Strange Magic: A Yancy Lazarus Novel

by James Hunter

  “Amazing,” I said, voice as flat as the Nebraska plans. “Can we get to the part where you ask me to do something wildly reckless and insanely dangerous? I’ve got shit to do.”

  “Dammit, man! I so rarely have visitors down this way—can’t you indulge me in a bit of the theatric? I mean really, is it so much to ask for you to play your part here?”

  “Jeez.” I rolled my eyes. “Fine … wow, Harold,” I said in mock wonderment, “The Pit you say? Amazingggggg. Please tell me more … I’m soooo interested—oh, oh, when are we going to get to the part where you ask me to do something wildly reckless and insanely dangerous? Can we get to that part? Please, please?”

  “Fine. If you’re going to be such a poor sport about it. I have inadvertently attracted the attention of a Dara-Naric—it’s lurking on the other side of the door. After I pop the safety hatch, I’m going to need you to go into the rift and scare it off.”

  “Dara-what-ic?” I asked. “And hey, I already told you I wasn’t going to play hit man for you.”

  He laughed at me, a great long heaving thing which did nothing to improve my general mood. Getting laughed at really does hurt. Stupid karma.

  “Good God!” He said in between gales of mirth. “You can’t kill a Dara-Naric! They’re eldritch beings that dwell in the depths of the Ether. They’re a terrible rarity, really. I, who travel the Ways daily, have seen their ilk only a handful of times. Each is completely unique and, to my expansive knowledge, indestructible … honestly, I was rather unfortunate in attracting this one on my last outing.”

  “And I can’t kill it?”

  More laughter.

  “No, no you can’t kill it. Perish the thought! You’ll be lucky to survive it.”

  “Come again?”

  “You be lucky to survive it,” he said, speaking slowly, enunciating each word carefully—a grown up speaking down to a child.

  “Well than why would I go in there? This seems like a terrible idea.”

  “Oh, it is a terrible idea,” he agreed, bobbing his enormous head energetically. “But if you want me to make you a Way to Arjun, I need access to my Pit.”

  Well shit.

  “So how do I get rid of it—err, scare it off I guess.”

  “Well …” he said, drawing out the word in a way that told me he didn’t have a clue. “There’s not a lot to go off, mind—Dara-Narics are rare and few people who encounter them live to tell the tale. But I have gleaned that they detest fire or maybe light—being creatures of the darkest depths—and that they also hate music.”

  “Music.” I said, feeling completely ridiculous. “Like AC/DC or B.B. King? Just music?”

  “Quite right. The Dara-Naric are beings of quiet and chaos. According to old, old sources the sound of even the simplest melody can drive them mad.”

  “So what? I’m gonna hop into your Pit of Doom, shoot off some fireworks and play a few tunes—maybe throw in a little dancing or juggling for good measure?”

  “Yes.” He smiled with a shark’s grin. “Something like that.” I considered turning and walking away, this idea sounded way worse than trying Ailia for help. I mean she’d probably kill me, but at least with the Morrigan I knew what I was dealing with. Some giant, unkillable, creature of chaos, dwelling in the blackness between worlds—a creature I’d never in my life heard of? That sounded like a really dumb plan.

  Sure, Harold and I had made a deal, but he hadn’t come through with his side of things yet, and I had specified that I could choose the job, so backing out now wouldn’t be a big deal … but I was so close. Harold could get me what I needed before anyone else had to get hurt or killed by Arjun and his demon carnival.

  “Do you have anything for me to play?” I asked, resigned.

  “Look around my friend. I have anything you could ask for.”

  I couldn’t go in with a piano—it’s a damn tricky business to fight a giant monster while hauling around an eight-hundred pound Steinway. Playing guitar also wasn’t an option: I needed at least one hand to sling some fire.

  There was one thing that might do the trick. I asked Harold if he had what I needed and, after a few minutes of impatient waiting, he scuttled back from his endless shelves handing me the requested items.

  With a long sigh, I made my way down the metal steps and right up to the edge of the metal-shielded Pit. Ready to jump into the darkness of the Ether and do battle with an eldritch monster armed with, drum roll please …

  A Hohner Special harmonica and a cushy neck-holder, like Bob Dylan used to wear. Some days, I swear.

  TWENTY-FOUR:

  Into The Pit

  Harold moved over to a complex and boxy computer terminal on the far side of The Pit, typing away in a flurry of key strokes and button clicks.

  “You won’t have long,” he said, not looking up from the screen. “I’m going to prop the gate open for five minutes—it will be on a time delay—but no longer. If you haven’t gotten the job done in five minutes than I will assume you are dead and the door will lock. The gateway is also motion sensitive—if you pass back through within the designated time it will close automatically, so no worries about the Dara-Naric following you through.”

  I had the harmonica secured in place around my neck, my pistol drawn in my right hand, and the weaves for a fire construct in my left. Fat wet drops of sweat littered my brow, my stomach seemed to be doing Olympic floor dancing: turning and flipping in a horribly queasy way. It was the kind of feeling you get when you’re about to go down the big rollercoaster drop, or maybe skydive. Without the parachute.

  Shit, this was a bad idea. I was breathing too hard, close to the edge of panic. Being confronted by something nightmarish is one thing—you don’t have the time to think about being scared—but willingly venturing into the dark lair of a creature so terrible it can’t be killed is altogether different.

  “Are you ready?” Harold called from the ledge, still punching buttons with master speed.

  “No,” I said, “but open the door anyway”

  “Disengaging locks in Three … Two … One.”

  The door let out a hiss and a puff of steam as a series of overlapping plates slid and rotated open, revealing a hole as black as darkest space. With a gulp, I jumped down into the chasm, expecting to fall into some great, unending abyss. Instead, I found my feet instantaneously connecting with some sort of walkway. The hell? There wasn’t anything beneath my feet, just more unending blackness, but I could feel the presence of something solid under my boot-soles.

  A glance back showed me the thirty-foot Pit, except, impossibly, it was standing upright—no longer a hole in the ground, but an upright doorway. I’d jumped down, but now found myself standing on a wall, a wall that felt like the floor. It was like one of those trippy MC Esher paintings—the ones that tinker with perspective so bad you can’t tell which way is up and which way is down. I shrugged my shoulders … whatever. I’d seen stranger things.

  And speaking of seeing this, I could see. The blackness before me was unending and unbroken, yet paradoxically, my vision wasn’t restricted in the least—my hands, feet, and body were as clear to me as they would’ve been on a perfectly sunny day.

  I took a few tentative steps forward, trying to slow down my breathing, fighting to get my panicked heartbeat under control. I don’t know what I’d been expecting—I’d never heard of a Dara-Naric, so I had no frame of reference to work from—but there wasn’t a damn thing in here. Just emptiness and more emptiness. Everything was okay, I’d gotten all worked up over nothing. Everything is okay, I told myself again urgently wanting to believe it.

  “Nothing’s here, Harold!” I called back through the portal, the sound of my voice as loud as a gong, but hollow and distorted.

  “Oh, it’s still there,” he called, his voice faded and far, far away. “I can feel its presence, lurking, waiting. It’s part of my gift. Trust me, keep standing around, it’ll find you …”

  “Well, I
don’t know what to tell you,” I hollered again. “I can’t fight what’s not—”

  Something, roughly the thickness of a tree trunk, swatted me into the air like a fly. I tumbled freely, twisting and turning as though in some gravity-free vacuum or maybe some crazy-ass traveling-carnival ride. I braced myself for impact, expecting a head-on collision into something with the grace of a car accident.

  Instead, I landed softly on my feet, which came as a helluva shock. Now, I was upside down, well sort of. I felt right side up, but the Pit’s opening was directly above me by about thirty-feet, hanging unsupported in the air like some otherworldly flying saucer—

  And that’s when I saw the Dara-Naric, its bulk hiding behind the portal opening, lying in-wait directly above me. It was the biggest living thing I’ve ever seen, and I’ve seen a school of blue whales. Its head was the size of a large house: black, inky-skin stretched tight over vast muscle and thick bone. A massive ridged plate ran horizontally across its great face, making me think instantly of a hammerhead shark, and beneath that sat a cruel hooked-beak the size of a car, filled with ragged tearing teeth. It didn’t have any sort of eyes—at least none I could find.

  A damn shame—its eyes would’ve been the first place I shot. Eyes can be a tremendous vulnerability for a creature so large; they make perfect targets, and let’s face it, no one likes getting poked in the eye.

  Its similarity to anything even remotely earth-bound ended at its head. Its body, stretching out behind it, was a craggily, rounded mass, more like an asteroid than a living thing. It had no arms or legs—nothing that might resemble feet or hands or claws—but it did have a shit-load of tentacles. When I say shit-load, I’m talking a crazy, incalculable, cloud of lazily swinging and swaying appendages—some bigger than skyscraper support columns and others merely the size of your average lawn tree. It was one of the latter that had taken a swing at me.

  The slimy son of a bitch was a real piece of work, something straight out of a Lovecraft tale.

  “Huh, that’s definitely a new one,” I said just to hear the sound of my voice in the void. This thing was out of my league—hell, I was sure this thing was out of everyone’s league. Maybe an angel (or a battalion of angels) could smite it, but human folk were never meant to tangle with something like this.

  I stood still, my heart hammering in my chest like a blacksmith working the forge, trying to decide what to do. The Dara-Naric wasn’t particularly aggressive, it didn’t seem angry or vicious. Just giant and menacing—and maybe a little curious. I think if it was hungry or angry there wouldn’t have been enough of me left to fill a mop bucket at this point. I was sure this creature could dispatch me without a second thought or bother if it wanted too.

  I didn’t think it wanted to. No, the sense I got was … loneliness and playful interest. A giant child left to frolic in the emptiness of the Ether. A giant, lonely, child who had suddenly happened upon a shiny, new toy: me.

  That first tentacle snaked toward me again, shortly joined by three or four more cautiously probing limbs. So, maybe this thing didn’t want to kill me, eat me, or do any of the other, generally horrific things most supernatural things like to do. Still, it was really, really big, and I thought it might accidentally pop my puny head off by playing a little too rough. I was not interested in ending up like that Barbie doll with no head—the one every little kid has in the bottom of their closet.

  I fired three shots into the nearest tentacle, my normally quiet gun roaring like thunder in the silent space. My bullets plowed into the Dara-Naric’s rubbery flesh, instantly absorbed without leaving anything even remotely resembling damage. The limb withdrew though, drawing back toward the creature’s moon-sized body. It had flinched when the gun fired, not when the bullets impacted. Harold was right, it wasn’t a fan of the light. That was probably why it was hiding behind the portal—so that when it opened, the earthly light wouldn’t disturb its sensitive nature.

  Ha, sensitive nature … maybe the Dara-Naric wasn’t a kid, but a moody goth teen, brooding in its room behind closed curtains.

  One of its other limbs struck out like a cobra, so fast I almost didn’t catch it. I narrowly sidestepped the strike and fired the remaining three rounds into that tentacle—at this range, I could hear the meaty, wet thuds. Again the creature withdrew the limb, unperturbed by the rounds themselves, but clearly uncomfortable with the muzzle-flashes. The other approaching appendages moved with greater purpose now, no longer lazily seeking out some new oddity, but instead searching for a potential threat. Maybe prey.

  I needed to end this quick before the creature became outright hostile and I ended up a smear of bloody tomato paste.

  I brought up my left hand and unleashed a stream of fire so bright it hurt my eyes. The flames washed over the creature’s beaked-maw—it lurched back in shock, a deep rumble of anger so massive it literally shook me where I stood. The fire poured into the creature’s flesh, but the Dara-Naric refused to ignite—there was no smoke, no embers, no flame, save what I dished out.

  It wasn’t burning, but boy was it was pissed, mondo pissed. Godzilla battling Mothra pissed. Hundreds of its limbs flailed about in a downpour of dark meat; a score of bobbing tentacles struck blindly at me while others crashed down hundreds of feet away in mindless rage. But each incoming limb avoided the touch of my lance of flame at all cost, as if each tentacle were semi-sentient.

  Okay, my flame beam didn’t do jack to actually hurt the Dara-Naric, but it wanted no part of the terrible light. Time to change tactics.

  I cut the fire lance off abruptly, and ran right, away from the bulk of the incoming tentacles. Seconds later a sputtering cyclone of flame, about five-and-a-half feet tall, sheathed me in its soft yellow furnace light. I know what you’re thinking: awesomesauce, tornado of fire … but simma down now—it’s only a flashy gimmick, designed for show, but with little practical value. At least until now. I can’t actually surround myself in burning flame—that shit would flash-fry me like a like a gooey, deep-fried Oreo. This little baby only looks like fire. It won’t burn a sheet of notebook paper, but it doesn’t take much juice and it’s bright and flashy as noonday in summer.

  If the Dara-Naric had been pissed before, now it went positively mental. Its shriek of rage sounded like the billow of a T-Rex using a megaphone, and it started aiming its blows right at me. I dashed forward, zigzagging and dancing among falling tentacles, rolling here and jumping there to avoid being crushed beneath the weight of the creature’s fury. A pesky mosquito avoiding incoming hand slaps.

  So far so good. Kind of, I guess. I mean, I’d taken a peaceful, curious creature the size of a small planet and turned it into a raging death machine … sounds kind of stupid and reckless when I put it like that.

  Harold had been right about the light, so now it was time to sooth the savage beast with some funky harmonica blues and I knew the perfect tune—let’s face it, I always know the right tune. I pressed the mouth harp to my lips and belted out a fast, punchy, upbeat version of Robert Johnson’s “Cross Road Blues.”

  Lots of people think that the harmonica is some kinda ignoble pocket toy—the kind of thing you might give a kid as a stocking stuffer. It’s not some hoity-toity, fancy-pants instrument like a violin or a cello, or shit, even a piano. But damn can it be sexy as hell, and sometimes there’s no more appropriate sound in the world—like when you’re fighting some freaky-ass, monster-movie reject.

  I ripped into the harmonica, bending notes here—the sharp trill of a blackbird’s chirp. Sliding notes there—the pitch failing like a stone, and wailing like a banshee. I worked my lips over the comb … two-hole drop with a tongue block—2/5 draw and a 3/6 blow. Up and down, up and down: the warbling cry of shrieking tires. The dusty noise of a country road. The crunch of gravel at the crossroads on a dark night. In my mind, I could practically see Robert Johnson with an arm slung around the Devil’s shoulders—both of them smiling and tapping along as I played.

  Though that little ditty
has some pop and pizazz, it can still make a well-adjusted man, with a good career and a loving family, jive right up to the edge of a bridge and jump. It’s the most down-and-out blues I know, and I was playing the shit out of it. Hopefully, the Dara-Naric would realize how terrible and pointless its life was and slither off into the dark reaches of the Ether and maybe drown itself to death in a swimming pool worth of alcohol.

  The creature responded with another terrible roar and backed away from the portal, even as its tentacles continued their assault on anything within a fifty-foot radius of me—shit, it was working. How about that? Hey, never underestimate the power of the blues. Plus, I had to admit it was kind of cool fighting with my own sound track.

  I had the slimy-shit on its heels, so to speak, and now it was time to get the hell out of Dodge before it was too late. I squatted down and pushed off hard, propelling myself upward with a boost of Vis conjured wind. Upward I flew, toward the portal and the crazy-ass Cthulhu monster, the whole while I trumpeted out my gritty blues and burned like a falling star. The combined noise and light was too much for the monstrous creature. It began to retreat and fade into the Ether as I rocketed through the open portal way, which promptly snapped shut behind me with a metallic hiss-clack.

  I sailed into Harold’s warehouse cavern, flying right out of The Pit and toward the metal storage racks nearest the edge. With a hasty effort of will, I redirected the wind construct to buffer my descent—hadn’t completely thought through the whole landing part of my escape plan. My ploy worked, and I touched down unscathed and no worse for the wear. Unfortunately, the pressure of the air toppled one of Harold’s precious racks—the contents of the shelf fell in a great clamor of tinkles and breaks. Shucks, oh well. Maybe next time Harold will think twice before sending me into the vast Ether to fight an asteroid-sized tentacle monster.