There are those who worship Azathoth, but they are mad.
Simon shivered, closed the book, and slid it back onto the shelf. The amulet lay heavy around his neck. He stood, breathing in the all-too-familiar scent of the study. He ran his fingers over the table, leaving trails in the dust.
“Mother,” he whispered into the silence, “where are you? Why did you leave us?”
There was, of course, no answer.
He retreated to his old room. Like Olivia’s, it had been preserved and kept clean. It was more or less the same as he’d left it over two years ago.
He washed up then dug through the dresser until he found his old nightclothes. He was surprised to discover that—though snug and a bit short in the legs—they still fit.
He wondered, sometimes, if the medication had stunted his growth as a side effect. Though he’d always been on the small side.
He crawled into bed.
Despite his exhaustion, sleep wouldn’t come. He rolled onto his side, staring at the wall, breathing in the smell of his bedding. So many familiar smells in this house. And each one awakened a flurry of memory.
When he and Olivia were very small, they had shared this room. They’d stayed up late, whispering stories to each other by the faint light of a meta-flame.
“What do you want to be when you grow up?” he’d asked her.
“I’m going to be a strong Animist,” she said. “I’ll be a fighter and a Healer and a demon tamer and a famous inventor, and at night I’ll be a bandit and wear a red kerchief over my face as a disguise, but I’ll only steal from wicked rich people and I’ll give all their gold to hungry orphans. And maybe someday I’ll be Queen. Only I won’t be a stuffy sourpuss like Queen Saphronia. I’ll have lots of parties, and I’ll invite people from all over the Continent, and there’ll be loads of good food and cakes with lemon icing.”
“You can’t do all those things,” Simon said.
“Why not?”
“Well . . . if you’re a bandit at night and a queen during the day, when will you sleep? You’ll get tired.”
“No I won’t. I never get tired. What about you? What will you do when you get older?”
“Oh . . . I don’t know. I guess . . .” He stopped, frowning thoughtfully. “I guess if you’re going to do all that, you’ll need someone to help you.”
She giggled. “Don’t worry about me. What do you want?”
“I want . . .” He stared at the ceiling. He thought and thought. But he couldn’t find a good answer, even then. He knew that he wanted to do something important, something that made a difference, but he couldn’t envision it. He’d envied Olivia for how certain she seemed about everything. It was never a question of could she do it. Just when.
When they turned six, she wanted her own room. He’d cried himself to sleep the first few nights after she left; the room had seemed cold and empty, full of shadows, and though she was just down the hall, it felt as though a vast gulf separated them. Vast as the chasm between life and death.
Simon’s throat tightened.
He thought longingly of the shiny black pill, still sitting in the bottom of the bottle on his nightstand. His tongue crept out to wet his sandpaper lips. A dull, sickly pain had taken root in his skull, pressing against the backs of his eyeballs with each heartbeat. His body was rebelling, crying out for the drug he’d denied it for so long.
Still, he resisted.
Alice had said the pill smelled funny. For some reason, that remark stuck in his head, wriggling in the back of his brain. It did seem strange now, to him, that he had never asked questions, never wondered what, exactly, he was taking. A small, cold seed of dread had taken root deep inside his chest.
He climbed out of bed. Still in his pajamas and slippers, he walked down the hall, back to his mother’s study, and summoned a tiny meta-flame. It danced over the tip of his finger as he scanned the shelves, trailing the fingers of his other hand over the familiar spines until he found the title he was looking for—Botany for Animists.
He slid it out and flipped through the pages. The plants were arranged in alphabetical order, each with a small ink drawing, the parts labeled.
Bloodweed: a dark red grass with stimulant properties, which can be mixed into a paste and used to amplify the effects of certain summoning spells.
Corpse flower: a small white blossom, faintly tinged with blue. The odor of corpse flower is repulsive to humans, reminiscent of rotting flesh, hence the name, but imps and demons find it intoxicating. Its petals are sometimes used in the training of demon familiars.
He turned to the back of the book and found the entry he’d been searching for:
Vinculum root: a black root which, when ingested, acts as a powerful sedative. It also has the unique property of suppressing an Animist’s ability to use meta. In liquefied and distilled form, it is iridescent purple. Its odor is distinct and pungent to demons and other entities, but undetectable to humans.
Simon’s mouth had gone dry. Could it be . . . ?
No. Ridiculous. His medicine came from a reputable Healer. Why would she secretly give him vinculum root?
Unless it hadn’t been her idea.
Dr. Hawking, his father, was the one who’d chosen the Healer, who’d arranged for Simon to be sent there, and who’d ensured that his medication kept arriving each month, even after Simon left home. Dr. Hawking had never wanted him to be an Animist. From the beginning, he’d discouraged Simon with probing questions designed to plant seeds of doubt.
Are you sure your nerves can handle the strain?
Animists must sometimes do unpalatable things for the greater good. Do you have the stomach for that?
But why? Why would his father sabotage him? It didn’t make any sense. He slid the book back onto the shelf and rubbed his damp forehead.
He started to walk back to his bedroom . . . then stopped. Turned.
Breathing quietly, he crept down the hall toward his father’s laboratory.
The door was closed. His father, he knew, sometimes slept in his lab. Simon knocked on the door. “Hello?”
No response.
He tried the knob. Unlocked.
Holding his breath, he slowly turned the knob, opened the door a crack, and peeked through. The room appeared empty. His gaze traced the hulking shapes of furniture, outlined by the faint, pulsating glow of the meta-flame dancing over his finger. Dr. Hawking must have already retired to his bedroom. Ordinarily, he locked the laboratory’s door when he wasn’t inside. Years of living alone had made him careless.
Simon slipped inside, heart hammering his ribs.
What was he doing? He didn’t even know what he was looking for. And if he was caught . . .
Best not to think about that.
He walked straight to his father’s desk and studied the messy papers sprawled across it. They were covered with incomprehensible notes, rows of equations, figures, and graphs that meant nothing to Simon. He shuffled the papers around then opened a drawer. Inside, atop a stack of more papers, sat a tiny bronze key.
He removed it, turning it over in his fingers, and glanced at the row of locked cabinets lining the wall.
He tried a few of the locks before the key clicked into place and turned. He opened the cabinet, revealing rows of jars filled with yellowish fluid. Several contained nondescript bits of tissue, and one held a yellow reptilian eyeball. In the largest jar floated a mouse with dull, moss-green fur. Instead of chisel-shaped rodent teeth, it had tiny saber-like fangs. Its belly was plated like an iguana’s. A dozen misshapen eyes protruded from its back. Its mouth was open, its little limbs contorted, as though the poor thing had died squealing in agony.
Attached to the jar was a yellowing label: Species: Common mouse. Injected with shoggoth cells immediately after death. Revived and lived approx. five minutes before expiring.
Simon wasn’t clear on the legality of attempting to bring animals back from the dead. The prohibition was only against reviving humans. But he was f
airly sure that the Foundation wouldn’t condone these experiments.
On the bottom shelf were a number of thick leather-bound notebooks. He flipped through one—more figures and incomprehensible notes—and picked up another. Several photographs slipped out and fluttered to the floor. Hastily, he picked them up . . . and froze.
The photographs were all of dead bodies, discolored and bloated, on autopsy tables. One was a girl, thin and pale, her eyes closed, a line of stitches running down the center of her chest and stomach.
Alice.
Dry-mouthed, he turned the photo over, revealing a date scrawled on the back, a date from almost three years ago, and a series of notes printed in black ink: Alice Tanner. Age of death, approx. fourteen. Homeless. No known family.
And another note at the bottom, scrawled in his father’s spidery cursive: Corpse acquired approx. ten hours after death.
Simon’s hands were shaking.
From downstairs, he heard approaching footsteps—the distinctive, uneven clomp and shuffle of his father’s artificial leg. Hastily, he shoved the notebook back into the cabinet, locked it, and returned the key to the drawer. Still clutching the photograph of Alice, he darted out of the laboratory and down the hall, back to his own bedroom, and slammed the door.
He sat on the edge of the bed, his breaths coming hard and fast. The story from the Underground floated through his head. Grave-robbing. Bodies disappearing mysteriously from the city morgue. Experiments.
He looked again at the photograph. It was Alice. There was no mistaking that face.
A black hole was opening up inside him, and he was falling. The picture slipped from his hand.
A rippling shimmer distorted the air. The space around him stretched like rubber, the walls elongating and then receding. The warble of distant flutes filled his ears.
And then the world vanished.
He stood in a desert, looking up at a sky whorled with jewel-like stars. A pair of doors loomed before him. He couldn’t remember where he’d been a moment ago, or how he had gotten here.
“Hello, Simon,” said a mild little voice, and he turned to see the shadow-thing standing behind him, its eyes blank circles.
“What is this? Did you bring me here?”
The shadow tilted its head. “You came here.”
“I don’t even know where ‘here’ is.” And yet he had the sense that he had seen this place before. He looked around, trying to collect his thoughts. “This isn’t the Eldritch Realm.”
“No. You might say we are somewhere far beyond that. But you might also say that we are inside you, and that this place exists inside everyone.”
Riddles. How he hated riddles. “I’d ask you who you are, but I have a feeling I’ve asked that before, and you didn’t answer me. As a matter of fact, this entire conversation feels very familiar.”
“You’ve retained a bit of memory. Very good. As to who I am, well. I am you. That’s one answer, anyway.”
“Pretty sure we’re not the same person.”
“Well, I’m not the fussy little ‘you’ that sits at the front desk of your mind, if that’s what you mean. I dwell in the dark spaces between your thoughts. I am more ‘you’ than you.”
This line of questioning was going nowhere. “You said I came here on my own.”
“It’s true. It’s the simplest thing in the world, to come here—you merely look between the cracks of the pieces that make up yourself, and you slip through. Like water through a broken vase.”
Simon had been here before. He knew it. Why couldn’t he remember? “Those doors . . .” He stared at them. They loomed, a freestanding, one-sided impossibility. “That’s the cathedral,” he whispered. “The cathedral of bones.”
“So, that’s what it looks like to you? Interesting. Would you like to go in again?”
Holding his breath, Simon stretched out an arm. The doors opened, just a hairsbreadth, and green light bled through. He could hear voices on the other side, he realized. They were laughing. Or maybe screaming. Or both. They were, he realized, the voices of everyone who had ever existed, the living and the dead—humans, demons, animals, creatures he couldn’t begin to comprehend. The light pulled at him, trying to draw him in.
This place—it was connected to everything. To the entire universe.
His mother’s face filled his mind. Was she here, too?
He felt himself pulled toward the doors, toward the light. Yes.
“She’s waiting for me,” he whispered. “Somewhere in there. I feel it.”
“Call out to her, if you wish. She may hear you. Though, I should warn you, there are other things listening.”
“Like what?”
The shadow shrugged its insubstantial shoulders. “Things.”
Simon pushed the doors. They didn’t budge.
“There is the matter of the toll,” said the shadow.
He remembered this part. “You want some of my essence. So how much can you take before it starts to affect me?”
“That’s the question, isn’t it?”
He sighed and raked a hand through his hair. “Fine. Just do it.”
Its arm stretched toward him, thinning into a tendril, which touched his heart. A chill settled into his bones.
For a moment, he couldn’t remember his own name. Or anything else. There was only a frightening blank. Who am I? There was someone . . . a girl . . .
Then the shadow withdrew its tendril, and memory rushed back, leaving him shaken.
“Go ahead,” the shadow said.
Simon flung the doors open and strode through, into the cathedral. It was just as he remembered: the bone chandeliers, the skeletal birds, the scythe-carrying, winged creature looming over the well of light. Its head tilted, creaking; its jaws parted. One arm stretched out, offering the chalice.
Slowly, like a sleepwalker, Simon approached the well, but this time, he ignored the proffered cup. Instead, he leaned down and submerged his entire head. Cool, misty green filled his eyes. And then there was only blackness. He had the impression of enormous space stretching into infinity. “Mother?” he called. His voice collapsed into echoes then was swallowed whole by the immense silence of the abyss.
A voice called out, tiny and faraway. Simon.
His heart leaped. “Mother! Where are you?”
She didn’t answer. Instead, a vision unfolded itself in his head: a massive, dark, sprawling shape, like a tree stretching its branches into a pale green sky. The vision winked out an instant later, and there was only the all-swallowing void. He was alone in silence. “Mother!” No response.
Then a single filmy yellow eye opened in the blackness.
It was looking straight at him. He heard a voice—a growl like the shifting of tectonic plates. His skull vibrated with the force of it.
“Mnahn . . . grah’n . . . shugg-oth . . .”
The words twisted themselves into his head like vines, wriggling deeper, trying to anchor themselves into him. They were pulling, drawing him deeper, and he felt himself stretched like taffy, the edges of his consciousness softening and blurring . . .
He was back in his bedroom. The world swam around him, soft and hazy and transparent. He could still see the cathedral behind it, like a shape at the bottom of a rushing stream, as though the real world were only a thin layer of paint, a mere shadow cast by a deeper reality.
The memory of that terrible voice filled his mind—the overwhelming sense of darkness and power. That thing, whatever it was . . . it could have crushed him. If he’d lingered another moment, it would have. He felt that with a cold, soul-deep certainty.
He grabbed the pill bottle from the nightstand. It slipped from his trembling hands and shattered on the floor. Reality faded in and out around him as he fumbled through the shards, cutting his finger on a jagged edge of glass. Blood dripped to the stone tiles as he grabbed the capsule.
Despite his newfound suspicions, he wanted it. It would calm the terror. He raised it toward his mouth . . . then, at
the last minute, he forced himself to lower his hand. No more. He dropped the pill to the floor and crushed it beneath his foot. It burst open and sank into the stones, forming a dark stain.
Breathing raggedly, he shut his eyes and pressed the heels of his hands against them. When he finally cracked his eyelids open again, the cathedral’s shadow had vanished. His bedroom snapped back into place, real and solid. Exhausted, shivering, he sank into bed and pressed his hands to his face. A low moan escaped him. The memories were a chaotic, nightmarish blur.
He didn’t know what he had seen or heard. Didn’t even know if it was real, or if the last thread of his sanity had finally snapped.
His gaze fell on the photograph of Alice, lying on the floor amidst the glass shards. A drop of his blood marred her pale form. He reached out slowly, as though his arm were moving through water, and picked up the glossy square of paper.
The door cracked open. Simon stuffed the photograph beneath his pillow.
His father stood in the doorway, silhouetted in the faint light of the hall. “Simon, what’s going on? I heard you cry out.”
“Nothing,” Simon mumbled. “Just a bad dream.”
“Your hand is bleeding.”
“I cut my finger on a piece of glass. It’s not serious.”
His father hesitated. Shadow drowned his face; Simon couldn’t read his expression. “I’ll be in my laboratory. If you need anything . . .”
“I’m fine.”
Slowly, the door creaked shut. Simon held his breath and listened to the scrape of receding footsteps.
Once he was sure his father was gone, he sprang out of bed and raced to Alice’s room. She was sleeping soundly. He shook her awake. She stirred and groaned, blinking luminous purple eyes at him. “Simon, what . . .”
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