’t any car keys in either desk. No cash box, either. Between the two desks another open door waited, a large sliding panel that led to the warehouse. Maybe the keys to the Ford were back there . . . and maybe something else, too. Maybe some boxed freight we could snatch, or a bag of mail. If we could grab it fast, I’d take it . . . but I sure as hell wasn’t going to hang around a second more than necessary.

  Dull electric bulbs glowed from tin cowls set high in the warehouse ceiling, spilling yellow circles of illumination on the floor. In the middle of the largest circle stood another desk, its surface reflecting light from above in yellow shards, as if tossing sharpened knives back at the timbered crossbeams above. A broken mirror lay on the desktop – that explained the reflected shards of light. And in the middle of the desk, an open box waited. The box hadn’t been opened neatly. Ragged slices crisscrossed the top, and rusty patches the color of dried blood had splattered the cardboard, as if someone had shattered the mirror and sliced into the box with the broken fragments.

  Bits of broken mirror smashed against the hardwood floor as I brushed them off the desk. A glance at the top flap indicated that the package was addressed to a man named Smith in Auburn, California and had been mailed from a university in Massachusetts. That told me nothing, so I upended the contents. A sheaf of papers dropped out, followed by a statue attached to a chain.

  The statue wasn’t huge by any means, but it was large enough that I couldn’t imagine anyone wearing it around his neck. Russ snatched the chain before I could get a close look at the thing. I only saw that it was fashioned from jade, and it looked like a hungry Doberman with the wings of a gigantic bat.

  The chain swung back and forth as Russ dangled the statue before his good eye. Broken mirror-shards on the desktop caught the idol’s image, and green light splashed against the warehouse walls. I barely noticed it because that sheaf of papers was still nestled between the reflected idols, and to me those papers were just as tantalizing as the statue itself.

  I unfolded the pages and started reading. I didn’t know if it was a letter or a story. All I knew was that the writer began by describing his strange partnership with a man named St. John, and then he turned to the subject of a statue they’d dug up in a European graveyard . . .

  And just then Russ started reading, too. The jade statue lay cupped in his left palm like a miniature pet, and once again my brother’s eyes were glazed with cobwebs. He was staring down at an inscription carved in letters I didn’t recognize. His lips moved slowly, deliberately, and the whispered words that spilled from them were the same words I’d heard him use outside the dead man’s house . . . the words I’d always taken for gutter Deutsch.

  Quite suddenly, I understood those words weren’t German at all.

  They were another language altogether.

  A language no one understood this side of hell.

  In another moment, those words were buried by another sound . . . a scuttling percussion that erupted from a garbage can next to the desk. It was a twin to the night sounds I’d heard coming from the bathroom at the dead man’s house, and a chill capered up my spine.

  Russell’s lips snapped shut, cutting off his words.

  The garbage can tipped over and banged on the floor, dumping more broken-mirror shards.

  A severed hand crawled through the mess, dragging a gnawed and splintered wrist.

  The hand moved across the floor like a giant spider.

  In another second it crossed through the doorway that adjoined the station office where the dead station agent stood, pointing at my brother with the bloody stump of his right wrist.

  The agent was a bucket of gore dressed in a suit – face torn to ribbons, mangled lips hanging in shreds. Those lips slithered together like a pair of hungry grave-worms, and above them the thing’s eyes shone with a stark blue brightness that made a glacier seem warm. Whatever the station agent had become wasn’t anything close to human anymore. Its bloody teeth cut words in the absolute silence of that dark warehouse, and though I heard those words I knew they were meant for Russell alone.

  “You unearthed the idol,” the thing said. “You used its power to survive, and you hoped you had left it behind in the trenches with the corpses of all those soldiers you murdered in the Master’s name. But you cannot escape the Master, any more than you can escape His talisman. It is risen from fallow killing fields just as the Master is risen, and it has found you just as He has found you, for the leash you occupy is a long one. The killing will never end, for this time the Master will bring you to heel like a prize bitch. This time you’ll wear a brimstone collar, and you’ll be forever at His side.”

  The words slapped Russell out of his daze, and he hurled the idol into the darkness. A quick whirling motion and the Winchester thundered in his hands. The agent’s corpse flew backward in a red shower, thudding against the office floor. Before the smoke cleared, the scuttling hand disappeared into the shadows.

  Russ and I exchanged a single glance – there was no time for words. There was nothing to do but get shed of this place, the things in it, and whatever waited for us beyond its doors.

  Russell turned and slid open the door that led to the station platform. An icy wind blasted through the doorway along with a cold stream of darkness, and it wrapped Russell in its grip and pulled him into the night.

  Before I could take a single step, the warehouse door slammed in my face like a guillotine blade . . . but not before another black shadow blasted into the room.

  It was the dead boar, and it was coming straight for me.

  The boar raged through the darkness, crossing the room like a red torrent loosed from a broken dam in hell. I leveled the .38 and put two slugs in the creature, but it plowed over me before I could fire a third.

  The pistol flew from my hand and spun through the jade shadows. Hoofs scratched over hardwood as the boar turned to attack again. I hadn’t even made it to my knees, and the only thing within reach was a thick shard of broken mirror. Dizzily, I snatched it up as the boar closed on me – its face a mask of caked blood, its snout flared with exertion.

  I drove the makeshift blade into the creature’s right eye. Tusks raked my belly as the glass tore into my palm but my grip held firm, and I jammed the misshapen blade deeper as the monster smashed me backward. My head thudded against the wooden door, and a black galaxy opened before my eyes. For a second I was nowhere . . . and then in the space of a single blink I was back, just in time to see the boar topple to the floor.

  I didn’t wait for it to get up. The pistol lay near the door, and I grabbed it with my bloody hand. Tittering laughter rose behind me, and I didn’t have to turn around to know the dead station agent was rising again. But I’d already heard enough words from that thing’s mouth, and I didn’t want to hear any more.

  A rattling shove, and I slid open the warehouse door.

  Outside, the air was thick with the stink of gunpowder.

  Russell’s shotgun boomed in the darkness, but my relief at seeing him alive didn’t even last a second.

  Bound up in the Winchester’s echo was the unearthly baying of a gigantic hound.

  The jade statue didn’t do the monster justice. Nothing could have. Its clawed feet set coal shards burning as it came down the tracks. But faster than the demon came the darkness, sweeping past the monster like a scalding wave, cascading through the tunnel of pine, filling it, and the demon’s eyes boiled in its narrow skull as it was overtaken by a night so black it might have been torn from a patch of universe beyond the farthest star.

  Just ahead of the monster, my brother stood his ground. The demon paused only a moment, then reared as it closed on Russell. Its great wings spread, slicing a gap in the nightwave, and its claws drew wide as if ready to tear that piece of earth from the womb of the world along with the man who’d claimed it.

  Russ fired the shotgun into the gap between those enormous claws. Again and again, as the monster’s talons raked the darkness. Blood spraye
d from my brother’s chest as he was slammed backward. But the Winchester was still in his grasp, and another blast of 00 buckshot splattered the night.

  Severed muscles gushed blood. The demon’s shoulder was skinned to bone and gory socket, and it howled as the next blast took half its face away. That sound couldn’t be described with words, but it didn’t defy understanding. Not if you had a something like it locked up in your own guts . . . not if you recognized the doomed tenor of it as my brother did, even with his own life draining away. Russ tossed aside the empty shotgun and struggled to his feet. The demon kept on coming, but blood no longer pulsed from its wounds. Now howls and screams erupted from each buckshot trench, as if every soul the beast had devoured was at long last free of the flesh prison housed within the demon’s body.

  The sound became a roar . . . a hellish cacophony that shook the earth and blasted glass from the train station windows. And Russ screamed as the demon closed over him . . . screamed those horrible words he’d kept locked inside for so long, the gutter sacrament that had doomed him from the time he first spoke it. But now his words were black taunts meant to challenge his tormentor, and soon those words became a howl of his own, slicing through the night like a scythe.

  I ran toward my brother, the .38 in my hand. Russ had drawn the Nahkampfmesser from its scabbard and was grappling with the demon, the German knife driving through scaled flesh as the creature’s great hands closed around his ribs. I was running fast, faster than I ever had. And then that black wave hit me . . . but it wasn’t anything as ephemeral as the night. In a moment I was twisting upward in a flock of gigantic bats, and their wings caught me and raised me into the pines in a boiling whirl, and the howls I’d heard from Russ and the monster and all those tortured souls were lost in the chittering screams of a thousand winged nightmares.

  The whole world seemed to spin in that black whirlpool. My hands clawed out, fighting for purchase. As I tumbled through the darkness my fingers brushed the station agent’s ravaged face. Pages of the letter whipped by along with the bloodstained box that had held it, and as the demon storm churned on I glimpsed the monster’s boiling eye in the distance, much dimmer now. Tattered flesh flapped over it like a broken coffin lid. And Russell was there, too – just for a moment, like dead Ahab riding the whale . . . and then he was gone.

  I dropped from the black twister’s winged embrace. Pain exploded in my ribs as I slammed down on steel rails. The night spilled past me, twisting into the pine tunnel. I watched it go. Bones cracked against pine boughs as the darkness spun into the forest, and dead wings were carved and torn by swirling eddies of broken window-glass, and gravel waves pounded all until there was nothing left but a final wisp of empty night.

  Then came silence. And there I was – down on my knees, shivering against those cold steel railroad tracks. Everything was gone . . . everything except the thing locked in my grasp. At first I thought I’d managed to hold on to the .38 as I rode the whirlwind, but when I raised my hand I found it wasn’t a gun that waited there . . . not at all.

  No. The thing that filled my hand was a jade statue.

  I threw it into the trees, and I ran.

  I must have followed the railroad tracks, because somewhere along the line I jumped a freight and headed east in a livestock car. The train rattled over Emigrant Gap in the dead of night. Nothing in the car but shadows and a howling wind that sliced the low-hanging clouds, whipping white ghosts through wooden slats as the car traveled over snow-capped mountains.

  Or so it seemed to me. Except for wind and shadows and those wisps of cloud, the rail car was empty. The railroad didn’t ship livestock over the Gap once fall delivered the first heavy snow. Try that, and the company would have ended up with a few tons of frozen meat. And maybe that’s how I should have ended up, just a couple hundred pounds of not-so-prime cut ready for God’s own butcher shop.

  But it didn’t work out that way.

  I was still alive when the train made it over the mountains. At least, that’s what they told me on the other side.

  They sliced off three frostbitten toes at the indigent ward in Reno’s main hospital. Stitched up my hand, took care of my other wounds, too. After a few weeks I got around okay. One of the nurses helped me find a job, and I worked in a casino restaurant for a couple months. When I got a little stronger, I landed a gig loading freight for a trucking company. It was a lucky break – the guy who owned the business was a casino regular.

  Anyway, the business wasn’t always straight up. Some nights the dispatcher would call a bunch of us down to the warehouse and we’d unload a truck of bootleg liquor. The boss must have liked the fact that I didn’t nip bottles or run off at the mouth, because it wasn’t long before he made me a driver. In those days that was like catching the brass ring. For me, it didn’t matter. The way I saw it there was no brass ring. There was just one day, and the next, and the one after that.

  But what mattered most were the days that had come before. That’s where my mind wandered, and returned. To a leaky migrant tent, where my brother’s cough echoed like the spinning tumblers of a locked safe. To a dead man’s house, and a broken mirror I stared into morning after morning. To a stolen Nash, where my brother and I found a map with our destination circled in red and a Winchester shotgun that could bring down a demon.

  Those memories held plenty of questions, but answers were in short supply. If Russ had any, he didn’t share them with me before he died. And now that he was past sharing . . . well, I got to thinking that maybe it had always been that way with Russ.

  Even so, I still saw my brother in my dreams. Just in flashes, like a choppy silent movie. Russ in uniform, digging trenches, a blood-stained spade in his big hands as he unearthed something buried centuries before . . . German flares blooming in the night sky . . . that green idol gleaming in soil that squirmed with gut-colored worms . . . a demon freed from the catacombs of an underground temple, stalking through mustard gas clouds . . . a German soldier’s corpse clenched between the monster’s teeth, two more dead men locked in its clawed hands . . .

  Those dreams formed a story, but I had no idea if it were true. It hardly mattered. When I woke up in the morning my memories were waiting for me, and they didn’t add up nearly so easily. My mind was a haunted house. That black dog of a wind still blew outside its walls, and there was a broken mirror in every sink. A stolen car parked in the driveway would take me exactly where it wanted and nowhere else. But the truth was that I couldn’t leave that house. I walked its corridors until I knew every step, even the ones that only led to locked doors.

  There were plenty of those, and I didn’t have to look very hard to find them. But I did look for answers in other places. We had a pile of maps at the trucking office, and I discovered that there wasn’t a town anywhere in California named New Anvik. I checked with the railroad, and there wasn’t a train station by that name, either. And that Massachusetts University, the one that had shipped the jade idol to a man in Auburn? A trip to the public library told me there wasn’t a university by that name anywhere in the world.

  But none of that mattered. A week after my library visit, a package from that university showed up on my doorstep. And yes – it was addressed to me.

  I brought the box inside my apartment, but I didn’t dare open it. I was supposed to pick up a load of hooch just north of San Francisco that night. Instead, I called in sick. Then I drove into the woods above Donner Lake and heaved the package off a rocky crag. On the way back to Reno I thought about buying a pistol and blowing a hole in my brain. If that box had been waiting on the front porch when I got home, I would have done it. But I never saw it again.

  A few months passed. I tried to keep busy. I took every job the trucking company offered, especially the bootleg runs that paid top dollar. When that haunted house started calling, I’d try to distract myself with a stack of novels from the library. If that failed I’d hit the tables at one of the casinos downtown, and I’d keep my mind on the cards.
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br />   That’s how I ran into the nurse from the indigent ward, the one who’d helped me land that restaurant job. Emma was out with a couple girlfriends playing blackjack, and we started talking across the table. The cards were falling my way. After a while I cashed in my chips for a stack of greenbacks, and I took Emma and her friends out for steak and pre-war champagne at a joint on Douglas Alley that didn’t care about Prohibition.

  It wasn’t the kind of thing I’d ever done. I’m not sure why I did it. But at the end of the night, Emma gave me her phone number. I said I’d call her, but a week passed and I couldn’t pick up the phone. I knew why, of course. The short version was that steak and champagne didn’t really change anything . . . and the longer version was all the stuff locked up in that haunted house.

  But for the first time I thought that maybe I didn’t want to look for the key to that house anymore. Maybe what I needed to do was leave it alone. I didn’t know if my brother had ever felt that way, but then again I wasn’t Russ. What we’d shared we’d always share, alive or dead, just as we’d always be brothers. But maybe the time had come for me to stop being my dead brother’s keeper, and the keeper of his ghosts.

  I was just about to dial Emma’s number when the company dispatcher called and offered me a midnight run to Grass Valley. It was a straight freight deal, no bootleg, but I needed the money after blowing that blackjack bankroll. And I needed time to think, too.

  An hour later I was driving through the mountains. Snow was falling. It was quiet. Not like it is when hail or sleet pounds your windshield, and you get the feeling that the universe is firing ball bearings at you from the darkness. No. This was the opposite of that. It was as if nothing was falling through the night . . . as if nothing was filling everything up.

  I liked that idea. As I drove west, it seemed as if that white nothing could wipe the whole world away. It felt like starting over . . . or maybe more than that. I pulled over and watched the snow drift down, sipping coffee from my thermos. Then I climbed down from the cab and followed a path that twisted through the pines.