I didn't see Odessa's biker boyfriend anywhere. That made me a happy mommy.
Odessa was the first to notice me. I felt a small surge of pride. I was carrying a small projector, which I set down on a table near the entrance. She tried to shoo me away with her eyes, but it was a little late for that. Matryoshka saw the gesture and followed it to me.
Her little doll mouth made its little smile again. "Ah, the High Priestess of High Modernism." That was a clever bit of wordplay. I wouldn't have thought she was familiar with that phrase. I wonder if she learned it from Odessa. "Are you here to show us some slides from your vacation?"
I clicked a button on the controller, and a bright light shone, exactly as if it were a projector. (It was, just not of the sort they believed.) The monsters laughed.
"I'm here for my daughter," I said.
"Come take her," Matryoshka replied, a cliché to the end.
I shook my head
Her lips flowed into an inhuman smile. "Twice have I bested you. My shadows will deliver unto you all the torments of the hidden world.
"Magic!" she intoned, raising her arms.
"Science," I replied. The projector was shining an invisible electromagnetic beam on Matryoshka, essentially harmless by itself. Maybe she felt a little tingle. However, it ionized a pathway ahead of the arc that was to come. I thumbed a second switch, which activated the miniature turbine within and struck her dead with a thunderbolt.
Abracadabra.
I wasn't sure if Matryoshka had a limit to dividing or if she was dolls all the way down. I resolved to kill her as many times as I had to, and if she was still functional at microscopic scale, she wouldn't be my problem anymore. She could pick fights with paramecia. It served her right for calling herself by a name that gave away how her powers work.
Silence reigned in the Echthros Club.
The beatnik gorilla beat on his chest, one two, rat-a-tat, like a burst from a machine gun and then charged, exploding into a knuckle-walking blitz that devoured the distance between us. But before he could reach me, Odessa lunged down from the stage and grabbed his neck from behind and threw him to the ground.
That's my girl.
Almost simultaneously, the werewolves rushed at me. They got further than the ape, but my machines, tracking anything that moved faster than a man, peppered them with a barrage of heavy metallic barbs and dropped them mid-lunge. They collapsed to the floor, where they yelped and writhed and regenerated, flesh trying to reknit around the impaling objects. While they were so occupied, I unstoppered my vials and administered my synthetic blob samples. It was very nasty stuff, but totally inert when exsiccated.
I added water to my dehydrated blob and turned away as it consumed their soft tissues, doubtless leaving behind chimeric skeletons fit for display alongside the Piltdown Man. Their side might have discovered the blob, but I had perfected it. And to think these Closers want to close the gateway and cut us off from the knowledge it contains. This knowledge will set us free.
The room stank of chemicals, of the swamp, of ozone, of burnt meat.
I saw Odessa cracking the neck of the ape, which almost distracted me from the charging lake monster. By luck or by calculation, it came in at just under the threshold that would have triggered the onslaught from my guardian machines. It advanced. I retreated. Its hideous leech mouth opened wide in all directions.
Once it was close enough, it hammered my robots with all its inhuman strength. Did it understand what they were? Or did it believe they were mere suits of armor juggled by a summoned presence? Its claws weren't powerful enough to tear through the armored plate, but it did hit them hard enough to disrupt the sensitive card readers that governed their actions, their internal gyroscopes only being able to compensate for so much. This also triggered the failsafe, however, a fountain of DSMO and sodium cyanide that geysered from their remains, which left the monster dead and smelling of bitter almonds. It wasn't as elegant as I would have liked, but I had to work with what I had on hand in the lab.
Matryoshka, a menace in miniature, shrunken again by the process of her rebirth, rose from the charcoal ruins of her corpse. She raised her hands to summon those forces she controlled, but Odessa plucked the jar containing the disembodied cerebral cortex off the table and threw the canister across the room with astounding force and amazing accuracy, braining Matryoshka with the brain.
I felt around for my supplies. In both a figurative and literal sense, my bag of tricks was almost empty. The goblins were surrounding me, with the sprites just behind them, their wings hummingbird-swift and almost invisible. They weren’t goblins, of course, any more than Matryoshka was magical, but lacking a better term, I fell back upon the nomenclature of folklore.
Odessa saw my plight, but I didn't think she could intervene in time. I don’t think of myself as old, but I’m certainly not young either, except in the sense of “I’m too young to die in such a ridiculous fashion.” But I was no longer in my physical prime, and I had always relied on technology to make up for any deficits. I had the torch, which was useless as a weapon against something so much stronger and more numerous than I, and some flares, which would only delay the inevitable. I dropped my goggles and triggered the flare and blinded the creatures.
I also blinded its stupid gator, which I didn't even see in the chaos. The thing bowled me over with its flailing tail. As I struggled to extricate myself from the tangled limbs of the goblin horde, the reptile fell on top of me with a force like a runaway mountain and I didn't know anything more.
I awoke to the sensation of someone flicking me behind the ear. "Come on, mom. Awake, arise, or be forever fallen."
I was on the ground. I pulled myself groggily to my elbows. "Knock that off, Odessa. It hurts."
"I remember. You used to do it to me to get me out of bed."
I rolled over to get a better look at her. She was crouched over me, apparently unhurt, in stark contrast to the devastation around her. Fires guttered here and there. The dying, and in some cases, the dead, moaned all around us, but neither of us paid them the slightest attention. A reborn Matryoshka, now shrunken to a height of merely several inches, lunged from out of the shadows at Odessa, who bowled her over with a casual kick. "It's over, mom. It's the morning of November first. I performed the Closing."
I closed my eyes. Humanity could have become gods of the natural world. So much knowledge, lost forever. Now we were left to slouch our way towards our eventual extinction, still shackled by our limited vision.
Matryoshka hurled curses from beneath a bar stool. “Just a minute, mom,” Odessa said. She then rose and ground the doll woman under her heel in a gesture very much like killing a cockroach.
She checked the smear on the bottom of her shoe, and looked at me. "I know what you're thinking. But it wasn't like that. The Elders would have brought knowledge with them, but that would have been the least of their gifts. This isn't knowledge that would have saved the world. As twisted as the patrons of the Echthros Club were, they were on the side of mankind."
Was she right? I don't know. I hope so. Every mother hopes her daughter will surpass her someday. I didn't think it would be so soon. I sighed. I was exhausted. I didn't know if she had saved the world or doomed it. I only had one question for her. "Are you coming home?"
The question was absurd. There was no home any more. Those lives had ended. Lorraine and Odessa were dead. The work of seven years was nothing but ash. We would have to start over completely, with new lives, new identities. But I had to ask the question. With Odessa beside me, I could do it again.
She looked at me with a joy so pure that all the shadows of the Echthros Club fled before it. "I'm coming home, mom."
Josh was born on a Night in the Lonesome October too long ago, on a night when the openers won. He lives with his wife Jen and his daughter Cthulhu and writes about the works of Roger Zelazny at his blog, Where there had been Darkness, where he is currently writing a post a day about Lonesome October. (Unless you're re
ading this after Halloween 2013, in which case he's finished.)
If you're more interested in commentary on this story, he can help you out with that, too.
Story illustration by Lee Copeland
Return to the table of contents
The Bells of Northam
by Joshua Reynolds
“Lord Northam is dead,” Harley Warren said, before taking a sip of his cider.
“I’m well aware of that, yes,” Charles St. Cyprian said. “I saw the body - or what was left of it, at any rate. My question is: what did you have to do with it? And why are you here?”
“Here” was the tidy, North Yorkshire village of Northam, in general, and Northam Manor, in particular, on October 31st, 1926. The village hugged the coast, and the Hull to Scarborough Line only stopped once a day, if the weather permitted. The manor was “up the hill” from the village, and it rose from a smooth spur of cliff that projected out over the sea. It wasn’t large as manors went, being more a box of stone, set down onto a much larger foundation, like the topper to a cake.
At the moment, its halls echoed with the sounds of a harvest celebration. Children ran screaming in pursuit of one another through the manor’s well-lit courtyard, and the atmosphere was one of jovial entertainment. Somewhere a band was enthusiastically, if not very skillfully playing a medley of the newest and loosest, and alcohol flowed freely as folk danced, laughed and shouted in celebration. The party stretched from the courtyard to the kitchens, and the old pile was packed to the rafters with celebrants in costumes of all types. Masked figures lurched and capered through the halls. Voices were raised in song and mummery, and stalls doling out cider, candies and pastries had been set up in every room. Makeshift stages had been set up in out-of-the-way corners, and mummers’ plays took place amidst curtains of crepe paper and canvas backdrops.
“That’s two questions,” Warren drawled. He and St. Cyprian stood in the library of the manor. It had long since been emptied of books, and the ancient shelves were buried beneath musty drop-cloths. It was the only quiet room in the manor, and thus perfect for a quiet conversation.
“One leads to the other, I rather fancy,” St. Cyprian said. “Answer them in any order you wish.” He glanced out the window. Outside, the sun was sinking below the dark horizon in a burst of autumn hues, and dead leaves scraped against the panes as they whirled and danced in the evening breeze. Chinese lanterns marked the stubby walls of the forecourt below and strings of battery-fed boat lights clung to the few, scabrous trees in the courtyard like cobwebs. Lanterns and candles lit up the other windows, making the house appear to have a dozen burning eyes. The crash of waves permeated the noise of the celebration, making for a constant pulse underneath the joyful celebration. In different circumstances, it might have been picturesque, even charming.
Warren smiled. “That’s why I like you, Charley. No small talk.” He sniffed. “Old Northam used to claim that the cellars of this place opened out onto a cliff, over the sea,” he continued, taking a sip of his cider as he gazed out the window. “He used to mention some old wife’s tale about the waves sounding like bells, if you were in the right spot.” His eyes shone eerily in the dim light of the library. “He said that the ‘bells of Northam’ would only sound to mark a special occasion. I always wondered if that was what he was thinking of, when he had one of his little fits.” He drained his glass and set it on the sill. “How much you know about Old Northam?”
“Other than that he spoiled that dreadful moggy of his? Not much,” St. Cyprian said. “I know he screamed, when he heard bells, though he never said why. Not to me at any rate. Nineteenth whatsit of ridiculously long line of barons, though I daresay he didn’t act it.”
“You know why he was roosting in Gray’s Inn, though?”
“He was busted, what?” St. Cyprian leaned back against the window frame. “Not a guinea or ha’penny to his name. Sold this old family pile of his for a stipend to eke out his twilight, is what I heard.” He pulled a silver cigarette case from his coat and flipped it open. He proffered it to Warren, who selected one of the hand-rolled cigarettes within, tapped in on the sill and shoved it between his lips. Warren bent as St. Cyprian lit a match for him. The latter took the opportunity to study the other man.
They were a study in contrasts—the tall, slim Englishman and the short, stocky American; the former dressed in the finest sartorial splendour available from the shops of Savile Row, and the latter clad more like an anarchist than a scholar. Both were occultists, but only the former could be said to be gainfully employed in that field.
Formed during the reign of Elizabeth the First, the office of Royal Occultist (or the Queen’s Conjurer, as it had been known) had started with the diligent amateur Dr. John Dee, and passed through a succession of hands since. The list was a long one, weaving in and out of the margins of British history, and culminating, for the moment, in one Charles St. Cyprian, whose responsibilities included the investigation, organization and occasional suppression of that which man was not meant to know.
Warren, on the other hand, had made a career knowing that which was not meant to be known, for his own reasons, which he shared with no one. There were rumours, of course, but St. Cyprian knew better than to put much stock in those.
“All of old Northam’s money went to getting his hands on the sort of library a man with too much interest in certain things goes about assembling,” Warren said. He puffed happily. “You got good taste in coffin nails, Charley.”
“I know. And my predecessor acquired most of that aforementioned library after Northam got out of the game.” St. Cyprian lit his own cigarette. ‘Some of it Northam kept, though, despite his protestations to the contrary. Every damn bibliophile in London with a penchant for the esoteric had the old man’s place staked out.”
Warren smiled. It wasn’t a pleasant expression. “Not all of them were from London.”
“He had something you wanted.”
“There is a certain book I’m looking to acquire,” Warren said. “The book relates to certain—ah—obscure burial practices I’m looking to learn more about.” He leaned forward. “That’s why I and Carter made the trip over the pond. Northam was finally willing to part with it. But he’s dead, and the remnants of his library are in the hands of the man who killed him.” He gestured with his cigarette. “The fellow who now, coincidentally, owns this house, and is throwing this fine shindig which we both seem to have invited ourselves to.
“I assume that you and I might be on parallel courses, otherwise—well, why would we happen to run across one another in this little slice of heaven?” Warren smiled and spread his hands. “It’s fate, I’d say.”
“I wouldn’t go that far,” St. Cyprian said. “But given the events of our first meeting, I’m willing to give you the benefit of the doubt. Besides which, John Silence speaks for you, and that’s as good as a recommendation from the Archbishop of Canterbury.” He glanced towards the other side of the room, where two figures stood near the door. “Unclench apprentice-mine. I’m sure Mr. Carter would like to take a breath without worrying about getting a bullet in his unmentionables.”
Ebe Gallowglass uncocked the Webley-Fosbery revolver she’d been holding on the library’s fourth occupant. She was dark and petite and dressed like a man, with a flat cap balanced high on her head and a brick-layer’s shoes. “Assistant,” she said.
St. Cyprian looked at her, one eyebrow raised.
“I’m your assistant,” she said as she holstered the revolver.
“My apologies,” St. Cyprian said. “To you as well, Mr. Carter,” he continued, nodding to the thin, lantern-jawed young man that Gallowglass had been holding at gunpoint throughout the conversation.
Randolph Carter deflated and took a shaky breath. He mopped his angular face with a handkerchief. He looked at Gallowglass. “Would you have really shot me?”
“Yeah,” Gallowglass said, with a shrug.
Carter made a face. He had served as Warren’s assistant
for some time, or so Silence said. Carter had been published once or twice. He had a talent for Dunsany-like romances, and there was just enough hard fact mixed in with his fancies to make St. Cyprian suspect that Carter was a man for whom dreams were more than simply what happened between the closing of the eyes and the jangling of the alarm clock.
“Cheer up, Carter,” Warren said, “Williams would have done worse, if he’d caught us.” He smiled, seemingly unperturbed by the prospect. He looked at St. Cyprian. “You know the little shit we’re talking about, right?”
St. Cyprian nodded. “Williams is a rum one and no mistake. I’ve run across his trail more than once, and he’s got more bodies on his conscience than just poor Northam. He’s obsessive and determined.”
“He is quite the rotten apple,” Carter said, hesitantly. He glanced at Warren, as if for permission. “Warren tried to warn poor Northam about him, but the old fellow wouldn’t listen. Williams is a fairly persuasive rascal, and something of an amateur mesmerist.”
“He’s a bloody loon,” Gallowglass interjected.
“That too,” Warren said. “He collects gods like another man might collect butterflies. And that’s what he wanted from Northam, I’d wager.”
“A god,” St. Cyprian said.
“Or something close,” Warren said. “Northam knew a lot of things, most of ‘em fairly unpleasant. And now Williams knows ‘em too. God alone knows what he’ll do with that sort of information.” He tapped the window. “That’s why Carter and I came up to crash this little party of his. Only when we got here, it was less a party than a goddamn carnival.” Warren frowned. “Lot more folks than I was expecting, if I’m being honest.”
Lovecraft eZine Megapack - 2013 Page 62
