Games Creatures Play

by Charlaine Harris

  “Who wants pizza?” asked Cylia.

  I closed my eyes and smiled.

  HIDE AND SHRIEK

  ADAM-TROY CASTRO

  Adam-Troy Castro has historically brought the suck to any sport he has ever been coaxed into playing, but he has a little bit more luck as a writer. His short stories have been nominated for eight Nebulas, three Stokers, and two Hugos. He has won the Seiun for his collaborative novella The Astronaut from Wyoming (written with Jerry Oltion) and the Philip K. Dick Award for his novel Emissaries from the Dead. Adam’s current project is a series of middle-grade novels about a very strange but very heroic boy named Gustav Gloom. Of “Hide and Shriek,” he writes, “Lovecraft, or Lovecraft-influenced fiction, has figured in a number of things I’ve written recently, including the Gustav Gloom novels and this little exercise in silliness; you’ll note that, unlike Howard Phillips, I don’t take it at all seriously. My experience with hide-and-seek includes a couple of cases as a child and as an adult playing with child relatives where I found some absolutely brilliant location to secrete myself in and stayed there, only to wait for ungodly periods of time as the other participants drifted to some other pastime and completely forgot that I was involved at all. The experience was, in a word, squamous.”

  They were Elder Gods.

  Almost no vocabulary known to human beings applies to anything having to do with their earthly existence, which began at some point before the first pathetic hominid stared slack-jawed at motes of light in the sky and is likely to continue after the careless ways of Man sends the last of our great edifices crumbling into dust.

  They lived by rules beyond our comprehension, according to dictates alien to our imagining. If they hadn’t wanted to come forth and eat us occasionally, there would have been about as much point in trying to understand them than as in arranging a diplomatic summit between a Nobel laureate and a paramecium.

  They were also, by inclination as well as circumstances of birth, right bastards. But look hard enough, and far enough, and you will find some points of congruence, some motivations easy to fit within our puny minds that are not too alien to be discerned within theirs . . . and one of those was boredom.

  After all, eternity lasts a truly goddamned long time.

  To wit: You think you’re in hell, just stuck at home waiting hours for the cable guy? Imagine that your life span can be measured not in years but in eons, and that you have agendas that require the occasional colloquy with another being like yourself who (like you) was there when the Milky Way was still under construction.

  Imagine that your associate has not shown up precisely on schedule and that you’ve floated in the aether watching the stars shift colors according to the precise physics of their own billions of years of life, and imagine that for you time is not sped up to match your proportional life expectancy, a blessing that would make the births and deaths of those stars look like a trillion strobe lights.

  Imagine that for you the hours pass at precisely the same rate they do for us, that you feel every second and every minute, that you get exasperated at the same rate and sigh exactly as openly as a commuter waiting on a street corner for a missing bus, and that the centuries continue to pass as you perform the equivalent of standing on one foot and then the other, feeling the remaining time left in the universe gradually count down toward zero.

  That is what an Elder God goes through, living out the eons of its existence.

  It’s nobody’s definition of fun.

  Hence the game.

  There were three participants, brothers of a kind; unholy spawn of the same obscene process that you would have to be blind, deaf, and demented to classify as sex. (It did involve fornication of a kind, and eggs, and other things, but astrological alignment and various horrific rituals also played a part, and, frankly, you don’t want us to even start to get into it, because if we did your mind would shatter from the sheer awfulness long before we even started describing the foreplay. About all we can convey is that if you were capable of understanding the process that spawned them, and the vaguely disreputable taint the circumstances carried even among their own kind, you would not have much to add to our earlier estimate: bastards.)

  Time was the least and most malleable of the things they had to kill, and they happened to be together, squatting like foul multi-tentacled toads on the blackened bones of a mortal race it had taken them no time at all to terrorize into extinction, when it occurred to all of them that in destroying this latest batch of toys they had left themselves with nothing of any entertainment value to do.

  This perturbed them.

  Neck wattles throbbed, tentacles writhed, slitted eyes fell slack, and three soulless souls contemplated the long, interminable agony of years spent waiting for another race of Man to invite their interest.

  Their direct words would leave any one of us blackened cinders, so we are forced to paraphrase freely. The sense of it, or at least as close as we can come to the sense of it without spontaneous combustion, follows.

  N’loghthl, Lord of Phlaaarg, looked glum. “Man. This sucks.”

  The Septic Breath Of All Existing Foulness replied, “You said it, brother. This really stinks on ice. Why is there never anything to do?”

  “It’s gonna be even worse when we topple the pillars of heaven, dismantle all the laws that give the universe shape, and reduce all of creation to eternal suffering and chaos. There really won’t be anything left to do, then. That’s going to be positively squamous.”

  “I’m not looking forward to it,” admitted The Septic Breath Of All Existing Foulness, “but come on, guys, by the time that happens we’ll be too old for fun anyway. I’m talking about now. All our toys are broken and it’s going to take forever to grow some new ones. I’m bored.”

  The third and smartest of the brothers, who had no name as we understand the term but was associated by the others with The Sound Made By A Billion Damned Souls, Writhing In Eternal Despair—for sanity’s sake, we’ll call him {Eternal Despair}, for short—said, “Perhaps we could make a game of it.”

  “What kind of game?” inquired The Septic Breath Of All Existing Foulness.

  “Well, we’re well past time to indulge in our eons of slumber, right?”

  The periodic need for eons of slumber was a nuisance, but it was built into Elder God metabolism the same way regular hibernation was built into the life cycle of grizzly bears. Sometimes it was referred to as “Eons of Unholy Slumber,” which amounted to gilding the lily.

  N’loghthl snarled. “And?”

  “So let’s do this. Let’s all find places to hide, on worlds where cute little civilizations have started to form. Only this time we’ll spread around some clues and portents to alert the apes that we’re around, somewhere.”

  “That’s stupid.”

  “So are they,” said {Eternal Despair}. “Don’t you see? That’s what makes it a game. We’re betting on their stupidity, and who among us manipulates it best.”

  N’loghthl and The Septic Breath Of All Existing Foulness laid their thousands of cold, pitiless eyes upon one another, trading gazes of infinite darkness and infinite malice, which had nevertheless brightened just the slightest bit with an interest that neither one of them had felt until now.

  They had to admit it. For all their immortal lives, {Eternal Despair} always had come up with the best games, games involving prophecies and cataclysms and torrents of gleaming ichor that always ended with entire populations of little things being laid to ruin in the most entertaining manner possible . . . and this one, even in its earliest planning stages, already promised the kind of resonant, despoiling joys that were always best appreciated by unapologetic stinkers such as themselves.

  It fell on The Septic Breath Of All Existing Foulness to prod the smartest of the three brothers with an eager, “Go on.”

  “Well,” said the smartest brother, “the poin
t would be to lay it on as thick as possible. Be obvious. Make certain they know that if they ever do awaken us, it’ll be The End Of All Things as far as they’re concerned . . . and give them reason to leave us to our rest. But also, just for shits and giggles, leave vague promises that whoever does betray his kind by setting off the alarm clock, earns power and treasure and everything his little numbskull mind desires. It’s a given: it might take a few million years, but sooner or later, each and every one will be discovered and released by some gullible cretin with no conscience and an underdeveloped sense of consequences.”

  “So how is that any fun?” N’loghthl inquired.

  “It’s a challenge, my dear brothers: a competition among us for the title of most nefarious. The winner would be the one who made the warnings most dire, and the rumored rewards of trespass most tempting, while nevertheless managing to remain undisturbed by stupid mortals for the longest period of time. The losers forfeit to him all the worlds and souls they’ve managed to accrue so far. What say you?”

  N’loghthl and The Septic Breath Of All Existing Foulness hesitated, for they knew how cunning their brother was, compared to them. They knew that there had to be some trick, some gimmick, some disgusting inherent corruption, some squamous element, that would stack the deck in his favor. But they were also Elder Gods, and they were bored. So they each pricked a warty, leprous finger with a needle of pure angel bone and contributed to the kitty that would hold the sum total of all their wagers. And then they each departed, in the span of a single vile thought, to construct their respective places of concealment.

  • • •

  N’Loghthl erected his crypt at the bottom of a black chasm a thousand miles into an inhospitable desert, a place a week’s march from the nearest oasis, which didn’t contain pure water but instead a powerful hallucinogen designed to inflict visions that could reduce the noblest man’s soul to a gibbering shell, screaming forever in the depths of his own personal hell.

  That oasis was itself six months’ journey from the nearest civilized outpost, which was only civilized if you count upright buildings as civilized and was only even that if you counted a twenty-degree slant on most walls as officially upright. The outpost was inhabited entirely by outcasts and perverts and inbred defectives, people who had been thrown out of every decent town inhabited by Man and had, by a process similar to sediment dropping to the bottom of a cup of dirty drinking water, wound up in this town best imagined as a kind of lint trap for humanity. We need not devote much concern to the affairs of that town, except to stress again that in order to reach N’loghthl’s hiding place a traveler first had to reach that foul oasis, and to reach the foul oasis one first had to trudge six months through a desert of fire, and to reach that desert of fire one first had to pass through the town . . . which was in and of itself the kind of place nobody ventured unless they’d been chased there.

  Altogether, it wasn’t the kind of journey anybody completed unless they were already mad.

  Even so, many were the treasure seekers, parched and ragged after a long ride from the vile flesh pits of the terrible cities that were the closest this entire continent came to civilization, who got as far as the oasis, espied the glittering turquoise waters of the lagoon framed by verdant ferns and gently swaying sunflowers, and thought themselves delivered from a horrible death by thirst; they’d say things like, “I dare say, Carstairs! I thought I was done for, but as soon as I take a sip of this fine bubbling elixir, all of my troubles will be—Aiiiiieee! Aiiiiieeee!”

  The Aiiiiieee, Aiiiiieee would of course be the sound the speaker made after he ripped off all his clothes and a great deal of his skin and fled back into the burning sands, shouting nonsensical syllables that translated to complaints that none of his right angles were in any way still perpendicular.

  At the bottom of that spring, N’loghthl had planted a chest with a lock that fired razor-sharp darts at the forehead of any explorer foolish enough to pop the lid. Inside the chest sat a book reeking of evil—literally, as in not just smelling bad but smelling malicious as well—containing secrets that amounted to even more direct routes to Aiiiiieee-land.

  Any adventurer foolish or desperate enough to hike that far away from civilization, damned enough to reach the oasis and yet prudent enough to test the water without drinking it, while still managing to get to the chest with his sanity intact and to somehow devise a way to open it with his forehead intact, then had to figure out that the only page that could be read safely was one secreted in the binding, with the treasure map to N’loghthl’s tomb and strict words to the effect that waking the sleeping Elder God would lead to a life of infinite wealth and power for he who accomplished it, followed by utter ruin and damnation for the rest of humanity.

  Most people who got that far were sane enough to consider this a rather bum deal, shudder, toss the chest back into the water, and head back to civilized climes.

  Most of those who remained paused to consider the trustworthiness of a note slipped into a book that drove people crazy at the bottom of waters that drove people crazy, that was itself locked inside a chest that could fire a dart at their heads, a thousand miles from the nearest outpost of civilization. They said, “You know what? This really isn’t worth the tsuris.” Then they tossed the chest back into the water. Their mothers hadn’t raised any idiots.

  Of those that remained, only a few survived the subsequent trek to N’loghthl’s tomb, and of those who reached the tomb on hands and knees, only a few solved the intricate and deadly puzzle of the quadruple locks, and of those that got past the quadruple locks, only three were able to descend through fifty floors of increasingly horrific death traps to reach the door guarded by all the rotting skulls.

  And of those three, only one was stupid enough to open the damned thing expecting fabulous riches.

  His name was not in any language you’ve heard of, but given how far he’d needed to flee from humanity in order to get that far, and how evil he needed to be in order to even want fabulous riches in a world where he thought everybody else would be enslaved forever, you would not be surprised to discover that it translated as Jerkface.

  Jerkface had given up everything to get this far. He had spent his youth, his reputation, his family, and his soul tracking down the rumors of a hidden tomb occupied by a sleeping god who could grant him everything, and he now stood before the door, emaciated and bleeding and covered with scars and naked but for the one fuzzy slipper the various death traps and pitfalls on the way in had not succeeded in ripping from his body. He wore the expression of a man who could not possibly believe that what lay ahead of him could be in any way worse than the hurdles he’d left behind, which was another reason his fellow human beings called him Jerkface: his utter and complete failure to learn from past experience that there was always another step down, even after rock bottom.

  He stood before the oval of perfect darkness as the black smoke came pouring out, and as the smoke resolved into a sulfurous face with a thousand eyes, and as a thousand eyelids blinked over a thousand slitted pupils. In a voice older than time, N’loghthl croaked, “Mortal! Thou hast freed me! I ask but one question before I bestow your reward! How long have I slept?”

  Jerkface had learned the precise period of imprisonment from some hieroglyphics he’d needed to decode on the way down. “A year and a half, O Great One.”

  The pause that followed was downright comic.

  “Excuse me,” rumbled N’loghthl. “Did you say a year and a half?”

  “One year, five months, two weeks, and three days. The inscriptions are quite clear on this point; you were installed here the very same day as the coronation of King Ghilistaq the Seventh, the day the great Comet Phlaaarg passed through the Constellation of Ignirifahs; and yes, that was one year, five months, two weeks, and three days ago, give or take a few hours depending on which calendar system you subscribe to. Just under a year and a half.”

&nbs
p; N’loghthl realized then just how inadequate his own contribution to the great game had been, and just how tremendous his humiliation would be when his brothers found out. His rage was for him no more than a snit and still, by all human standards, infinite. His glare made Jerkface’s brain matter liquefy and pour in pink streams from his nostrils. As the corpse hit the dusty tomb floor, the irritated Elder God coiled his ten thousand tails around his barbed ribs and curled into a ball to weep, knowing that he would not be able to get back to sleep at any point during this millennium, and caring only that, with luck, one of his brothers would wind up as badly humiliated as he had been, so he would not be forever alone in his ignominy.

  In this way another thousand years passed.

  • • •

  In choosing his own hiding place, The Septic Breath Of All Existing Foulness incorporated an epiphany about the nature of Man that his clueless brother N’loghthl had completely missed.

  This was not necessarily an indication that he was smarter or more perceptive than N’loghthl, though that happened to be true on both counts. It had more to do with the nature of his particular awful presence, as distinguished from his brother’s. N’loghthl was, after all, a physical being, with physical attributes, including fangs, heads, claws, tentacles, and several limbs of varying shape designed to shatter the mind of any mortal who ever beheld them. He was a veritable cornucopia of obscene body attributes that looked like a flaming explosion in an anatomy lab and were very well suited to a creature whose immediate response to a mortal interloper was to bite his head off and whose immediate way of dealing with an encroaching civilization was to stomp on it while roaring.

  These were all perfectly acceptable approaches to a problem. But early in his own development as an Elder God, at that point in relative infancy when creatures like himself got to decide in just what ways they’d offend the very pillars of creation, The Septic Breath Of All Existing Foulness decided that it was better to embody Evil the Concept as opposed to Evil the Monstrous Thing; he decided that he would be the unseen, intangible thing that lurked in corners and made shadows so chilly. He wanted to be the creature who inspired fear by absence rather than presence, the creature who by having once briefly been to a place rendered it horrific forevermore, rather than the creature who had to actually hang around in his lair and twiddle his thumbs, waiting for prey.