I sucked in my breath, only to be almost overwhelmed by the stench. Somehow, I’d missed the retching foulness until then. The place reeked of rotting corpses, and looking around, I saw thousands of bones littering the ground. This place was not just my gravesite but the dumping ground for the entire Faceless One’s cult. I did a double take when I saw a much-decayed corpse of exceptional size with tattered clothes resembling the ones Marcus Whateley was wearing.
“You’ll have to explain what you mean.” I said, climbing to my feet. “Also, tell me what has happened to Mercury and the August.” I felt a pang of remorse for being unable to protect Bobbie and loathed going on this trip now.
“They can still be saved. You, however, need to comprehend your situation … and mine.” Marcus gestured to his corpse. “There exist an infinite number of possibilities in the realm of Yog-Sothoth. Places where the Earth never experienced the Rising, you were born a woman, you died in infancy or at your father’s hands, and even ones where the Great Old Ones do not exist.”
“I would love to visit such a world,” I said, staring at him.
“As would I,” Marcus said. “Now that I’m dead, I see no reason not to.”
“You’re dead?” I asked, too stunned to articulate my thoughts properly. “Am I?”
“No,” Marcus said, putting his fingers together. “You are in a different universe. The John Henry Booth of this universe is dead. August and Mercury were captured by the Faceless Ones. The former decided to surrender after your death. Mercury did not resist when she saw your deceased frame. The body I substituted there.”
I stared at him.
“This is perhaps a lot to take in,” Marcus said, sighing.
“You’re speaking of quantum physics,” I said, blinking. “Or at least the science-fiction idea of it. Infinite realities and parallel universes.”
“Yes,” Marcus said, nodding. “I’m glad to see I won’t have to dumb it down completely.”
I glared.
“Oh, don’t take offense, I have a very special relationship to the nature of space/time. I suppose you do, too,” Marcus said, rubbing his hairy chin. “The short version is you were about to die and your quest fail so I brought you to another identical universe where the matter wasn’t yet settled.”
I had a thousand questions about what elements I didn’t just outright disbelieve. “You can do that?”
“I can do just about anything.” Marcus shrugged. “Well, except avoid being killed by dogs.” Marcus frowned, as if this fact was an unfair one. “The problem is parallel realities and alternate universes are not as stable as people think they are, particularly when dealing with the Great Old Ones. They’re always crashing, merging, exploding, and erasing themselves. In this case, the number of futures where life carries on is shrinking fast. I doubt we’ll have a second chance to make this right.”
I considered myself quite the intelligent and open-minded man, three million years of reading on an alien world will do that, but I was lost. “Just so we’re clear, I’m not in my world. You shanghaied me from it so I could save your own timeline where the John Henry Booth died.”
“That’s not entirely true but it’s not entirely wrong either.” Marcus paused. “But for all intents and purposes, yes.”
“Return me to my world at once so I can save it,” I replied, balling my fists.
“That universe is dead,” Marcus said, calmly.
I stared at him. Several seconds passed. “What happened?”
“The Unimaginable Horror happened,” Marcus said, his voice sympathetic. “That dreadful Oroarchan, Mother to All Colors, was released and devoured all of your world’s population. The Faceless Ones, alone, were spared and only for some value of it as it used their bodies to incubate more of its kind. It moved them to other inhabited worlds, fulfilling its promise of salvation while laying the groundwork for the genocide of countless ecosystems across the cosmos. The Yithians plan to survive by projecting their consciousnesses forward didn’t work as the Horror fed on their psychic presences. I don’t know if it was capable of thinking in terms of things like revenge, but it certainly got some.”
I thought of Mercury, Jackie, and so many others. I felt sick.
“Don’t be melodramatic,” Marcus said, sighing.
“What?” I said, looking at him.
“Your mate, children, and others you love are still alive on this blasted ruin of a planet. At the very least, individuals who resemble them identically. Indeed, the very past selves your Jackie, Mercury, Gabriel, and Anita branched off from.”
I didn’t understand what he was saying. “They’re not them.”
“Aren’t they?” Marcus said. “If you create a perfect duplicate of a person in mind, body, and spirit, then who is to say that’s not a form of immortality?”
“They do,” I gestured with my head to my corpse.
Marcus narrowed his eyes. “Pretend this is the same world then or assume I’m lying. Tell yourself I’m just pretending at omniscience.”
“I will,” I whispered. “Because I don’t believe you can do what you’re describing or that other worlds exist. Why should I help you?”
“Because a Mercury needs your help and a Jackie and all the other people you love in this reality.”
He had me. “All right, tell me how to stop the Unimaginable Horror’s escape. I personally think your plan to release it and put it back in is stupid.”
“It’s a bit too late for that,” Marcus said, looking guilty. “I underestimated just how quickly the Faceless Ones would adapt to my teachings about non-linear space and time.”
“How long until it gets free?” I asked.
“In this reality?” Marcus said. “Twenty minutes. I’m afraid the astral turbulence has reached the point I can’t move us back further.”
I almost shot him there but he’d apparently survived worse. “Twenty minutes.”
“More like nineteen now,” Marcus muttered.
“So, our only plan is yours,” I muttered. “Let him be released and then put him down. Convenient.”
“I’d argue this is the opposite of convenient even for me, but we don’t have time,” Marcus said, sighing. “A rare state for me.”
“Tell me your plan.”
Marcus explained.
I choked. “Are you out of your damn mind?”
“Obviously, since my mind’s over there,” Marcus said, gesturing to his corpse again. “However, my irrational-sounding plan is the single rationale solution to an irrational problem. Unless you have a solution to fighting an immortal planet-eater? This isn’t a comic book, Booth, and you can’t punch this thing in the face.”
“But HIM?” I almost choked on the word.
“Technically, I don’t think said being’s species has a gender,” Marcus replied. “If you can think of any other plan, I’m all ears.”
“Kill the Faceless Ones before they release it.”
“We’re past that point I’m afraid,” Marcus sighed, looking at the one part of the ground not covered in bones. “The Yithians bindings on Oroarchan held for the better part of sixty-five million years. Contrary to what a human with an eighty-year lifespan might think, that’s far from forever. Chipping away at that has been a slow, laborious process, but the sects which worship the Unimaginable Horror have been doing so for a very long time. Even if you were to stop the rituals now, it would be a matter of months until it freed itself.”
I punched the wall. “Fuck it.”
“I thought my letter was quite clear,” Marcus said, surprising me. “However, my goal was to make use of my power so it could be transported across the universe to some other world. The Great Old Ones litter the universe but have very little care about which minute rock they threaten the existence of.”
“That’s a much better plan than summoning—”
Marcus interrupted me before I could finish. “Unfortunately, my plan was doomed from the beginning. My knowledge of time didn’t inform me of ev
erything I needed to comprehend. A million things can go wrong with every breath—Chaos Theory in a nutshell. Not only did the Faceless Ones kill me, but the Unimaginable Horror’s essence permeates everything in this world. Even if it was somehow freed and sent to the edge of the universe, it would just return here to reclaim its power left in the oceans. The Faceless Ones may have suspected my betrayal as well since they have been hounding you from Miskatonic on.”
“They sent a Hound of Tindalos after my group,” I said, looking at him. “I killed it.”
“Poor creature,” Marcus said, sighing. “It is a shame when such a magnificent being gets caught up in the affairs of human wizards. Either way, you have to make a decision now.”
“Like I did with the shoggoths?” I asked.
“That was unfortunate, but yes,” Marcus said.
I refused to go along with Marcus’s plan out of hand. “What about the Faceless Ones? Can they be reasoned with? Don’t they know this is insane?”
I was grasping at straws and we both knew it.
“Insanity is a human term,” Marcus said, looking at me. “So I suppose you could say the Faceless Ones are insane. They are our ancestors created by the Elder Things by accident or design. Long before homo sapiens interbred with Neanderthals to make modern man, the Faceless Ones were the Elder Things’ first experiments. Smarter, stronger, and wiser than us. They lived amongst us with psychic projections, tweaking our genetics and interbreeding with us in hopes we might develop into something resembling them.”
“Those things are our ancestors, truly?”
“I would not call them things, John,” Marcus said. “After all, who are we to talk about deviations in the human genome?”
He had a point there. “Why then?”
“Pride,” Marcus said, his voice low. “The Faceless Ones are kin to a much more attractive race called the K’nyanians. They have since reverted to a more primal form thanks to merging their bodies with the Flying Polyps. The Faceless Ones believe they came with Cthulhu across the stars and held themselves up as a superior race to simian humanity. Their legends are untrue, mind you, but try explaining that to them. Once they were a vast civilization that covered much of the Earth and ruled regular humanity like gods. They then pissed their empire away with civil war, decadence, and trying to control shoggoths.”
“Like the Elder Things,” I muttered. “Like the ghouls.”
“Like countless species,” Marcus said. “History can be summarized as periods of suffering, great prosperity, decadence, and then sliding into self-destruction. The Faceless Ones are almost extinct now but they see the fact the rest of mankind is almost gone as a chance to reclaim lost glories. They believe the Unimaginable Horror will sweep away the Earth’s peoples and allow them to rebuild.”
“Like Armitage and the Great One,” I muttered. “Like Martha and the New Arkhamites. Is everyone truly that stupid? Am I the only one who doesn’t believe the Great Old Ones can be controlled? They’re not animals you can tame!”
“It is the myth of the End Times,” Marcus said. “The Church of the Nailed God and Cthulhu both taught with the end of the world that their god would rise from the dead, smite the wicked, and reward the faithful. Except, the apocalypse has already happened and the gods did not take notice of us.”
“So, we’re the only people trying to save the world, huh?” I said.
“After a fashion,” Marcus said. “You misjudge the University. They made a token effort to save everything. They just didn’t think my methods warranted my continued survival.”
“Your methods involve trying to manipulate the Great Old Ones. I may be behind them in this matter.”
Marcus actually smiled at that. “Look at the bright side, Captain Booth. My plan doesn’t involve summoning my father.”
I glared at him.
Marcus looked down. “If my plan works, though, we’ll be able to bind the Unimaginable Horror and save the planet for whatever race comes after us. Be it a derivative of humanity, shoggoths, or intelligent rabbits.”
I sighed. “Have you seen any futures where humanity does live past the next three generations?”
“It depends on your definition of humanity.”
I paused. “I don’t know if I can bring myself to care about another race’s survival.”
Marcus nodded. “Then do it for your children. Both the ones you have already sired on human women, adopted, and will have in the future. You are like me, John, a being which is not of this time or place. You fear your inhumanity, but you shouldn’t because that allows you something which is more precious than can be imagined.”
“And that is?”
“To serve as a living receptacle for humanity’s past emotions and wonders. When mankind is gone, we will serve as a living record of its existence.”
“Unless we’re both killed. Permanently.”
“We should avoid that.”
“On that we agree.” I put away any concerns I had about this not being my reality and focused, instead, on saving it. “All right, we’ll go with your plan—God help us.”
“A god will help us.”
Yeah, that was Marcus’s plan. To defeat the Unimaginable Horror, we’d have to summon Cthulhu.
Chapter Thirty-Three
I stepped out of the garbage pit into which the Faceless Ones had thrown my corpse. I was in the middle of their camp, and there wasn’t much left of it. It seemed the entirety of the remaining organization had ascended the Tower of Zhaal and were even now performing the next phase of the ritual that would bring about the end of the world.
There were a few enslaved shoggoths tending to the camp, cleaning up the remains and refuse from our brief battle, but none of them paid me any heed. A few of them created faces that showed their sympathy or confusion for my situation. I wished I could stay and ask them what was happening with the army I’d left behind, but that wasn’t an option.
Looking up, I tried and failed to see the summit of the tower. I then attempted to figure out a way to climb an infinite location. If this were the Dreamlands, it would be a simple matter because the laws of physics amounted to “Dream it and such will occur.” Unfortunately, we were in the physical world, and as much as the laws of physics were breaking down, they weren’t collapsed enough to mean I could just teleport up there.
“I may be able to help with that,” Marcus said beside me. He was holding Doctor Ward’s journal, having retrieved it from the contraption. “You’ll need this if you’re to have any hope of summoning Cthulhu. Neither August, you, Mercury, nor I are capable of bringing forth the Lord of R’lyeh and ending this struggle. All of us together, however, have a chance.”
“How much of a chance?”
“A slim one.”
Of course. I took the book from his hands. “What sort of resistance can I expect from the Faceless Ones and the Reanimated?”
“Extreme,” Marcus said, looking up the tower. He, unlike me, seemed to be able to see the top. “We may know their plan will result in nothing but the destruction of this world and many others, but to them, it is the salvation of their race.”
“They deserve to die for what they’ve done.” I thought of Insmaw and Shak’ta’hadron.
“‘Deserve to die’ is a very loaded term, John,” Marcus said. “They may need to die, need to be killed for us to survive, but evil does not exist. Nature is amoral and sentient beings are a part of it. Even Oroarchan has a purpose, sending out its millions of offshoots to feed so it might survive forever.”
I was sick of debating philosophy with him. “I’m still going to stop it. Kill it. Somehow.”
“As is your right. Every being in the world has the right to kill another in order to defend itself or the future of its offspring.”
I gave a half-chuckle. “Death is rarely meaningful. More often, especially with violence, it’s a senseless waste.”
“Death can be both meaningful and a senseless waste.”
I contemplated that, t
hen shook my head. “Take me to the top.”
“I need to preserve my strength for the summoning,” Marcus said, patting me on the back. “I can, however, make it so you’ll be able to go up there yourself.”
“All right.”
Marcus paused. “This will destroy John Henry Booth. From this day on, you will no longer be a man but a monster. It’s the only way to proceed, though.”
“Will I still care about Mercury?”
“Yes.”
“Then I don’t mind.”
“So be it.”
With that, he pushed his hand into my skull and I felt its icy grip pass through my brain. The pain was mild, all things considered. Over in a second. The consequences for the action, though, would resound through the rest of my life. Marcus Whateley opened my eyes. One moment I was John Henry Booth. The next I was R’thugh’cruan. The next I was Captain John Henry Booth during World War One, my own ancestor. The next I was a Crusader bringing Muslim secrets to the Knights Templar, which would eventually morph into The Black Keys of Solomon. I was a metis in the Pre-Revolution Americas, fighting cultists for people who would kill me for harming white men regardless of their wrongs.
I was a Hyperborean wizard banished for his heinous practices, a Stygian Yiggian-Human hybrid, a Texas ranger, a cattle-rustler, a Sioux chieftain, and a five-headed hydra-like beast slithering across the surface of a volcano world. The whole sum of my consciousness throughout countless incarnations of time and space became one in my mind. I had access to all of their memories, thoughts, and values. Linked to Yog-Sothoth as all of his Eyes were, a million different minds were linked, and I could spend a thousand years just trying to sort through them. Then I was John again. Perhaps a hybrid of John and R’thugh’cruan since I felt a loyalty to both humanity as well as the long-dead Kastro’vaal race. The other lives’ memories became a distant flash as only the barest outline remained. Still, I would never be entirely human again in mindset as I saw, for a single moment, how everything was connected.
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