“You have the greatest library in the history of the universe in your head right now. You have the skills to manipulate your body as R’thugh’cruan could. Likewise, the knowledge to be able to summon Cthulhu. In the future, you will be able to consult with your other selves, too, with meditation and dream-walking. All of that matters less now than your ability to go after the ones above. Can you do that?”
I made a pact with R’thugh’cruan in my head. The two of us merged our minds and consciousness to hold back the tide of the others. Between us, we were so similar that there was little change. Well, one small change. I now felt the Eyes of Yog-Sothoth were my family every bit as much as humanity and vowed to find them a homeworld where they could escape the eternal madness of Yog-Sothoth’s realm, be it Earth or otherwise. I also possessed an all-consuming need to mate, which made me wonder if the Kastro’vaal had ever heard of restraint.
“Yes,” I answered him. “I am.”
“Then go,” Marcus said, pointing up to the sky.
I transformed into the shape of a byakhee and found myself carried up by unnatural winds through the air, through countless worlds. Doctor Ward’s journal entered a secondary stomach I conjured until the time I needed it again. My insect-meets-chiropteran form felt as natural as my human one as I flew higher and higher toward the tower’s apex.
Along the way, I felt the presence of the Unimaginable Horror peeking in. Denied its daily diet of souls, the Tower of Zhaal was no longer holding Oroarchan back. The Great Old One devoured spell after spell of the Yithians, growing stronger and more “real” with each passing second.
As a byakhee, I was telepathic; I could sense the consciousness of the being. I’d imagined the Great Old Ones to be deific beings far removed from the mortal concerns of men. The thoughts they pondered were, in my head, the kind of questions that took all of human civilization ages to answer.
The Unimaginable Horror thought about feeding.
Its awesome mind, capable of calculating the mathematical foundations of the universe, directed its incredible intellect solely to the question of hunger. It thought about killing, feasting, devouring, rending, tearing, hurting, and growing larger so it could kill more.
There was nothing but corpulent NEED driving its actions. The Unimaginable Horror wanted to consume the whole of the universe and when it was done, it would move on to other realities so it might devour their populations. It might merely eat a few galaxies here and there before doing so, having no further desire to engage the Great Old Ones in territorial fights for dominance.
It was a scavenger.
Fuck it.
I reached the top of the Tower of Zhaal and saw a gathering of hundreds. Faceless Ones, Reanimated, humans, ghouls, Deep Ones, and other cultists were gathered there. Marcus Whateley had been underplaying the cosmopolitan nature of our foes, as the Faceless Ones merely comprised a solid majority.
The Matriarch led the ritual from the middle of an infinite-pointed star at the north end of the tower’s top. She was chanting in Ancient Stygian with a dual-serpent- headed staff around a black sun. I saw that much of her magic came from this staff and the iron ring on her finger, both items having once belonged to powerful wizards of ancient times.
Mercury, August, and several other prisoners were in the center of the tower’s top, bound in rope inside a mystical circle. Most of the prisoners had already been killed by Faceless Ones wielding knives, letting their blood drain out onto the tower. Given how much magical energy I felt being channeled through the Matriarch, it was a ridiculous extravagance and a pointless waste of life.
Then again, so was what I was about to do.
Landing on the edge of the tower’s summit, I transformed back into John Henry Booth. I was not him anymore, though, or at least not him alone. Transforming my arms into whip-like tendrils that could heat themselves to the temperature of the surface of the sun, I screamed in an alien language before swinging them around. Bodies were bisected, decapitated, and incinerated as they danced around the prisoners.
The Faceless Ones screamed and went for weapons, but I deformed my mouth to something hideous and breathed out white-hot flames that caught sixteen of them on fire. A few died instantly, but most of them ran around screaming, falling off the edge or to the ground where they perished in agony.
The Faceless One Matriarch, to her credit, did not attempt to gloat or intimidate me. Instead, she just turned the awesome power of her mystical artifacts against me. She drained the mystical circle imprisoning August and Mercury for extra energy before blasting me with a fiery spell designed to kill me.
Oh the agony!
I fell to my knees, my flesh incinerated only to regenerate and be burned again. The Matriarch killed prisoner after prisoner via her mystical draining, and would have killed August as well as Mercury if not for the fact that they’d somehow freed themselves in the meantime. Both erected a shield around themselves to prevent their deaths.
“Go to the hell that awaits you!” I snarled, my voice guttural and inhuman.
“There is no hell but this world!” the Matriarch cried out, intensifying the spell. The pain became so great, I felt like I was dying.
Which I was.
Mercury then chanted an invocation to Great Cthulhu and summoned power that was like a supernova to witness. The Faceless One Matriarch’s star-like shield vanished in an instant, causing her to stumble backward. Mercury grabbed a Desert Eagle from the holster of a Reanimated corpse on the ground, aimed, and shot the Matriarch three times in the face.
The Matriarch fell backward to her doom, her body disappearing over the tower’s edge. Given the Tower of Zhaal’s peculiar physics, it was quite possible her body would fall forever. Either that or it would be eventually scoured by winds into nothingness.
“Good job,” I said, never more proud of Mercury.
There were about thirty remaining cultists, terrified and cowering individuals unwilling to fight for their lives. I was spared from having to deal with them by August stretching out his hands and tearing their lives from their bodies, drinking their power to feed his own.
I was glad he was on our side.
“Clever, girl,” August said, staring. “I never would have been able to dispel her barrier.”
“It turns out my magic works better when I’m pissed off,” Mercury said, looking over the tower’s edge. “John, you’re alive.”
“Yes,” I said, turning around to claw out Doctor Ward’s book from my chest. The wound sealed over completely and I returned to a completely human form. My clothes were also there, false creations of my body’s ability to mimic fabric through shed skin. It was sickening as well as amazing.
The book was undamaged by the stomach acid or whatever was inside a byakhee, perhaps because of spells woven into the lining. This was going to be a hard sell. Turning around, hoping I looked human, I said, “We have to summon Cthulhu.”
Mercury and August just looked at me.
The tower shook. Oroarchan was about to escape.
Mercury said, “Shit.”
August reached out his hand. “What the hell. I always wanted to go out with a bang.”
Huh, that was easier than I expected.
Chapter Thirty-Four
Like the breaking of a dam, I felt the barriers erected by the Yithians shatter on the Tower of Zhaal and the Unimaginable Horror come forth like a tsunami into this world. All throughout the tower, blackish, foul water carrying something vile poured out onto the desert around us.
Like the Biblical Flood, there was a terrible sense of purpose to this water, and it moved in disturbing, animated ways, grabbing Faceless Ones from the sides of the tower and dragging them screaming into its shadowy depths. At the top of the tower, surrounded by the dead, we were ignored by it for the time being, even as I could see into its horrid depths and comprehend the true dreadful majesty of its malevolence.
The Unimaginable Horror was more than just a corruption, a living ocean of foulness. As
more and more water poured out, I could see the guiding spirit animating the liquid and shuddered instinctively. It was an energy field, a presence, and a matter all at once—a strange color that existed nowhere in the human visual spectrum and was just as strange to that of a Kastro’vaal.
The Unimaginable Horror was like a gigantic hand of a three-dimensional being reaching into a two-dimensional world, stretching itself outward. A sick, mad part of my mind was grateful to realize there was no way to comprehend the totality of its terribleness. It showed me that, even in my newfound alien state, there were still mysteries too nightmarish to comprehend. Even a species as close to the Great Old Ones as the Eyes of Yog-Sothoth was nothing more than another rung on a perverse mockery of Jacob’s Ladder, descending ever deeper down a tunnel of madness. The Unimaginable Horror was the unnatural disaster that would end all life on this Earth and perhaps destroy the universe someday. It had helped create all life on this planet for the purposes of devouring it, and tonight was the night of its harvest.
It was a god. The universe did not care about mortals, their problems or fears. The universe did not care about gods either, though. For as a bleak and pitiless as this world we lived in was, there was a cold comfort knowing that it favored everyone equally. Great Old One or insect, one could manipulate the natural forces guiding the universe, but they did not offer an ounce of succor.
A thimbleful of sympathy.
In that respect, the Unimaginable Horror—no, Oroarchan—was no better or worse than us. Death might die for the Great Old Ones, and it served as no permanent prison for their kind. Yet with strange aeons (and these were very strange aeons), I’d seen a human and his daughter brought back to life through Nyarlathotep’s own technology of the mind. The Great Old Ones, too, could be beaten and imprisoned, as the Yithians had shown. A swarm of bee stings could kill a man under the right circumstances, and it was my hope that we were that swarm.
If not, the Earth’s lesser races were doomed.
“Cast the spell!” I shouted to Mercury and August. Both my companions were as mesmerized by the sight below as I was, staring at the ever-growing mass beneath us that would soon drown out the tower.
“Right!” August said, shaken by the sight and clutching Doctor Ward’s book against his chest.
Mercury went to my side, cold but determined. Giving me a kiss on the lips, she looked into my eyes, shook her head and joined August in casting the spell. I did not think for a moment she’d forgiven me, but here, at the end of the world, it was an acknowledgment that there would always be love between us. Which was what made my actions cut the deepest.
Shaking my head, I took position in a triangle with August as he began to read. Mercury’s magic, when added to August’s, was possibly equal to that of the late Alan Ward’s. I felt them draw on the deep psychic reservoirs of the race I was now a part of. They drew on my knowledge, too, using the long-dead wizards in my past to make calculations impossible for normal humans. All three of us, together, provided enough force to perform the summoning.
Even so, I don’t think we would have been able to complete the spell if not for the protection provided by our insignificance. The merest outstretch of Oroarchan godlike mind would have vaporized us. It didn’t sense us, though. The being was too busy bringing itself to full power. Just watching the ever-expanding sea of nightmares made me wonder if the Great Old One would drown the world, but instead I focused on serving as a vessel for the spell being cast.
I sensed Marcus Whateley’s presence join us during our enchantment, and the extra-dimensional, quantum-physics-defying being provided his own additions to the spell. Our minds became linked with his and a strange geometry filled our heads. Infinite angles, connections, and computations became as child’s play among us.
Working on the spell for centuries, Alan Ward could never have succeeded any more than apes working the controls of a helicopter. Yet the man we’d been hired to kill gave us the intelligence necessary to do so.
And we did.
A black light burst from the ground beneath us, enhanced and magnified by the Tower of Zhaal below. Like a signal flare, it shot through all corners of the universe and sent a signal out to the one higher being in the cosmos we believed might reasonably care whether Oroarchan destroyed the Earth or not.
Ku’tulu.
Ku’tulu.
Ku’tulu.
The voices in my head sang of Azathoth’s High Priest, the Lord of R’lyeh, and the greatest of the Great Old Ones. He (she? it?) was the exception to the rule about the universe caring about something. I felt the entirety of the cosmos warping with his arrival, as if the gods above Nyarlathotep had only been watching my struggles in anticipation for his arrival.
Oroarchan’s water-based body boiled and twisted with the casting of the spell. I was fully prepared for the being to destroy us in that moment, but he did not. Oroarchan was more concerned with the flames than the animal. I didn’t even know if our mad, desperate gamble was going to work. We were making a call upon Cthulhu, but there was no guarantee he’d answer. Who knew what that dreaming god cared about now that he was awake and wandering the universe, doing whatever gods did. He might have greater concerns than the release of Oroarchan, and our desperate summoning was little more than a prayer anyway.
A prayer I was surprised to see was answered.
The arrival of Cthulhu was heralded by an impenetrable fog. It rolled forth across the ground and around us from parts unknown, blanketing our surroundings. The clouds above us became a swirling vortex of storms with lightning of a hundred different colors crisscrossing in varied directions. The moist air felt toxic due to the presence of Oroarchan in every molecule of water.
“Oh God, it’s coming,” Mercury whispered, her voice quaking with a fear I’d never heard.
“Yes,” I said, my voice every bit as terrified as hers.
August clutched Alan Ward’s book against his chest and fell to the ground, laughing as if aware of the immensity of the doom we’d brought down upon ourselves.
I caught my first glimpse of Cthulhu when the fog cloud began to part and its awful beautiful face was illuminated by lightning. I shut my eyes to any dimension but the ones visible to humans, but I couldn’t bring myself to close those, too. Looking upon Cthulhu’s terrible majesty, I felt my heart beat faster than ever. Cthulhu was, without a doubt, a mountain that walked. A mile tall if it was an inch, and that was just its projected self overlaying a much grander being that moved through reality as if it were its own universe.
I’d seen thousands of idols dedicated to Cthulhu over the decades, but none of them caught a glimmer of the true, awesome visage of Azathoth’s most perfect son. No demon, god, or monster of Earth’s mythology could approach Cthulhu’s glory. He was and forever would be.
For posterity’s sake, even if such a thing was not to be for much longer, I’ll try to describe what I saw rather than felt. Great Cthulhu, as mentioned, dwarfed all skyscrapers in his size, seeming to stand as tall as the Tower of Zhaal. Its head had three baleful black eyes on each side and was bedecked with a thousand tentacles at the base of its long, stretched-out skull.
The creature’s body was a rubbery thick mass that seemed almost flabby, as if there were too much of it to be seen in the space it occupied. Yet as it stretched forth, the creature seemed to become taut and muscular like a lean predator. The creature had wings, but they were not leathery like a bat’s or feathered like a bird’s, but composed of the same sinew-like substance as the rest of his body.
And its presence.
Dear God, its presence!
If I were to say every cell in Great Cthulhu’s body contained intelligence equal to a man and the psychic will thereof, I would sound like a lunatic—but there it was. Cthulhu was a nation unto itself, much like the shoggoths in that every part of him/it/her was alive. The destruction of humanity by the Great Old Ones’ awakening was rendered morally justified by its rising, as I realized that all those who died were les
s than a fraction of those living inside the Prince of the Old Ones.
Worse still, I recognized the siren call of the voices inside Cthulhu as the ones inside my own head. The distant call of Azathoth’s court where the Blind Idiot God was worshiped by nameless entities was matched by Great Cthulhu’s own mind. For the past year, I had been unwittingly hearing the song of Cthulhu.
That was when Cthulhu spoke.
What Cthulhu said I could not say, for it was not directed to me but to Oroarchan. Like being struck by the heat of a nuclear bomb, one couldn’t be even the least bit psychic and fail to be overwhelmed by his words.
“Ah!” Mercury screamed, tears running down her face while she clutched her head.
“Please!” August tried to tear out his own eyes, dropping the journal, only for him to collapse before his hands reached his face.
I just stood there, frozen in place. I felt Nyarlathotep’s terrible presence reach into my mind then and force all of my extra senses open. I was forced to watch the conflict between Cthulhu and the Unimaginable Horror in its full, terrible glory. There were things I did not witness, thank all that is holy, but what I did see would haunt me through this life and every one thereafter.
I saw the Oroarchan reach with its aluminiferous tendrils to the distant world of Xash, where it was worshiped by the world’s degenerate, once-civilized people. Every being of every age was killed to provide Oroarchan the strength to grapple mentally with Cthulhu. Cthulhu responded by ripping out the corona of a distant star and hurling at it at the heart of Oroarchan in another layer of reality. The only reason all life on Earth wasn’t instantly destroyed by the opening salvos of their battle was because it was being fought on an entirely higher order of the Multiverse.
Tower of Zhaal Page 28