Guignol & Other Sardonic Tales

by Orrin Grey

  You have died.

  VIII

  As more and more of the enormous crabs rise from the city streets, you realize that you didn’t sign on for this. You’d apologize to Samanda if you could, but your mouth is full of magic rock. Even as you dart past her, the claw of the enormous crab fastens around her waist, and the pebble is squeezed from her mouth. You take comfort in the knowledge that she’ll probably drown before the crabs can tear her apart.

  The crabs are surprisingly quick for such huge beasts, and several times you have to deflect snapping claws with the blade of your sword. At the end of the lane, a creature so massive that it makes its brethren look regular-sized rises up before you, the entire end of the street yawning upward into a gargantuan blue carapace. Your blade licks out and slices off a wavering eye-stalk, and then you’re stepping atop the monster even as it levers itself upward, and using its height to boost you onto the avenue above.

  You find yourself in a broad thoroughfare lined with cyclopean pillars that must have once reached to the heavens, if this city ever existed above the waves. At its far end, you see the gates of some temple or fane. As you pass through, you discover that the interior is not an interior at all, but that some ancient cataclysm has rent the building, destroying the roof and bringing down most of the walls, so that the temple is now open to the sea and to a massive chasm that splits the sea bed behind it. Here you find the throne of the Yellow King, and the King himself asleep upon it. Samanda was right when she hypothesized that the King might not be a man. What lies upon the throne is an enormous worm, fat as a maggot, its yellow flesh the color of infection.

  Next to the throne is a heap of gold and jewels, and atop the heap the treasure that you seek, what can only be the Shining Trapezohedron. Black and shot through with red, it seems to call out to you, and you slip noiselessly across the temple floor toward your prize. You had believed that you might need Samanda’s skills to steal the stone, but it seems now that you may be stealthy enough after all, and you reach the pile of treasure without the King so much as stirring.

  You reach out one shaking hand, close your fist around the Trapezohedron, and as you do so, you hear a sound behind you, a sound out of place in the soundless depths of the ocean. You turn, and you see that the worm that is the Yellow King terminates in a human face, and that face is directing its mocking laughter at you, and you realize that, while you’ve gotten what you came for, you’ve also fallen into a trap.

  If you cast the Shining Trapezohedron away, refer to passage X.

  If you gaze into the Shining Trapezohedron, refer to passage XI.

  IX

  You fight the unnatural pull of the mushrooms that surround you, and follow Ivrian through the strange fields of the Plateau. As you near the temple steps, however, you notice that the fungus seems to have shifted slightly. Each time you look away, the topography has changed when you look back. Before you can point the phenomenon out to Ivrian, one of the corpses tears itself free from its fungal bed and lunges at you. Your sword comes up and slices off an arm. The sensation is oddly repellent, not the clean bite of a normal blade cutting normal flesh.

  All around you, the bodies within the fungus are rising up. Mushrooms in vivid blues and greens and purples burst from their bodies as they clamber, shamble, or even crawl toward you, and you know, even as you try to fend them off, that the fungus is what controls them, what makes them move, and that gives you an idea.

  “Ivrian,” you shout, “their bones are still intact!”

  And she, to her credit, sees what you mean immediately, plucks a fingerbone from the putrefying mass of the arm you just hacked off, and from it begins fashioning a hasty doll. In moments, one of the fungus people is fighting at your side, and shortly thereafter, another has joined it, and then another.

  The creatures are not formidable in combat, too slow and too soft, but they cannot be slain as any living foe can, by cutting off a head or stopping a heart. No matter what you do to them they keep coming, and even with your reinforcements, you know that you won’t last long. You turn to Ivrian, to tell her that one of you has to make it to the temple, just in time to see two of the creatures hauling her down. You slash at them, reducing them to quivering masses, but by the time you reach her it’s too late, she has already swallowed the fungus they jammed in her mouth.

  She presses half-made dolls into your hands and tells you to go to the temple, that she’ll hold them off as long as she can. You consider trying to argue, but already her skin is taking on an unhealthy grayish tinge, and so you take the dolls and run.

  The temple steps flash under your feet, and you don’t stop until you are beyond its golden doors, and those doors shut firmly behind you. You see that the temple is only a façade, that within it is open to the elements, and the back “wall” of the chamber not a wall but a cliff that drops off into a gorge that seems to go down forever. Between you and the cliff there sits a golden throne, and upon it reclines the fattest man you have ever seen. His flesh hangs over itself in massive folds, like an avalanche of a person, a mountain of flesh that cascades ever down and down. Covering his face is a mask of yellow silk, and to each side of him stand guardians in golden masks, holding curved golden swords. In one of his massive hands, he holds what must be the Shining Trapezohedron, a black stone striated with red that seems to pull you toward it.

  The Yellow King holds out the stone, as though inviting you to come take it, but as you start to move forward so too do his twin guards. You glance down at the sword in your hand, and then at the dolls that Ivrian gave you. Hastily you begin shaping one of the dolls, pressing into its face a piece of gold prized from the door at your back. You hear the footsteps of the guards coming closer, and you use the doll as Ivrian taught you. When you look up, one of the guards has turned stiffly, and cut the other down.

  You smile in triumph as the guard whose strings you now hold turns and advances on his former master, and the Yellow King is silent even as the guard cuts off his hand so that the Trapezohedron rolls free. It is only as you pick it up that you realize why this came to you so easily. The moment you touch the stone, you feel its power, feel it drawing your gaze, gathering up your strings as readily as Ivrian ever did, and you realize that you are the puppet, and that you always were.

  If you cast the Shining Trapezohedron away, refer to passage X.

  If you gaze into the Shining Trapezohedron, refer to passage XI.

  X

  Realizing that the Shining Trapezohedron is something more than a jewel, some cursed and terrible artifact that can bring you only doom, you raise your arm to cast it into the chasm behind the Yellow King’s throne. At least, you intend to. But while the signal races from your mind, it never seems to reach your hand, which stays where it is, gripping the stone tightly.

  You understand that you are no longer in control of yourself. That you are a puppet, being pulled by strings which you cannot see or imagine. Though your will screams against it, you turn your gaze toward the stone in your hand.

  Refer to passage XI.

  XI

  You cannot resist the pull of the stone, and inside the Shining Trapezohedron you see at first only swirling clouds of red and black. Then the clouds part and you are looking into the past and the future. You see yourself entering the Jeweled Remora in Lankhende, taking a table near the hearth in spite of the heat and closeness of the night. There you meet with your companions, and you speak of your quest for the jewel. You keep your voices lowered, but a stranger watches you avidly from the shadows.

  From the depths of the stone, you hear a voice at once strange and familiar, reciting a rhyme that stirs dim memories that seem to come from another life: “… and much of Madness, and more of Sin, and Horror the soul of the plot.”

  Author’s Notes: Even before I received the invitation from Jesse Bullington and Molly Tanzer to contribute a story to Swords v Cthulhu, I was already embroiled in an online discussion about how difficult it was to do anything new with the mee
ting place between Lovecraftian mythos and sword-and-sorcery, given that the two have been cross-pollinating since at least the days of Robert E. Howard. I had previously written a very brief little confection on the theme for Sword & Mythos, edited by Silvia Moreno-Garcia and Paula R. Stiles, but for this I wanted to try my hand at something robust.

  I knew that I wanted my primary inspirations to be Fritz Leiber’s Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser tales, which remain probably my favorite sword-and-sorcery stories, but I wasn’t sure how to avoid producing just another flat pastiche until I finally landed on the idea of doing a choose-your-own-adventure-type story. But a proper choose-your-own-adventure tale, complete with good endings and bad ones, didn’t feel quite right for a Lovecraft anthology. So I took a few pages from Poe, and the result was a choose-your-own-adventure where even the best paths didn’t lead anywhere very pleasant—or maybe much of anywhere at all.

  Programmed to Receive

  1. The Tower

  When Kelly is a little girl, the Tower is right next to her bedroom window. With the purple curtains open, it becomes her nightlight, and she lies in bed staring up at it and the stars beyond.

  Her dad was one of the men who helped build it, and now he watches over it. That’s what he says, the words he uses. He likes to tell her about the Tower, to point up at it and explain that it’s one of the most powerful broadcast towers this side of the Mississippi. When she asks him what it broadcasts, he just says, “Honey, this thing could send a signal all the way to outer space!”

  Kelly has an imaginary friend who lives at the top of the tower. At least, that’s what her mother says, “imaginary.” Her mother says that when she was a little girl, she had imaginary friends, too, but they were always other little girls like her, girls she could have tea parties with. Kelly’s imaginary friend isn’t a girl like her. He’s kind of like a bug and kind of like a flower, and he glows with his own light. He lives at the top of the Tower, but sometimes he comes down, and Kelly can always hear him, his voice a drone, like the TV on in the other room.

  Kelly calls him Lenny, but she doesn’t know why. On the wide-lined paper that they give her in school to practice penmanship, she writes: Sumday I’ll clime up the Tower an get on Lennys back an he’ll take me to see his frends. He says the signul isn’t strong enugh yet. He wants me to help make the Tower bigger, but I don’t know how.

  2. The Moon

  When Kelly is twelve, she and her dad move away from the Tower. Her mother has already left by then. Kelly remembers her parents standing in the front door, the sound of the trucks passing on the highway outside, punctuating their conversation. She remembers her mother saying to her dad, “This is your fault. You did this.”

  Kelly and her dad move to a lake where Kelly’s dad is building a dam. The lake is big and flat, the color of the slate tiles that Kelly sees in Home Depot. They live in a trailer park near the dam site. It’s a lot smaller than their old house, and the Tower is too far away to see. The sky here is always gray, like the lake, and Kelly never remembers seeing the sun. It’s cold and her breath comes out as steam in the air as she gathers with the other kids to wait for a bus that takes them to school in a cinderblock building surrounded by evergreens. The bus isn’t yellow, like her old one was, but gray, like everything else here, with green letters.

  With the Tower so far away, Kelly doesn’t hear Lenny anymore. She doesn’t have any friends now. There are kids in the trailer park, but they feel temporary. She knows that soon enough she’ll be moving on. That her dad doesn’t watch over the dam, like he did the Tower. Kelly feels different from the other kids, but she also knows enough to know that all kids feel that way, so maybe it’s nothing.

  She spends a lot of time down by the side of the lake, looking out across the water. There’s something that lives at the bottom of the lake, something that glows like the moon. She thinks that maybe it’s like Lenny, but she never sees it, never hears it. She just knows that it’s there.

  3. The Magician

  When Kelly is old enough, she moves away from her dad and goes to the University of Kansas. She cuts her hair boy-short and dyes it bright pink and wears a faded black T-shirt with the letters T.S.O.L. stenciled on it in purple. By now the headaches have started, stabbing pain across the inside of her skull, along the back of her forehead. Like a railroad spike, working its way out between her eyes. Her dad took her to the doctor the first time it happened, and they called them migraines, gave her yellow-and-red pills which she dutifully takes whenever she feels a headache building.

  She majors in art history with a minor in chemistry, which is where she learns how to make the bombs that blow up part of the KLMB television studio. She watches on the little TV in her dorm room as the police drag away the members of the campus protest group who set the bombs, their faces blurred out in a storm of pixels. They shout about television, calling it the “brainwashing tool of the oligarchy.”

  Kelly recognizes one of them as the boy who sat next to her in ethics, the one she slept with a few times before he finally got up the nerve to ask her about the movement, about bombs. He’s wearing a T-shirt with a picture of one of the aliens from They Live, posed to look like Uncle Sam.

  She expects the police to knock on her door, to show up in one of her classes. Every day for weeks she waits, but they never come. She claimed no affiliation with the group, and she was nowhere near the blast, and she guesses that the boy didn’t rat her out, that the police, having found their culprits, didn’t probe too deep. In a way, she’s disappointed.

  The boy never asked her why she was willing to help. He just assumed that she had the same goals he did. She never tells anyone about the bombs, never has anyone to talk to about why she made them. She doesn’t keep a diary or a journal of her thoughts, but that night she draws a picture of the Tower on the inside cover of her notebook, surrounded by flames.

  4. The Hanged Man

  When Kelly’s dad hangs himself, men from his work come and take the papers out of the big four-drawer filing cabinet that has always stood in his office, wherever they lived. But they don’t know what Kelly knows, about the papers that her dad keeps in an old boot box at the top of his closet, next to the pistol that Kelly was never allowed to touch.

  By then Kelly is out of school, and doing nothing to help her alma mater’s reputation by working as a custodian. She remembers the custodians at her various schools, pushing brooms and running floor buffers, seemingly lost in their own solitary orbits. That feels right to her, safe. She stays away from people when she can, and stays isolated from them when she can’t. She knows by now that she sees things other people don’t, and she’s beginning to learn why.

  When the funeral is over and everyone is gone, Kelly takes down the boot box and looks through it, sitting cross-legged—what they used to call “Indian-style” in her elementary school—on her dad’s bed. That’s where she learns about the machine.

  They found it at a crime scene back in the ’30s, half-destroyed by a bullet from a revolver. They put it back together, bit by bit over the years, shuttling it from secret bunker to secret bunker, making it the provenance of first one bureau and then another through the Cold War, until it ended up in a repurposed missile silo in Kansas, where they built a Tower over it and attached it to a transmitter, just to see what would happen.

  When she’s done reading, she burns most of her father’s papers in the fireplace, and the others she takes back to her room, placing them in a pile atop books on Jungian archetypes and the pineal gland, schizophrenia and the Tarot.

  5. The Hierophant

  When Kelly is ready, she takes two weeks off work, gets in her car and drives south and west. She leaves her dad’s house burning behind her, all her books and papers inside. In the car she listens to the radio, the irony not lost on her. Franz Ferdinand admonishes her to “Turn It On,” though she intends to do just the opposite.

  A mile from their old house she hits the first roadblock. Night has fallen outside, and
she can already see the Tower’s lights in the distance, blinking to warn off planes. Blue and red lights pulse in the darkness at the roadblock, the SUVs stopped at forty-five degree angles, sawhorses up across the road. She coasts to a stop, turns off the radio, rolls her window down.

  The guy in the sheriff’s department jacket walks up to the car, his gun unsnapped in its holster. His hair is cropped military-short, and there’s a hole in his forehead the size of a nickel, a single black line of blood running down his face, along the right side of his nose, around his lip. The hole looks just like the one a bullet would make in a movie, like a trephination wound. Kelly figures that’s not far off. The deputy looks at her. His eyes are that blue they call “cornflower,” but they don’t focus on her, they’re looking past her. Something else is looking at her through him, and it’s not using his eyes. She looks at the hole, at the darkness on the other side of it. He nods and moves aside, and others like him move the sawhorses, pull one of the SUVs to the side of the road so she can drive past.

  She leaves her window rolled down, the radio off. She can hear it now, the static in the air, the sound, musical and familiar, like a TV on in the next room. The air outside is too cold, and there’s a breeze that comes from nowhere and goes nowhere. What her dad used to call “wind from Pluto.”

  There are cars parked everywhere at her old house. More police cars and an ambulance, their lights strobing the darkness, a station wagon, pickup trucks. News and television vans are clustered at the base of the Tower, their own satellite dishes and broadcast arrays extended. Everywhere, people are milling around, and Kelly doesn’t have to look to see the holes in their foreheads, all of them identical.