It was like nothing I’d ever seen.
“Booth, what have you done?” was the first question I registered from the chatter among my associates during this bloody revolt. It was Mercury asking, coming up behind me as I committed to memory the destruction I’d unleashed.
“Something I don’t regret,” I said, staring out into the ruins the city was becoming. The shoggoths stripped it of every signifier of having once belonged to ghouls while raising their own décor and monuments. Strange organic crystal formations started to appear over every building while blackish tar-like growths paved over the streets. The shoggoths were transforming the city of Shak’ta’hadron into a city for their kind, and I suspected it would soon resemble a hive. “But something I bear witness to all the same.”
“You could have given us a heads-up you were going to destroy a civilization,” Bobbie said, less concerned with the destruction than anyone, even Martha.
“I admit,” August said, giving a half-smile. “I’ve killed a lot of people in my time and am a very bad man, yet I had the impression you were a good one. It amuses me that you’ve caused more deaths in one night than I could in ten lifetimes. I wonder if there’s a moral lesson here.”
“Thinking I’m a good man was a failure on your part, not mine.” I stared out into the darkness.
“Such a waste,” Martha said, looking out. “Is it right to sacrifice the achievements of a culture because they were built on the fruit of a poisonous tree? The greatest civilizations of humanity were the Romans, Chinese, Egyptian, and they were all founded on slavery. It is an evil that has been with us for a long time and one we will never be entirely without.”
“Then perhaps that is why we have never built a civilization to last,” I said, staring out into the flames.
“If you say so, John.”
“I do. The evil does not erase the good, but it does taint it. The shoggoths built this civilization. It is theirs. To destroy if they want.” I couldn’t help but wonder if everyone was involved in the slave trade, though, and if some might not have stood against it. Yet was that enough to absolve their guilt?
“And they have.” Martha looked away. “Time will tell if the shoggoths mean to let us live or not. Once the fever of bloodshed takes hold, it is a rare group that stops to think whether their victims deserve it. As you well know.”
I was about to respond when another shoggoth joined us on the balcony and formed the oily statue-looking form of Whispers-Of-Rebellion. Speaking in the same voice as before, it said, “You need neither take credit or blame for our actions tonight. While Captain Booth assisted us in this action and is considered a friend to the shoggoth people, this has been in the works for decades. We needed no savior to deliver us. He merely quickened our revolution, and if the shoggoth people need to look for a hero, they need but look to each other.”
“You didn’t have to exile them all,” I said, looking at them.
“Coexistence requires both sides to acknowledge the other as worthy of life,” Whispers-Of-Rebellion replied. “The shoggoths determined we could never live in peace with the ghouls who enslaved us and believed this was the better alternative. Would you have rather us destroyed them all?”
It was a false dichotomy in my mind. If the ghouls did survive and did find another home, they would remember the loss of everything they’d owned every bit as much as the deaths they’d suffer along the way. The shoggoths might outnumber them as well as have far greater power, but the ghouls were a clever race as well, possessed of much magical power. A time might come when they sought revenge.
“You might have tried living together,” I said, looking down at the ground. “But I won’t judge you. I, too, have been a slave before. I was a prisoner of the Dunwych for almost a year and I was forced to labor for them in between serving as their brood stud. I craved vengeance on the woman who held me like this, even when she didn’t understand what I was feeling at all.”
“Then let us speak of this no more,” Whispers-Of-Rebellion said, addressing us all. “The shoggoths are fully committed to assisting your expedition in preventing the Unimaginable Horror from being released. We will also provide New Arkham with a number of our ranks to assist you in growing your ranks.”
“Excuse me?” Martha asked, surprised.
“What was done in slavery is different from what was done in choice. We have determined that helping you and several other human settlements will assist in bio-forming this world to be better for all of our species. There will be obligations in return, but they will not be ones of resources you cannot spare because nothing you have is something the shoggoths need.”
“What do you want, then?” Martha asked.
“Help against those who would re-enslave us,” Whispers-Of-Rebellion said, its voice gurgling in an unsettling manner. “It may not be today or tomorrow, but it will come someday, and it will be good to have allies then.”
Martha considered this. “I will take this to the president.”
“Good,” Whispers-Of-Rebellion said. “You will find the shoggoths to be strong allies if you remember to treat us as such.”
By her look, this didn’t reassure Martha.
“Do you know where the Tower of Zhaal will manifest?” I asked, clearing my throat.
“The Faceless Ones almost killed me,” Martha said, sighing. “They did not believe my claims the monster could not be controlled.”
She picked up Alan Ward’s book from where she’d laid it down and handed it to me.
I took it in hand.
“I didn’t think it would be that easy,” I said, sighing. “And what of the shoggoths?”
“John, did you do this just to find out where we’re supposed to go next?” Mercury asked, horrified.
“No,” I said, shaking my head. “I didn’t.”
Whispers-Of-Rebellion said, “The Tower of Zhaal is going to be summoned in the Valley of K’vash. It is here the Yithians long ago erected the tower and sent it into the space between this universe and the Dreamlands, an endless void in which only death and sorrow exist. The Sepulcher.”
“Just once, I’d like to visit someplace nice,” August said, crossing his arms. “How about you, Bobbie?”
“I don’t know any nice places,” Bobbie said, looking over at him. “Well, I knew one, but it got destroyed.”
“Point taken,” August said, glaring at me.
“Very funny,” I said.
“I’m not laughing,” August said.
“Can you show us to this place?” I asked, keeping my eyes on Whispers-Of-Rebellion.
“We will take you there and help fight the forces therein,” Whispers-Of-Rebellion replied. “The Faceless Ones are not alone in their plans to bring forth the Unimaginable Horror. They have the aid of the Reanimated and their ranks grow by the minute.”
“Who controls the Reanimated?” August asked, not quite getting it.
“The Unimaginable Horror does,” I said, remembering the passage from The Unimaginable Horror. “It takes the echoes of the once-living and turns them into slaves so that it can use them to free itself.”
“The Sepulcher is a place worse than oblivion for the dead,” Whispers-Of-Rebellion said. “Many shoggoths are enslaved at the Tower of Zhaal’s base. They have sacrificed more than a few to provide the power to bring forth their monstrosity. It shall exist within this plane of reality within the hour.”
“Shit,” August, Bobbie, and I said simultaneously.
“How many soldiers do they have there?” I asked. I knew the true danger wasn’t in numbers, but I wanted a baseline.
“Thousands,” Whispers-Of-Rebellion said. “You will need us if you don’t want to be killed outright.”
I took a deep breath. This situation had started out of control and was just getting worse. “I suppose we should be grateful that you’re going to be accompanying us, then.”
“Yes, you should be.” Whispers-Of-Rebellion almost seemed smug.
“If you don’t min
d, would you please allow us a moment of privacy to discuss this?” August asked, gesturing to me and the rest of the group.
“As you wish,” Whispers-Of-Rebellion said, vanishing back into its liquid form and slithering away.
“Do I need to begin by discussing with what’s wrong with your action, or can we just go directly to what the hell is wrong with you?” August asked, not bothering to look at me.
“It might have been useful to give us a heads-up before you start a slave revolt,” Bobbie said, sounding more amused than angry.
“I didn’t start it. They just asked for my help,” I said, frowning. “Frankly, they would have done it anyway, and the Keeper believed it was coming regardless of my help.”
“What happened to him?” Mercury asked, looking shell-shocked by the carnage outside.
“He’s dead,” I said, sighing. “I did what I felt I had to do.”
“Please don’t hide behind that tired old maxim.” August rolled his eyes. “You did what you chose to do, and that has resulted in us being surrounded by hostile sentient doom blobs. The ghouls were like us, while the shoggoths most assuredly are not.”
“Like us is debatable,” Martha said, her voice like ice. It was obvious she had no sympathy for the late inhabitants of Shak’ta’hadron.
I stared at Martha. “Please, please, don’t defend me. You’ll only make it worse.”
“It doesn’t matter now, does it?” Mercury said, staring out into the destroyed city. “John made the call, and we have to live with the results.”
“I—” I started to say.
“Don’t,” Mercury said, shaking her head. “The stakes are too high to second-guess ourselves. Since the Tower has manifested and the Faceless Ones are responsible, Whateley is probably dead or failed in some other way. That means our mission for the Yithians is finished. I don’t think anyone else is going to stop them, though, so the fact we now have an army is a good thing.”
I could hear the disdain in her words. I knew Mercury well enough to know she didn’t disapprove of my actions, but it occurred to me she would have wanted me to discuss them with her first. I’d made a unilateral decision that potentially put her and the rest of the group in danger. It wasn’t the sort of decision I would have made when I was an R&E Ranger. It was too reckless. I felt sick over endangering Mercury and looked away.
I wasn’t fit to lead this group.
“I would like to take this time to note I signed up for the assassination of a wizard, not taking on an army,” August said, raising a hand. “I consider my part in this particular enterprise to be fulfilled and will be returning to the University to collect my fee.”
“I’ll work with the shoggoths against the Faceless Ones,” Bobbie said, gazing out into the darkness. “Someone informed the Deep Ones of where the people of Insmaw were located.”
“I’ll try and contact New Arkham for assistance,” Martha said, pointing upwards. “Away from here. Where it’s safe.”
“I’ll go,” Mercury said, sighing. “In for a penny, in for a pound.”
I looked at August, knowing he was the biggest advantage we had. “Your reward is not going to mean much if the planet is dead.”
“I’m an optimist,” August said. “I have every confidence you’ll be able to survive this and save us all. If I see you again, I’ll even buy you drinks.”
“You’re willing to risk your life, but are you willing to risk your husband’s?” I made a gamble.
“That’s…” August narrowed his eyes. “Fine. I’ll help you, for his sake.”
“I’m surprised that worked.”
We had a team to save the world and an army.
Why did I feel this was going to go horribly wrong?
Oh right, I’d been down this road before.
Chapter Thirty
I’d like to say we departed almost immediately, but frankly, arranging even a shoggoth army took longer than a few hours. The shoggoths knew what the Faceless Ones were doing at the Tower of Zhaal through their psychic bond with others of their kind and assured me we still had a few days before the Unimaginable Horror broke loose.
I wasn’t so sure.
There wasn’t any way to argue with the shoggoths given our present power discrepancy, and I was forced to wait until they were ready to depart. That proved to be in the “morning” of the next day, for whatever value that word had underground. I discovered I did have to sleep and spent that night in fitful dreaming slumber, visions of indistinct evils haunting me.
Before we departed, I made a note to write a letter to my children, which I handed off to Martha to take with her back to New Arkham. The contents of the letter were short, but I hoped they would convey my feelings to my offspring.
Dearest Anita and Gabriel,
I am sorry for the delay between this correspondence and my previous ones. As you know, I was suffering from a condition which was getting progressively worse. What I kept from you was that it was a transformative one. My metamorphosis from being human—and not.
It is the nature of our bodies that so much of our thinking can be influenced by elements beyond our brain. That the soul, for lack of a better term, is controlled by conditions like hunger or lack of sleep. I feared the being I was becoming would not be the father who raised you.
The thought of losing that connection, of you’re being ashamed of me because of it, was a fate worse than death. I tried to deny my true self but now that the process is complete, I wondered why I was ever afraid of it in the first place.
I am me.
Society may say that I am unfit to love you and be loved by you because I am now one of the monsters that inhabit this world. Your mother has a vague idea of what sort of thing I am, but for all the frightening bits of my transformation, I do not consider myself to be evil. After all, any being still capable of loving you is a being I cannot help but be proud of.
I was going to write about how I would understand if you chose not to renew our relationship due to the pressures of New Arkham or your own beliefs. I have faith, though we may struggle with each other from time to time, that you will understand why I have done what I’ve done.
We are family.
I am going into battle soon, and like all soldiers, I must prepare myself for the possibility that I will not survive. If I do not, and somehow this world manages to continue, I would like to convey one final piece of wisdom to you. Please take this to heart as you look upon a planet that seems to have no hope, no functional ecosystem, and doom around every corner.
This world is worth fighting for.
Do not abandon hope, even in the face of insurmountable odds, and continue to believe there is a chance for humanity to survive in a world designed to exterminate us. Maybe we will survive, maybe we won’t, but you deserve a chance to believe your children will inherit this Earth.
-Your loving father,
John
I sent a similar letter to Jackie, handing it to a shoggoth and trusting they would deliver it to the University without difficulty. I hoped they would understand why I’d done the things I’d done and would learn from my mistakes.
If not, there wasn’t much I could do with it now.
The army of the shoggoths traveled without vehicles, but they provided us with a strange spider-like conveyance capable of traversing the erratic terrain of the few underground tunnels they’d left standing. The device was six feet tall with eight long copper legs that moved in unnatural ways. Its interior possessed weird gem-like controls, pedals, and levers. The thing belched steam every few seconds, and I wondered how the ghouls had come up with such an outrageous device.
Bobbie, August, and Mercury rode with me as I piloted the contraption, none of them having much to say to me since they’d found out I’d destroyed a civilization. All of us wore ghoul-manufactured goggles provided by the shoggoths. They gave us near-perfect vision in total darkness—an immensely valuable gift for exploring the underworld.
The trek took hours an
d was uneventful, but I couldn’t help but feel an oppressive sense of doom clouding the journey. Part of it was undoubtedly the immense difficulty of the task before us and the guilt I was feeling, but there was something more.
I could “see” through time much the same way I could in the Hinton Library. I didn’t—no human could survive such visions—but some of it was still leaking through. Something was going to happen and soon.
“We’re probably going to die out here,” Mercury said, sitting beside me in the front seats of the spider contraption.
“I’m ready,” I said, staring forward.
“I’m not,” August said, shaking his hands as if to make the statement somehow amusing. He was sitting behind Mercury, looking ill as our vehicle bounced from side to side.
“I don’t want to die, but if it saves the world, I’m OK with that,” Mercury said, sighing.
“You are?”
“Not really.” Mercury shook her head. “A lot of people are dead, John. The Insmaw folk, the ghouls back there, and however many people died to make all those zombies the Faceless Ones sent after us. It’s not your fault, but death seems to be following us around. Maybe we need to find a way to break that cycle.”
“Hmm.” I wasn’t sure how to respond to that.
“To keep Jackie from it.”
“Huh,” I said, still unsure.
“Are we having a conversation, or are you just going to mumble the entire way?” Mercury glared at me.
“A little bit of both,” I admitted. I wasn’t sure I was ready to die. Ironic, since I’d been suicidal before all this. Fiction often told of the courage of those willing to sacrifice themselves, but while I’d always been ready to risk my life, it was something else to walk into certain doom. I would do it—for Jackie, for Gabriel, for Anita—but I didn’t like it.
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