Differently Morphous

by Yahtzee Croshaw

  Mike sighed. “All right. I have to go back to the car anyway. If I bring back the Scotch eggs we bought, will ye keep an eye on the shoggies while I’m gone?”

  “Fine,” muttered David, which was the response he used for everything from grudging consent to wholehearted, enthusiastic support. He dropped himself onto the patch of flattened grass Mike had left and held up the binoculars with one hand, supporting his chin with the other. He tried not to look impressed by the sheer size of the shoggoth convention.

  Mike made his way back down the hill toward the patch of muddy gravel that some enterprising landowner had halfheartedly set aside as a car park. Leisurely he cracked open his shotgun and inspected the two loaded salt shells. He’d have two shogs dead if his aim was on, then there’d only be another ninety-eight-odd to deal with. He mentally catalogued the contents of his car boot and considered his options for improvised explosives.

  In a forested path halfway to the car, another human being emerged from the brush, and he and Mike both halted, mutually surprised. The newcomer was a scrawny, bedraggled young man in spectacles, a rumpled button-down shirt, and extremely impractical shoes, and he was carrying two fully loaded garbage bags over his shoulders.

  “O-oh,” he stammered as he took in Mike. “Oh, I didn’t think that anyone else was . . . er.”

  “Wouldn’t go that way, mate,” said Mike, pointing behind him with his shotgun. “Whole bunch of slime monsters. Ministry of Occultism business.”

  “Ministry of . . . what?”

  “Secret government division that sorts out monsters and that.” Mike had had the principles behind the relaxed approach to secrecy explained to him by his Ministry handlers, but had never fully grasped the concept.

  “Really,” said the skinny man interestedly, fidgeting with the knots of his garbage bags. “So you’re going to kill them all?”

  “Aye. Couple o’ salt shells’ll do the trick. Don’t worry, everything’s under control. Your taxes at work.” Mike snapped his shotgun open and closed in demonstration.

  The other man stared at the gun, not moving. “Have you always killed them? Every time you’ve seen one?”

  “Aye, course. What’re you doing out ’ere, anyway?”

  The young man met his gaze with a start, then looked to his garbage bags guiltily. “Me? Oh, I was just . . . erm . . . going to . . . dump some rubbish in the reservoir.”

  “Aye, thought so.” Mike nodded towards a vaguely path-like clearing in the undergrowth. “Might wanna hold out fer the next one.”

  “Thanks, I’ll, erm, do that.” He raised his arms high and gingerly pushed through the bushes, trying not to let the bags get snagged. He strolled in the direction Mike had indicated as slowly as he could, nonchalantly glancing over his shoulder, until he saw that Mike had disappeared from view. Then he turned on his heel with a crunch of twigs and sprinted toward the shoggoths.

  Meanwhile, Mike reached the car park, pulled open the unlocked boot of his Range Rover, and inspected the contents. He and David had picked up a couple of sacks of rock salt from a farm supplier on the way, which he immediately pulled out and let fall into the dirt. He could certainly manufacture some impromptu salt shells from the normal shells he had, but every second would count after the initial attack, and he didn’t want to be caught reloading.

  Instead, he grabbed a plastic Morrisons bag loaded with homemade pipe bombs. He always had plenty, because making them was a hobby he’d picked up to help calm himself down whenever he argued with the wife. He also pocketed a screwdriver set. He’d have to unscrew each bomb’s casing and fill all the available space with salt.

  Then he closed the boot, retrieved the little paper packet of Scotch eggs from the front seat, and made his way back to the hill, carrying the pipe bomb bag in one hand, his shotgun in the other, and the two salt bags under his armpits. “Ay oop,” he said, when David was back in view.

  The boy was lying on his back, using the binoculars to inspect the clouds, and looked up just in time to catch the flung bag of Scotch eggs with his chest.

  “Let me know if you want salt with ’em,” said Mike, cheerfully dumping the two paper sacks at his feet. David glared, then went back to distastefully inspect the Scotch eggs. Mike dropped to his knees and carefully crawled back up to the top of the rise to take up the binoculars.

  The shoggoths were gone from the banks of the reservoir. Not a single one remained. The only signs of their presence were the usual trail of wetness, indicating that they had continued the journey south, and the shredded remains of two large garbage bags.

  “I thought I told you to watch them!” he snapped.

  “I did!” protested David, mouth full. “They went off that way.”

  12

  “Brother and sister,” thought Diablerie aloud, as he sat in the back seat of his ridiculous car, smoothing down his mustache with his fingertips. “The taint is not passed through blood. Strange coincidence for a brother and sister to both possess one.”

  He attempted to meet Alison’s gaze in the rearview mirror, to impress her with another mysterious look, but Alison was very deliberately keeping her eyes on the road. Her lips were pressed tightly enough together that she could have cracked a walnut between them.

  “Something ails you,” said Diablerie. It wasn’t a question.

  “No, it doesn’t,” mumbled Alison in as small a voice as possible.

  “I sense the desire for acclaim, for credit.” He touched his forehead. “You are offended that your discovery of the missing two went unacknowledged. You are pricked by your troublesome mortal pride.”

  Alison frowned at him in confusion. “Erm. No, it was—”

  “Do not forget, girl, we are not partners.” He leaned back and flicked a hand dismissively. “You are my assistant. All you should require is the knowledge that you are assisting. Which you are. And you shall have a reward greater than any word of empty praise from a glorified jailer.”

  “What?”

  “Another question. Which Diablerie is honor bound to answer truthfully. So ask.”

  She let a deep breath in and out. “So we’re really going to bring the Weatherbys back to that place?”

  Diablerie rolled his eyes. “Girl, I am in tune with all of the universe’s most sinister vibrations. I hold before you the key to the darkest mysteries that have plagued mankind since the dawn of civilization. Please ask me a hard one.”

  “W—”

  “Next time. The answer is yes, we are. Now drive.”

  Alison did so in silence for all of two seconds. “I’m not saying I don’t agree with, you know, the principle. I’m just saying, from an outside perspective, it kind of looks like we’re throwing people in prison just because—”

  “Just because they have a chance of accidentally sparking a fiery magical conflagration with their mind,” interjected Diablerie. “You know nothing of this world. Innocence is a fragile concept when death and destruction are but a mishandled sneeze away.”

  “Yes, I totally understand,” said Alison, with just a hint of irritation. “But not every magic power is like that, right? Adam said a lot of them don’t really do anything.”

  “Such as?”

  “He mentioned someone with a power that just makes their hair glow . . .”

  “Indeed! But how could it be known that it wouldn’t glow with the force of a thousand suns? Or emit deadly radiation? Or turn all who gazed upon it into sea urchins? Only the secondary school can clarify these matters.”

  “But . . . you don’t think . . . that stuff they were doing in the yard, that was a little bit like brainwashing?”

  “I should hope so,” said Diablerie lowly. “Washing is the correct thing to do to that which is unclean.”

  Without warning the dense brush either side of the car cleared, and they were passing through the village of Bratton Fleming. A cluster of pastel semidetached houses peered sleepily over rectangular hedgerows on the far side of a nicely maintained allotment. The ta
llest building in sight was a church bell tower in the distance, from which the staid silence of the English countryside seemed to radiate.

  The address Trevers had provided directed them to a small terrace of four dwellings, all painted the insipid yellow of a banana milkshake. The Weatherby home was the one sporting a gleaming white front door with frosted window.

  “Would they really come back here, Doctor?” asked Alison as she snapped the hand brake into place. “It’s the first place we’re going to look. It’s the first place anyone would look.”

  “That was a question that I am no longer honor bound to answer,” sniffed Diablerie. “However, your questions have been such a cavalcade of tedium thus far that I will deign to answer for the sake of my own distraction. I doubt the tainted ones have other havens, and it may offer us a clue if nothing else.”

  Alison followed him to the front door, hugging herself. “They’re called Aaron and Jessica.”

  Diablerie paused in the act of rapping his cane upon the door. “I sense that you disapprove of the Ministry’s methods,” he said, giving Alison a sidelong look.

  “No, no, no, I was just reminding myself.” She held his gaze for a moment, then caved under the pressure. “I totally understand the prison thing, I really do, but I can see how it might look bad. To outsiders.”

  “Then we must rejoice that outsiders need never be concerned with it.” He scrutinized the subtle movements of her facial features. “How would you propose these image problems be addressed, pray? In the eyes of your hypothetical outsider friends?”

  “I don’t know, they could just . . .” She looked away. “They could just show them a bit more understanding.”

  “Understanding,” he repeated, rolling the word around his mouth like a distasteful sprout. “I shall consider your counsel. Let it never be said that Diablerie is closed of mind, even to the ideas of the suicidally misinformed.” He bashed the front door with his walking stick so hard that the entire door shuddered in its frame. “Cower in your pit, children of the taint!” he called at full volume. “Diablerie has come to your door! Grant us entry or be prepared to be smitten with understanding!”

  The house remained silent and unmoved. Diablerie reached for the handle, and to both his and Alison’s surprise, the door fell open, unlocked.

  Diablerie entered an entrance hall so small and narrow that he was in the middle of it with a single stride. A set of carpeted steps led upwards, a closed door to the left presumably led to the living room, and an archway at the far end marked a transition from hallway to kitchen. The entire house was plunged into darkness with every curtain closed, lending a certain eeriness to its utter mundanity.

  Diablerie pulled the living room door open with an elaborate gesture that ended with his hand almost touching the side of his head. “Hm,” he said, his powerful stare tracking in all directions. “Diablerie confesses himself perplexed by trends in interior decoration.”

  Alison peered around him and felt nausea flutter down through her torso like confetti.

  The entire room was coated in what looked in the half light to be a sticky, dark brown substance, and when the sour, metallic stench hit her nostrils, she knew it to be blood. Everything was covered in it: the flower-patterned sofa with the circular cushions, the scratched coffee table, the electric imitation fireplace with the plastic molded coal. She didn’t know much about splatter-pattern analysis, but there was no way of telling where the stain had begun. It was like an enormous sheet of blood had simply dropped unceremoniously from the ceiling.

  Unperturbed, Diablerie strode into the middle of the room, the carpet squelching underfoot. “What devilry is afoot in this place?” he wondered aloud.

  Alison swallowed her horror just far enough to squeeze a few words past it. “Sh-should you be doing that?!”

  Diablerie peered at her. “Hm?”

  She fought to assemble coherent words. “The—the crime scene!”

  He gave her a look that was almost human, then spun on his heel with exaggerated contempt. “Ha! Diablerie cares not for the impotent twiddlings of any mundane investigation. My communion with the spirits will shed the necessary light on this.” He thrust out his arms, outstretched palms faced down, and seemed to be in a trance for a few moments before he snapped out of it, stepped back over to the door, and flicked the light switch.

  Just as the ceiling lamp came on, turning the twilit gray brown of the blood-soaked room a much more vibrant red, a young woman leapt up from behind the sofa. Diablerie jumped a little in surprise and tried to turn it into a pseudomysterious gesture, throwing up his arms and waving them in circular motions.

  “P-please . . .” whimpered the girl. She was blond and slim, shorter than Alison, wearing a thin white singlet and jogging bottoms that were absolutely soaked through with blood. She kept her elbows pinned rigidly to the sides of her torso, but her forearms were waving back and forth, hands shaking in time with her lower jaw.

  Diablerie reared back, throwing up his cloak in his usual defensive maneuver. “Girl,” he hissed in Alison’s direction. “Is that one of the tainted ones we seek?”

  “No, it’s not Jessica,” said Alison, deliberately using the name.

  Diablerie narrowed his eyes at her for a brief moment, then shook himself and thrust the point of his cane towards the girl. “Very well. You there! We seek two minions of darkness. Reveal them or be damned!”

  The girl boggled at him, aghast, then opted to appeal to Alison instead. “Please, they killed . . . they killed them . . .”

  Alison was about to go to her but stopped herself moments before she stepped onto the saturated carpet. She compromised by putting out her hands in a somewhat placatory way. “Um. It’s okay.” She thought back to the many police dramas she had seen on TV. “You’re safe now. Nothing to see here. Can you tell us who did this?”

  The girl’s face screwed up even further. “They were two, they looked human, but . . . they were monsters . . .”

  Diablerie’s cane decisively slammed into the carpet with a wet thunk. “We have confirmed the presence of tainted ones,” he announced, stepping back into the hall and dropping to one knee. “I can now channel the spirits and divine the route by which they left this place. It will take some time, girl. Search the upstairs rooms.”

  “Right!” She made the placatory gesture again for the survivor’s benefit. “Just . . . stay here, all right? We’ll get you out of here really soon.”

  The girl just stared, standing awkwardly in the middle of the bloody room. Diablerie held his cane vertically in front of him, facing the front door, bowed his head, and began emitting many of the same silly noises he had demonstrated on the car ride from the station.

  Alison hurried up most of the steps and slowed as she reached the top. The upper floor was also shrouded in darkness, with all the bedroom doors closed and the one open door leading into a dull bathroom with peach fittings. But what made Alison stop was a subtle sound on the edge of hearing, just audible over Diablerie’s gibbering. A strange, arrhythmic fluttering.

  She rounded the banister and determined that the sound was coming from the door at the far end of the landing, probably one of the bedrooms. She crept closer, and as her eyes adjusted, she saw irregular flashes of white light at the gap beneath the door. The sound became more like a harsh, insectile chittering. Her first instinct was to go back and tell Diablerie, but she didn’t want to interrupt whatever he thought he was doing in the hall.

  It was getting hard to think. Adrenaline had turned her ordered mind into a six-lane pileup. She knew she wasn’t ready for this, but at the same time, she could picture Elizabeth Lawrence, sarcastically asking her why she had chosen to dawdle outside the door as the nightmare had been free to unfurl.

  She made up her mind to open the door, but first, there being no sense in going unprepared, she grabbed a toilet plunger from the bathroom, which she held in front of her for want of a single line of defense. Then she outstretched one finger toward the bed
room door, leaned the rest of her as far back as she could, braced herself, and gently pushed it open.

  “shut the door!” yelled Jessica Weatherby, before glancing up and slipping her headphones off. “Who are you?”

  She looked exactly as she had in the school photograph: same unflattering glasses, same black hair, same dumpy build. She was wearing a T-shirt with some baffling in-joke emblazoned on it and sitting in a computer chair with a towel draped over the backrest. The source of the sound had been her fingers racing across a computer keyboard, and the source of the lights had been a pair of monitors, one of which was displaying a children’s superhero cartoon.

  Jessica’s eyes bulged as they took in Alison’s attack stance, and her outstretched fingers stiffened. “Are you . . . here to take us back?” she said, in a quavering voice.

  “Well . . .”

  Jessica swiveled in her chair to face Alison properly. “I’m really, really sorry. I know it was bad of us to run but, look, I really wasn’t liking it there.” She clasped her hands. “Mum and Dad aren’t here right now, but they totally don’t want us to go back either. Honest. We called them and they said to tell you.”

  “I won’t take you back,” assured Alison. “I won’t do anything you don’t want me to. I’m not one of them.” Her eyes darted between Jessica and an Interstellar Bum Pirates poster on the bedroom wall for a few moments until inspiration struck. “Actually, I escaped from the school as well.”

  “You did?” Jessica cocked her head, bewildered. “How did you know to come here?”

  A second round of inspiration struck. “I’m a friend of Aaron’s. He said I could hide out here too.”

  Jessica’s gaze drifted down to Alison’s hand. “Did he tell you to clean the toilet?”

  What Alison had taken for a plunger in the darkness was, in fact, a toilet brush. She examined its bristles distastefully. “Um . . .”

  Something occurred on Jessica’s computer monitor, and it immediately captured all of her attention. She half turned back and started typing with one hand. “Sorry, I was in the middle of messaging someone. So you’ve got a magic power as well?”