Through a Mythos Darkly

by Glynn Owen Barrass

  Ruiz kept firing at them until the gun jammed or ran out of bullets, Arneson couldn’t see. He handed the kid his revolver. The road was littered with bird carcasses. He hit one and nearly stalled, had to gun the engine to clear the carcass, which collapsed with a bird’s alarming fragility under the bumper.

  The truck’s horn sounded and stayed on. “Your friends stop,” Ruiz said. Arneson looked back and stood on the brake. A roadrunner slammed into their spare tire and staggered away. Ruiz shot it twice with the revolver, but only aggravated it.

  The truck skidded to a stop. Baskin lay facedown on the wheel. His side of the windshield was misted with blood and brains.

  The roadrunners had torn away much of the canvas canopy over the bed. Harrigan leaned against a crate, spraying a crowd of huge mouths like a clutch of hideous baby birds with the Thompson. When the drum emptied, he reversed it and stove in the skull of the nearest bird-thing. Another one snapped at him and nipped away one of his arms like a licorice whip. Harrigan fell back on the crate. “Get out, Cowlick,” he said, and rolled the sick corporal out of the truck. Brewer was off his bike and running for him when the last three roadrunners leapt onto the bed of the truck to wet their beaks in Harrigan’s blood.

  Harrigan stuck a pistol into the open beak of a roadrunner and fired a flare down its throat. The monster’s neck exploded and the headless thing leapt up and clawed Harrigan’s guts out in one deft scoop.

  A spark from the flare must have hit the gasoline. The bed of the truck went up in a red, filthy sunrise, the sound like God slamming a door knocked all of them flat on their asses.

  Bernstein came stumbling up to the Jeep with a bloody map and a revolver in his hands. “He just…he just stopped and he said, ‘I’m sorry,’ and he…just…”

  “We should go,” Kirazian said. “It can’t go on like this…”

  Brewer took off with Cowles riding pillion, but drew up less than fifty yards away when he saw a lone motorcycle coming back. It had a cow skull on the handlebars.

  Arneson jumped out of the Jeep. They should get the fuck out of here, there could be more of them or worse, and all this carrion would attract them sooner or later, but…

  The rider jumped off the gore-smeared Harley and ripped the balaclava off his grim, impassive face.

  “Cap went down,” said Norman, who lit a cigarette and inhaled once, then stubbed it out and pointed at Arneson. “Wants to talk to you.”

  “You left him?” Arneson started to run.

  “He’s not going anywhere,” Norm said.

  He found Schwering lying in the ditch on the right side of the road, about a hundred feet short of his bike. He’d tried to come back after he crashed it, on a mangled leg, with blood coming out his mouth, nose and one ear.

  “I’m fine—lemme alone…” The pilot gnashed his teeth and pushed him away when Arneson tried to lift him. “Only slow you down…Get us all killed.”

  “We’re not leaving you behind.” Arneson pushed on a patch of road rash on Schwering’s knee, gasped with relief when the officer winced and hit him. His spine was okay, but his ribs…His chest was eggplant-toned with internal bleeding pooling in his belly.

  “You are leaving me, and that’s an order.”

  “I don’t have to listen to your orders anymore.”

  “Listen to this, Buzz.” Schwering cocked his pistol and put it in Arneson’s ear.

  “God damn it…”

  “Yeah, God damn it all.” Schwering sat back, biting his lip, rested the gun on his lap. “You know, I knew why the FBI pulled strings to put you on my plane. You were too young and too dumb to pass the flight test on your own, but they picked you because some twitch in your record told them you’d put a bullet through my right eye if I ever so much as farted sauerkraut, am I right?”

  Arneson looked back down the road. The jungle was making strange and terrible sounds, but nothing like before, and the other men stood silhouetted against the bonfire of the truck. Sgt. Pat Harrigan, engineer and radio operator; Sgt. David Baskin, top-turret gunner. It was a miracle they weren’t all dead. That’s what a true believer would do, he’d look for some sign that some half-witted, crooked sadistic monstrosity of a titanic demiurge was tipping the scales in their favor, if only to decant them into hotter water.

  “They were right,” Schwering said.

  Arneson’s neck snapped around so fast something tore inside it. “What?”

  “I was a spy for the Third Reich. It’s all true.”

  “Goddamn you, shut up.”

  “I telegraphed our runs to my uncle at High Command. Why the hell d’you think we never lost a man? Because we were expected. We were marked. They were terrified to be the one who shot down der Reichsmarschall’s precious nephew.”

  Arneson reached for his own pistol, but slapped empty leather. “I’d do it now, if I could. You’re just making this up so we’ll leave you…”

  “No. You’d be stupid not to leave me. But I need you to finish the mission.” Struggling to peel off his fleece-lined flight jacket, he dropped the pistol, which Arneson picked up.

  “Oh leave off with the games, Buzz, I’m about to die.” He fought his arm out of one sleeve and nearly fainted. Arneson helped him out of the leather jacket.

  “What’s the mission, sir?”

  “We…You’re going to Los Alamos. It’s near Santa Fe. It’s where they’re building the bomb. The Nazis had people working on a bomb, too, along with a bunch of other, crazy shit that confused science with magic. They were all dead or vanished by the time our boys got there, but Army intelligence heads found some formula they think was responsible for what happened. They think we can use it…Maybe to do to them what they did to us, or maybe to make it stop…”

  “Where is it? Why didn’t they just…?”

  “All of the bombers had somebody carrying it…” His bloodied hands fumbled with the quilted interior, ripped away a false label to reveal a waterproof pouch sewn into the lining. “We just…got lucky…”

  Arneson refused to take the jacket, laid it over the captain. “God damn it, you goldbricks! Bring the Jeep up for the captain!”

  “Fucking…kid…” Schwering coughed and gagged, seizing up or perhaps deliberately choking on his own blood. Arneson fought to clear his airway, was rewarded with a belch and a chuckle.

  “I had to do it. They found out I changed my name, too. Your family’s got nothing on mine, sir. Good people, scholars…but the things they learned, the things they had to do…I had to get away from it. But you can’t get away from what you are, can you?”

  The jeep pulled up beside them and Bernstein came with the first aid kit, but the captain never answered.

  They drove for three days.

  They turned north and passed through dead, empty towns and forts where their commerce was clearly unwelcome. They found gasoline a day outside the San Antonio jungle, and offered to trade a thousand dollars in U.S. dollars and British pounds sterling. The trader tried to take their bikes and the crew ended up killing the trader and his two stooges, and a legless pig that may well have been the brains of the whole operation.

  At Fort Stockton, they passed through a battlefield like another Bulge, with shattered tanks and half-tracks and hills of indifferently burned, naked infantrymen. At first, Bernstein was confused, because he could only see American vehicles and dead dogfaces. It took a minute to accept the truth.

  They followed Highway 10 and skirted El Paso’s seething cloud forest and turned north into a desolate, lunar landscape they welcomed for its sterile familiarity. Nothing for the abominable forces that ruined America to work with, out here. The weathered buttes and volcanic cones remained unchanged, but they had always been hostile to humanity. The Indians out there must think the Great Spirit finally answered their prayers.

  The highway took them through Albuquerque, where they saw life of a sort, even if it hid until they’d passed. Arneson, riding Cptn. Schwering’s bike, could hardly blame them. Brewer in a he
lmet he made out of a roadrunner beak, with a baseball bat studded with a dozen of those claws embedded in it. Kirazian still in that damned top hat, his back swaddled in bloody bandages. Ruiz in mud and blood war paint, hunkered behind the machinegun and a cigar clenched in his teeth. Norman…just Norman.

  They picked a winding path up the rising terrain until they came to a tiny village on the corrugated shoulder of a great volcanic caldera. Tanks and trucks and Jeeps parked on the streets, but not a soul did they see on the streets of the strangely, desperately quaint little town that housed the most brilliant scientific minds in the world.

  They came around a corner onto Main Street and found a short, white-haired man standing in the street. He wore a conservative suit and a battered fedora, and smoked a hand-rolled cigarette. He waved to the pack of motorcycles as if they were expected guests.

  Arneson jumped off the Harley and walked up to the man who was not as old as he’d thought at first, but his hair was coarse and white, his face deeply lined. His eyes sparkled as he asked Lt. Arneson if he had anything for him.

  Arneson pressed the waterproof pouch into his hand. “We were the only plane that got through, and half of us didn’t make it. Whatever this is…” he looked around. He saw silhouettes in houses, a man standing on his porch down the street with arm raised in greeting, but he hadn’t lowered it or moved since they arrived. A mockup to confuse spies, maybe, with mannequins. The wind changed, and he smelled the houses.

  “It’s supposed to stop whatever the Germans did to us,” Arneson finished.

  The man opened the pouch and looked at the celluloid and paper sheets, at densely inked mathematical formulae and arcane diagrams that seemed to writhe off the page when the eye caught them at the right angle. “Why, young fool,” the scientist said, “the Germans didn’t do this to America.” He laughed and tucked the packet under one arm and turned to lead them into a big red schoolhouse.

  “We did it.”

  Arneson looked around just as Cowles screamed. Something punctured his neck, like a massive bee sting; it swelled and he swooned to the ground.

  Arneson, Norman and Kirazian drew their sidearms and shot the scientist. Head bowed, his slender body accepted the bullets like inept but sincere compliments. “Can we please move past these pointless agonistic displays?”

  Brewer went for him, but something they couldn’t see speared him by the eye, lifted him off the ground and drank him. In midair, it rendered him a hollow husk. By the time it was done, they could see what was doing it, though they didn’t want to.

  A writhing pillar of claws and blood-glutted entrails, it slithered backwards, sucking in upon itself when they shot it, though it seemed not to be wounded. Cowles tried to crawl to them, but the swelling spread to his torso, which bulged and sagged until it dragged on the pavement. All awful appetite, the thing crawled back to him even as they stood over it shooting and shooting into its gelatinous body. At last, Arneson splashed the last of the gasoline from the jerry can on the Jeep, and threw Ruiz’s cigar on it. Cpl. Cowles and the thing that fed on him went out together, shrinking and shriveling into a charcoal husk in the otherwise picturesque small-town American street.

  “Please,” the scientist said, “follow me.” A tiny giggle escaped his lips. “The final test of our ultimate hypothesis is about to be completed, and outside won’t be remotely inhabitable for…oh, speaking scientifically, I would have to say forever.”

  “You see, it was the injustice of it that drove us mad…To present us with the proofs for opening up the Infinite, and the means to work godlike changes upon the face of the earth, to ease all human suffering and remake earth and sky and send men to distant worlds…and then to demand a bomb?

  “You tell me,” whined the scientist, “who was really mad?”

  Arneson and the others could not reply, for they were bound and gagged. A squad of buck privates in gas masks that leaked reddish ammonia vapors dragged them across the desert alongside an army of animal sacrifices—cows, pigs, chickens, dogs, cats, monkeys, baboons, pigeons in stacked, mewling moaning cages, and even several ant farms under glass. The scientist walked around the bomber crew as they approached ground zero. His eyes glittered like cobalt in the noonday sun.

  They passed concentric rings of empty, unpainted houses with cars and mailboxes out front, and skeletons mounted with a master taxidermist’s care in lifelike positions throughout.

  “We could have given them anything…cities on the moon, rainforests in the desert, bloody goddamned time travel, and they wanted to blow the poor Japs off the face of the map, no more, no less.

  “Well, it was madness not to go mad, says I.”

  Kneeling beside Arneson as if seeking a more active audience, he removed the young lieutenant’s gag. “You understand, don’t you?”

  Arneson vigorously nodded.

  “We would give them their destructive weapon and in the process, we would have what science has always dreamt of, without so much as daring to speak it. Like having your cake and eating it too, and what kind of hare-brained horseshit saying is that, anyhow? Why anyone would simply want to just have a cake…without eating it…” He looked lost, the eyes going dull, and he started to walk away.

  “What was that?” Arneson asked.

  “What? Oh, yes, thank you! To find God, yes. We would look upon the sleeping face at the center of creation, and wake him up.”

  “I didn’t think you eggheads believed in God.”

  “Oh, we’re skeptical, but we’re not fools. We only want proof, and such extraordinary proof as we have found, it simply cannot be described, it must be demonstrated.

  “Without ever risking exposure, we made our first attempt to make a weapon of relativity. But what we made was not a bomb. It was instantaneous travel. It was a door.

  “When we learned that our counterparts in Europe were closing in on the same theories, we concluded that it would be foolishness to compete, when we had more in common with each other than any of us did with the men who held our leashes. So we opened a Door, and we brought them in. We helped each other, for as long as they were useful, but in the end, once the truth became obvious, only one man’s services were still needed.

  “This caused some complications here once it became impossible to hide Heisenberg’s team. We had made their puny atomic bombs, but the fools would never get to drop them.

  “One week after victory was declared in Europe, we successfully opened our Door several hundred miles above where we are standing now. The light of His countenance shone upon all of this great nation for but a moment, before our reserves were depleted. And look what He hath wrought.”

  Arneson thought of all the dead people posed in their houses, of the legions of abandoned military vehicles outside, stretching all the way back to Texas. All gathered and lit up as tinder to ignite this…

  “You did all this just to destroy America?”

  “His holy light is far more than a destructive force. It is transformative, and soon, it will transform the world.”

  The rocket was like the buzz bombs the krauts threw at London, but much, much bigger, at least six stories, and it was full of people, though they were asleep as they were loaded into the nose of the rocket like they were simply another form of fuel.

  “This time, we won’t just spy upon him. We’ll shake him out his sleep and perhaps even poke him in the eye, but in the end, we’ll make him a proper offering, as good pilgrims invariably must to their chosen gods.”

  “You’re going to offer him all those people?”

  “No, lord no! That’s ridiculous. They’re just to open the Door. I’m going to offer him the most precious thing we have…

  “Our sun.”

  They were tied to stakes on fine white sand dunes, less than a mile from the bunker. The scientist’s amplified voice projected the countdown over the desert, which became an unsettling guttural incantation.

  The rocket ignited, thrusters thundering, the rocket lifting up with madd
ening slowness at first, but almost as if lifted as it clawed its way up towards the few vaporous clouds above the desert; it became a streak, and then a dot lost in the sun.

  Watching it, Arneson stared into the blinding white light, reciting the formulae he’d memorized from the pouch as a mantra, a focus to draw his mind into a realm where will is matter, and matter merely shadow.

  As Buzz Arneson’s great uncle mastered occulted sciences that opened or closed portals to other spheres, so his great nephew had discovered extraordinary abilities which early exploitation by his overeager father had led to scandal and dissolution of the family. Arneson changed his name to spare the Armitage clan of Arkham further humiliation, but also to throw off those who had taken a sinister interest in his unique abilities under hypnosis, particularly those from the United States government.

  When the FBI tracked down Buzz Arneson, they were not interested in his reliably executing his superior officer if he turned traitor; they hoped to learn if Arneson couldn’t stop Captain Schwering without lifting a finger.

  While Kirazian, Bernstein, Ruiz and Norman called to him, Arneson twitched and foamed at the mouth, staring into the sun…

  But in his mind, Buzz Arneson woke up and rubbed his eyes and freed himself from his harness. The acceleration crushed him to the floor, but the rocket was rapidly approaching its terminal phase, and minutes remained before the secondary boosters would throw it into outer earth orbit.

  Arneson crawled across the bulkhead of the rocket capsule, past dozens of sedated human bodies hanging like meat in a freezer, until he came to the instrument panel. There was little to control in the remotely guided rocket, but the receiver itself could be tampered with, and Arneson did so until his twitching nerveless fingers went numb and his vision was crowded with pulsing violet blobs, and then he went away.

  The chanting continued, louder and faster. They were told that the rocket would reach its apogee in one hour, and then it would detonate. After that, they were on a god’s timetable, and miracles might occur all at once, or in an eyedropper of eons.