For a moment, I wondered what alien will had possessed this once-dead girl, but my thoughts were interrupted by the unmistakable feeling of familiar movements just beyond the boundaries of my vision. I closed my eyes, trying to concentrate on the approaching tremors beyond the sporadic thrashing of the reanimated within Frezzetti’s garden.
My backup had arrived.
Tcho was going to be pissed that I had left him short-staffed, but the deal was that my church’s business took precedence. Mandy and Chilly were some of my earliest converts when I claimed Providence as a staging ground. They were both lost souls in need of something to live for, a purpose, a change. When society could only give them a slow, pauper’s death, I offered them a chance at an eternity of grace beneath the waves. They were loyal, discreet and, as it appeared, punctual. I had known about Frezzetti’s garden, if my negotiations went poorly, it only stood to reason that Karen and I would wind up here. Relief swept over me as Mandy swam into sight. Her sinuous form coiled like a serpentine shadow. Gone was the waitress and sometimes bar-top dancer. She was beautiful, twisting towards me, a dark scaled silhouette. She swept past the thrashing dead thing beside me and with a smooth swipe of wickedly sharp, clawed hands tore its jaw free in a cloudy burst of putrescence. Mandy darted low, her slender, deadly arms reaching for the chain wrapped around my leg and pulling it taught. But it was Chilly who set me free, the rows and rows of serrated teeth in his distended maw snapping down onto the length of chain between Mandy’s grip and tearing through the links with a savage shake of his head. The chain came loose, and though I was still dragging a few feet of metal behind me, I was feeling much more spry. The truth, no matter how horrible, is always more comely than a lie. Mandy and Chilly were basking in the truth of their shared reality and it–very literally–pained me that I could not join them. It physically hurt to resist the Call. But I had work to do, and I needed to stay on task just a little while longer.
Karen continued to struggle against her bonds, even as the thicket of death fought to bring themselves closer. Chilly moved as if to try and help her, but I placed a hand on his rough, sandpaper skinned shoulder and held him back. He couldn’t feel that she was on the cusp of becoming. But I could.
Her form was flowing, like the waters around her, becoming protean. No doubt she was experiencing the blissful agony of shedding her skin. Karen’s leg bent at an unnatural angle, her knee buckling in on itself as she slipped her leg free from the chain. She excoriated herself with her own nails, her skin sloughing off at her touch in long sheets that floated in the water around her. Her legs buckled and split, forming dark green tendrils that undulated freely along the water. Karen’s arms followed suit, her hands melding into long, thick lengths of coiling tentacles. She lashed at the encroaching undead and knocked them aside effortlessly before launching herself upwards with a forceful push of her tendrils off of the seabed. She was heading straight towards the men that had put a bullet in her head and tossed her into the ocean like garbage. A very understandable reaction. Logic can give way to instinct upon becoming, even more so upon your first change. All I could do was try and keep up. I followed her ascent, orbited by my two acolytes. Admittedly, I wasn’t in that much of a rush.
Screaming, gunshots, more screaming. Karen had made it to the boat before I did. As I drew closer, I could make out several of Karen’s limbs latching onto the underside of the boat, the rest of her was out of the water, no doubt draped over the vessel. I resurfaced on the side opposite Karen. Ray was pressed up along the side rail closest to me, his back facing the water as he continued to pull the trigger on his dry pistol. The hammer clicked impotently over and over as Eddie’s struggling body was raised high into the air, wrapped up in Karen’s deadly coils. The heavyset Mafioso’s mouth was open like he was screaming, but his voice had been crushed from him. His face had turned a reddish purple and he was covered in half-dollar sized, circular bite wounds from the vicious fanged suckers that lined Karen’s new limbs. Hm, a purely twisted octopus. Maybe Ray was onto something with his ‘theory.’
I reached up and pulled myself back into the boat with a brief effort, all but collapsing onto the deck. I felt heavy, my lungs were burning and still full of seawater. Ray’s terrified eyes were locked onto the sight of Karen, pretty, young Karen, constricting Eddie to death. His bones were snapping audibly as she curled him into a neat little ball. She wore a wild, primal and vindictive look on her face that seemed to have Ray’s full and undivided attention. It gave me time to void the seawater from my lungs. By the time Ray had turned his gaze to me, I was ready to rumble. I tackled the rat-faced goon to the ground with a surge of effort.
“Please…please…no, I’m sorry!” he whimpered. But by my count I had been beaten, eviscerated, shot and drowned. It was time to balance the ledger. I slammed my fist into his face once and drove his head back into the hardwood beneath him.
“Shut up!” I sneered and gripped the length of chain still hanging off of my leg.
“You can go! You can both go! Please, I’ll leave you alone! I swear to God!” he cried around his split lip.
“Now, you know those were the terms I first proposed,” I took the chain into both of my hands and pressed it down onto his throat, “I’m afraid, much like Eddie, that deal has expired.” I applied some pressure as he sobbed beneath me. He kicked and struggled, but I had the leverage now. “Tell me, Ray. Do you feel like a King?” I eased up just a bit to get his answer.
Ray coughed, wheezed and pleaded, “Please…please. Don’t kill me…oh Jesus, please don’t kill me I can help you! I know where Caesar’s holding up tonight I-”
“Liar!” I sneered, “He’s got hideouts all over the damn city, no one knows where he’s going to be, otherwise I would have gone straight to him.”
“No! No, you got it wrong! I drove Pauly, I drove Pauly! Caesar he has a pattern, you see? I used to take his son home to him. For months I did this!”
I raised one eyebrow as he began to pique my interest. Something wet was tearing over in Karen’s direction. I didn’t look, but Ray did. His color was alternating between ghost white and sickly green. One of Karen’s thick, dark tendrils was inching across the deck towards Ray, I pretended not to notice for now. But I made sure that Ray did.
“Now, that is the beginning of a worthy trade,” I said as I removed the length of chain from his neck entirely, “but still, not good enough.”
“Please, I didn’t know-”
“Irrelevant,” I snarled.
“This can’t be happen-”
“It is. Stop pissing yourself long enough to focus on my words. What are you willing to trade for your life?”
“Anything!” whimpered Ray.
I laughed darkly. “Are you sure? Anything is a very broad trade.”
“Yes! Jesus! Anything you want!” He screamed as Karen brushed his arm with a swipe of her glistening, salt-water-drenched tendril. I tore him away from Karen’s grip, looking back to offer her my first real glance. She clung to the side of the boat and swayed like a serpent being charmed by a swami. Her arms had split into a mass of writhing, undulating tendrils each wrapped around an unidentifiable chunk of gore that had once been Eddie. Each arm coiled and feasted upon the meat with dozens of razor-sharp suckers. The mottled green of her limbs contrasted with the pale lavender underside of her new appendages and the milky flesh of her shoulders. There was no clear distinction between the stark change in her coloration, the murky jade of her limbs instead turning gradually white until the nape of her neck seemed unchanged. The most noticeable metamorphosis occurred from her waist down. Her trunk thickened to accommodate the veritable forest of writhing limbs below her, resembling nothing less than a centauric combination of woman and cephalopod. She reached for him again with an annoyed hiss, her green and brown eyes both staring at me from the muted, damp rainbow of her matted hair.
“No.” I responded to that hiss firmly, grabbing her extended tentacle in my arm. She wound her rubbery coils
around my forearm and squeezed tightly. My teeth clenched as I felt her crushing grip working itself around me. “Karen. Stop.”
There was no response as she lurched me towards her with a rough tug. I maintained my grip on the squirming Mafioso enforcer, the hardened killer that was mewling like a pathetic, wounded kitten. Her eyes dragged languidly over we two smaller, weaker looking things and her lips curled into a smile somewhere between amused and what a shark offers its meal before striking.
“I understand the lure of the Call. It can be powerful…but mindless savagery isn’t our purpose. We must maintain discipline. Do you hear me? Karen?” I whispered, resisting only with my words. A pause, but I was gaining no ground with her. “Kraken. I need you to stop.” At the mention of her name, the name she chose for herself, a shudder ran through her, strong, like someone exposed suddenly to a bitter chill. She slowly loosened her grasp from my arm and let me slide freely back down onto the boat. I was kneeling in a puddle of liquefied Eddie when I caught a look in her eyes that let me know she understood me.
“I’m sorry…Dagon, I-” she began, her lower lip trembling.
“Never. You never need to apologize to me,” I replied. “How do you feel?”
“H-hollow, y-you promised that I would change one day, that we…we would be together beneath the waves…but I d-don’t know if I feel anything,” she said softly as her body dipped a few more feet into the waters beneath her.
“You’ve been remade in the image of our Father and our Mother. But, such a change is as much sacrifice as it is a gift. You and I will have our eternity, but there’s so much that must be done first. Mandy and Chilly are waiting. Can you feel them?”
“Yes,” she bit her lower lip, nervously. “I-I can feel them, I can feel you…really feel you…like the beat of a loud drum…at my very core.”
“That’s it. That’s how you will know those that have taken the final step on the path to enlightenment. Go with them, Mandy and Chilly. They’ll take you to the City. They will show you the secret places and teach you the blessed mysteries of our esoteric order.” I smiled like I imagine a proud parent would when their child takes their first uncertain steps.
“But the band-” she protested.
“You can’t go on stage like that. One day, there’ll be no need to occult ourselves from the world, but the time isn’t right. Soon. But not yet. They’ll teach you the words to wrap yourself in the flesh, to walk above them, but among them. It’s a necessary deception. But one that takes time to establish. Tcho will have to make other arrangements while you recuperate.”
Karen turned, to look back towards the dark waters bordering Providence. Not so far in the distance I saw the silhouettes of my two devoted acolytes, peering just above the surface, watching my protégé with anxious, elated and welcoming eyes.
“Before you go?” I asked.
“Yes, Dagon?”
“Have you learned anything here tonight?”
She stared over her shoulder at me, her blood spattered body writhing with idle effort as she nodded. “They can’t stop us,” she said, before diving beneath the waves in a smooth, beautiful arch. The boat rocked from side to side as she left us.
She always was my most promising student. Top marks, Karen. I nodded once to Chilly and Mandy, before they too slipped beneath the obscuring oil-slick black waters. I remembered Ray, in part only because of the acrid smell of urine-soaked-slacks and the sound of his panicked panting.
“Anything? Well, Ray. I accept your terms,” I shifted amidst the blood to offer him my hand. “I think you’ve learned something, too. Something about the true nature of power. You’ve seen so much…there’s really only two paths to travel now. Death–a choice that you seem to be averse to–or, conversion. My God will forgive your pathetic human faults, so long as you serve him faithfully. Take off your cross and throw it overboard. Forsake your false, imaginary idol and embrace the truth that only Dagon can offer you.”
Ray reached into his shirt and grabbed the silver cross around his neck and ripped it away from him with a single pull. In the same motion he flung the glistening metal out over the rail. It was like he couldn’t get rid of it fast enough.
“Good. Now, serve well, and you’ll be gifted just like Karen has. Eternal life. Power. Riches. But, fail, or even worse, prove that this was all just some lie to spare your worthless life? Well. Then I swear that you’ll have wished it was you pulped all over this boat. Do we have an understanding?”
He nodded quickly.
“Alright. I’m trusting you.” I took his hand in mine and sealed our bargain with a shake, “I have one more thing to take care of tonight. Where exactly is your old boss holding up, Ray?”
“Wake up, Caesar.” I said, while lighting one of Eddie’s cigarettes. There had been a few that had escaped being entirely drenched in gore and what little that had spattered onto this one added a certain metallic flavoring that only heightened the smooth pull of smoke. Caesar stirred in his bed, shifting beneath the covers oblivious in that half-dream state, before his waking reality came crashing down and he sat up wide-eyed and tense. His chest was bare and it barreled out as he screamed for help. I let him go on for a few annoying moments before I interrupted, “No one’s coming.”
“My boys-”
“Are dead. But they tried to kill me first, so we’ll call that a wash,” I said with an uneven shrug. The injuries I’d suffered had taken their toll on me. My movements were getting jerkier, harder to control. I was going to have to give into my own Call, soon, and restore myself in the City with Karen and the others.
“So what? You want me to beg for my life? Screw you, Moss, you cocksucker. You think you can do anything to me that your bitch hasn’t already done? Go on, kill me, just don’t make a song and dance out of it,” his dark eyes narrowed in stubborn, but brave, contention. “But you won’t get a thing. My men won’t follow an outsider like you, Moss. No matter how much cash you flash around. It ain’t about money, it’s about family.”
“And finally, we find some common ground. It is entirely about family,” I said quietly, slipping the dead-man’s lighter away before reaching into the side pocket of my ruined coat and scooping my hands down around the quivering, wet, sticky mass that was riding within. I’d say that she resembled a large, spherical jellyfish, but I’d hate to insult her. In truth, the being that I drew from the confines of my coat was integral to the designs of the one I serve. “Even after all you’ve done, the fact remains that I still owe you a life. I wasn’t lying when I said what happened to Pauly was a tragedy.”
Caesar shifted in his bed, the sight of the squirming blob in my hand had gotten his attention. Funny, because he had also gotten hers. She shifted and slid along my fingers, trying to press through them as she extended her curious, quavering flagellum from somewhere within her being.
“Y-you don’t get to say his name,” Caesar’s voice faltered.
“Listen, I’m not going to kill you. Like you said, that would accomplish nothing except bring more death into this speck of a world. What I am doing is offering to replace what’s been taken from you.” I said, raising my arm to bring my companion a bit closer to Caesar’s bed. Her extended lashes dragged along the edges of his sheets eagerly, leaving streaks of thick, clear mucus wherever she touched.
“What the fuck is that thing?”
“The future of the Frezzetti family. I’m going to give you a son, one that will never have to die,” I said. It was a struggle to keep her in my grip, she was oozing in anticipation.
“You’re crazy,” Caesar spat and threw his legs over the side of the bed. But, cutting off his escape was as easy as letting go. The flow of her movements were beautiful, her limbs stretching forward to embrace Caesar, slathering him with that same glistening trail she’d left on the sheets. He started to panic, pulling himself up away from the bed, but by then, she’d already gotten a good hold of him.
“Calm down, you’re only working her up,” I advised.
/>
“Get it off!” he snarled, struggling futilely as she pulled herself fully onto his back. I flicked the ash from my cigarette onto the carpet. Of course, by the time I looked back, I noticed several of her whip-like tendrils poised over her like scorpion tails ready to strike. The swollen bulbs on the end of each had extruded a dripping, poisonous barb. Her kind did not take rejection well. Caesar winced and twitched spasmodically as he was stung over and over. He grabbed weakly for the maple wood bureau at his bedside before collapsing down, out of sight while dragging most of the bedding down on top of him. I sighed, walking around the bed with faltering steps. He was lying on his side, his teeth gritted and his breath shallow. The covers had fallen onto him in a thick clump and I took a moment to lean down and pull them away. Underneath, she was still clamoring over Caesar’s prone form. But he wasn’t struggling anymore, well, I suppose he was trying to struggle.
“You should really start listening to me more,” I smiled.
“C-c-can’t,” Caesar struggled to say through his locked jaw.
“Move? Right. Neurotoxin. It’ll wear off, when she’s finished. She’s a very special lady, designed for just one purpose. She’s going to carry your child for you. But first there’s…well, I don’t need to talk to a grown man about the birds and the bees do I?”
He stared at me in revulsion.
“I understand. You’re an older gentleman, this is so sudden. You’re worried about performance issues?” I stood, using the bedpost closest to me to help steady my movements. “Don’t be. She’s very good at what she does. And that poison that’s coursing through your veins? There are certain side effects. Better than Cialis, and you don’t need a prescription. Well. I’ll give you two kids your privacy.” I said and limped towards the door. I paused in the door frame long enough to speak over his muffled protests. “I’ll be back a few months down the line with your child. I have my hooks in your organization now, and if I find that you’ve mistreated or harmed your son in any way, I will make you pay. After all, he’ll be my family too.”
Lovecraft eZine Megapack - 2013 Page 47
