I agreed wholeheartedly. Nancy’s focus on her father had helped her to hold the beasts at bay, but it wouldn’t last, and Dyer might already be gone. We wouldn’t know for certain until we were out of the Blasted Heath.
I pulled my sword from Ammi’s body, and I wasn’t nice about it. At the same time, I released the spell that held him in the air. He fell with a grunt that was more Ammi than the void.
The pickup wouldn’t hold four of us in the cab, so I jumped into the back and helped Leo lie Dyer down.
As Dyer’s head gently touched the metal of the truck bed, I heard a menacing laugh from behind me.
I glanced over my shoulder and watched as Ammi, holding his side, laughed.
I wasn’t the only person who found Ammi’s laugh discomforting. Leo looked at me and asked, “What is that about?”
I looked away from Ammi and then to the path we had driven up only minutes ago. “We’re too late,” I replied.
“They’re here.”
Chapter 5: Still The Blasted Heath
The slight growl of engines and crunching of gravel could just barely be heard. They were getting closer.
I drew my .38 Smith & Wesson in my right hand and kept my left tightly gripped on the handle of my cavalry sword.
“Get into the house,” I shouted. It was too late for quiet. Cultists were coming, and I had no doubts that they knew we were here. I turned to follow my companions into the shambles of a house when a solid mass slammed into the back of my knees and dragged me forcefully to the ground.
Before I landed, Ammi Pierce was already on me - slapping and clawing at me like an animal. He climbed up my waist and was tearing at my chest and face before I could get my weapons up to defend myself.
His fist, powered by something more than an old man’s muscles, pumped up and down into my face. I felt my nose break and stars filled my vision. My vision cleared just enough to see Ammi Pierce raise both his hands above his head, clasp them together, and bring them down.
I twisted my neck and shoulders and managed to pull my head just barely out of the path of Ammi’s clenched hands, and managed to take a glancing blow to my temple instead of the direct hit to my face. Stars shot along the right side of my vision as Ammi’s knuckles brushed my skull.
My vision cleared again, and I felt Ammi shift his weight. My arms were still stuck at my sides and seemed to be held there by the will power of whatever was wearing Ammi.
His hands were suddenly inches from my ears. As soon as I noticed that they were there, my mind was flooded with pressure. Sound filled my mind, screams of an agony that wasn’t of this earth. Each sound was a pressure point on a place in my mind. Every painful memory, image, or thought that I had ever had was forcefully pushed to the front of my mind. Each of those thoughts rode on the backs of creatures from the void. They were tentacled, otherworldly things traveling from Ammi Pierce and into my mind.
A piece of me realized that they weren’t just coming from Ammi, but they were the very same creatures that had chosen Ammi for their vessel. He was filling me with his own parasites.
These creatures didn’t really know Andrew Doran, though. I had spent the better part of the last year learning to compartmentalize my mind through living with a creature already inside my head. These were different and not of my own making, but the concept was similar.
That small piece of me that recognized that these creatures were Ammi was enough of myself to gather my will-power. While they attempted to flood my mind, they had left Ammi wide open.
I pushed past the creatures and sent my will forward and into Ammi’s mind. With all of the beasts rooting around in my own head, Ammi’s head was incredibly empty. It didn’t take me long to find what I was looking for.
The remains of Ammi’s soul were tattered and barely coherent as having once been a person. In my mind’s eye, his soul looked similar to his body, but without any specific border. Pieces flaked off and drifted away in the emptiness of his mind. He didn’t have many years left in this state, and I wondered what the creatures would do once they lost their plaything.
I poked Ammi with my mind, prodding him for some sort of reaction. He had obviously been tortured for far too long, and didn’t respond to any of my pokes.
So, I punched him.
Metaphorically, of course, as my hands were still pinned to my side, and I had no idea what was going on outside of my mind. As I had mentioned earlier, I had been strengthening my mind for the better part of the last year. I took that strength and used it to make a mental punch directly at the center of Ammi’s psyche. If I had to, I would destroy him altogether, but I was hoping that it wouldn’t come to that.
I was placing my bets on the fact that the creatures controlling Ammi still needed him. Otherwise they had held him for far too long to just be torturing him for fun. They needed Ammi’s soul on this side of the veil to anchor them here.
My bets were spot on. I could feel the creatures retracting from my mind almost as soon as I attacked Ammi. As they returned to their mind, I returned to mine.
My consciousness flooded into my damaged body, and my eyes were no longer filled with stars. Instead, I watched as Ammi Pierce’s body shuddered and rocked before sliding off of me.
The creatures were struggling to regain the balance they had needed inside Ammi’s head. The distraction forced them to release their power on my arms and I was suddenly free.
Bleeding and dizzy, I got to my feet as quickly as I could, moving away from Ammi while I did so. I tested my grip on my sword and pistol, flexing my fingers as I turned back toward the possessed man. Ammi shuddered again before his back straightened and his eyes were filled with the inhuman look of the creatures.
Ammi’s possessed body rose to its feet. The air around it seemed to ripple with power and I heard the vehicles coming ever closer.
Gripping the sword tighter, I said through my already swollen lips, “Ammi, I don’t have time for this.” I ignored the blood oozing over my mouth as I continued. “Worshipers of the Serpent God, Yig, if we’re lucky, are coming into your Heath to get William Dyer.” I couldn’t get a read on Ammi’s thoughts, his face was alien...impossible to read. “They will sense the power here and they will not stop at Dyer. They will want that power for themselves.” There was still no response. “They will take your Colour from the Well!” I was shouting and blood was spraying from my mouth. The well was the last card I had to play.
There was a slight twitch in Ammi’s brow. My words were making the creatures think. If I was correct, than they would soon be fighting the Nazi-employed cultists for me.
Ammi shouted, “They can try!” He ran at me with incredible speed. In that moment, I realized that Ammi didn’t care about the Nazis or any of their followers. All he cared about was the threat in front of him and he would take care of that one and then the next one as they came.
While Ammi and the beasts within him traveled faster than I could possibly have hoped to, he didn’t travel faster than it took to raise my gun.
The first bullet from my magically enhanced pistol slammed into Ammi’s chest. It was a lower shot than I had intended. Ammi’s heart stopped sustaining his life a long time ago. Blood didn’t even blossom from the wound. A hole punched into Ammi’s chest and he didn’t slow in his lunge toward me.
The second bullet hit exactly where I had aimed it, cutting a hole above Ammi’s left eye. It was just a black void in his head, but it had the desired effect. Otherworldly spirits or gods from another dimension, it just didn’t matter. No matter what creatures were driving Ammi’s body, they couldn’t do it without his brain.
That didn’t stop them from trying though. Ammi Pierce’s body continued to surge forward, but stumbled and lost stride. The skin around the bullet hole darkened in a decaying spiderweb pattern. The effect of the magically-propelled ammunition was different on different creatures, and it was killing the evil within Ammi in a way that I hadn’t seen before.
It was as if someone had d
eflated Ammi, and he collapsed to the ground at my feet.
I took only a moment to reach down and check that the animating force that had been inside Ammi’s body had left. I also mumbled a deeply felt, “I’m sorry,” but I don’t know if I was saying it to Ammi Pierce or to the person who would soon be the next vehicle of choice for the void beasts.
I didn’t have much time to think on it before gunfire was exploding all around me. I spun toward where they were coming from and was facing the shack.
Leo was standing on the on the dilapidated porch with a pistol in each hand. In Nancy’s stupor, he must have taken up her weapon. Leo was firing over and past me. I spun around again to see where the bullets were landing and watched as they punched holes into the side of one of the two trucks that were pulling up.
They were two old farm pickups and I recognized them immediately. Of course, the large “Property of Miskatonic University” helped, but I also knew them as the utility trucks that were usually seen around my alma mater’s student housing. These were more cultists who had been residing just a little too close to my home for me to have been comfortable.
The realization came to me that I hadn’t actually ever been safe. The Nazi agents had only been biding their time until all of their pieces were in play. I wasn’t Dean of that damnable University any more than I had been before Brandon Smythe’s tenure.
Both trucks were loaded with eight cultists each: two in each cab and six in each bed. Each of their faces were covered in dark tattoos, with intricate runes that stretched down past their necks and onto their bare chests. Their bare chests were also covered with straps that looped over one shoulder and connected to very large guns.
They returned fire almost immediately. The Nazis people leapt from the trucks and marched forward to rain a steady stream of bullets at myself, out in the open, and the shack where my companions waited.
A dropped to a crouch as our aggressors’ feet touched the dead soil of the Blasted Heath. My pains were suddenly a distant memory as I ran directly for the dilapidated shack. I didn’t slow as I went up the three rotting steps, crossed the tiny porch, and dived through the doorway.
Leo continued to shoot from behind me, but backed into the shack as he did so. Once I saw him clear the threshold, I kicked out at the door from my position on the floor. It slammed shut and Leo shouted in French, “Get the table!”
I stood and the blood rushed from my head. I was dizzy and suddenly remembering the beating that I had only just received. As I regained my footing, I took in my surroundings...
...and gagged.
Animal body parts littered the barren shack. There was no furniture aside from the one large oak table. The table was covered in more animal parts and the closer I looked the more I saw how those animals had died.
Human bite marks were all over the parts, and the parts were in varying states of decay. Ammi had lived like less than an animal, eating to survive, but leaving the remains to rot in his own home.
In a (surprisingly clean) corner of the shack laid William Dyer with his head on the lap of his daughter. Nancy held her father tightly and continued to mumble whatever she had been mumbling to him earlier. It sounded like a children’s story this time.
William Dyer’s eyes were wide open, but he wasn’t looking at anything in this world.
I found my feet quickly enough and Leo and I ignored the carrion on the table as we lifted the heavy beast, flipped it, and slammed the top against the door for added support. To our fortune, bullets slammed into the door at that moment, but didn’t pass through the table. Not yet, anyway.
I crouched behind the table with Leo and reloaded my .38 Smith and Wesson from the ammunition I kept in my holster belt. I realized that I was still tightly gripping my sword and slid it back into its sheath at my side. Leo was emptying one of the pistols and using the remainder of the bullets to reload the other. We were pitiful adversaries and it wouldn’t take our attackers long to realize it.
I waved my pistol in the direction of the Dyer family. “Only us, then?” Leo only nodded and I noticed the stress behind his eyes wasn’t entirely in response to our newest Nazi-employed attackers.
The Blasted Heath was still pressing on his mind, and probably more so since I had killed Ammi Pierce. Leo had seen that and I hoped he hadn’t seen it as an act of betrayal.
I nodded toward the door. “I’m sorry that I killed him.”
Leo shook his head and only spoke in French, it was easier. “No. It was either you or him. You made the right choice.” He forced a smile and looked away from his reloaded pistol, tossing the other one into some animal parts that resembled something like a pig. “Besides, one of those men out there has to be more weak-willed than I.”
I nodded to my friend. “Any ideas?”
Leo shrugged. “I shoot people. Ideas are your thing.” He forced himself to say it in English.
I returned Leo’s shrug. “Well, I’m all out.”
Leo was about to make some sort of suggestion that I was certain ended with the words “blaze of glory,” when a new voice joined the conversation.
“Hold your fire!” The voice echoed outside of the shack. It sounded like it was coming from just at the end of the rotten steps.
“Dr. Doran,” he lowered his shouting, but we could still hear him well enough. “You know why we are here. Send out the geologist and we will be on our way.”
His voice was deep and solid. This man was confident, but there was something else behind his voice. He sounded tired, beaten, even though he had us over the fire.
Barking a laugh, I replied, “I’m supposed to believe that? You will let us go, completely unharmed?” I laughed again.
“Today, yes!” He shouted and it was almost a sigh. “This chase, the body count, it’s all too much. You’re bringing unwanted attention to our actions. So, today we will give you a pass. Give us the geologist and we will be on our way. No harm, no foul.” There was a pause. “You have my word.”
Leo joined me with a laugh then. “The word of a Cthulhu Cultist? What? Did the Nazis run out of Yig followers?”
Leo tilted his head to the side and eyed me with a hint of a smile. “You did ask for a better quality of cultist.”
I frowned at him, hissing, “Shut up!”
“Dr. Doran, be reasonable. I am not your enemy. I am only not your friend. I don’t like the Nazis any more than you do, heck, I’m an American from Rutland, Vermont.” Rutland’s foremost expert in Cthulhu paused, probably hoping to give me time to absorb his red-blooded American status. “We have mutual needs. The Nazis want the geologist, and so do my friends. Knowing that, I am putting all of my chips on the Nazis being in over their heads. I just want to be there to pick up the pieces.”
I nodded to no one in particular and replied, “In that, we’re in agreement. The Nazis have no idea what they are getting into by hiring a bunch of backstabbing cultists to do their stateside work.” Snapping my fingers, I motioned for Leo to stay low and check the back. This was a lot of chit chat for someone who seemed to know a thing or two about me.
“The city in the south,” Rutland continued, “is a powder keg. The wick has already been lit. Give me the geologist and I’ll watch- hell, I’ll even take pictures for you, Doctor- as the Nazis destroy themselves.”
“Thank you for thinking of me, Rutland. That’s very considerate of you.” I tightened my grip on the .38 and slid further back from the table. “Unfortunately, I think that you have misread me. I hate you monster-worshiping cultists more than I hate the Nazis. I don’t need Cthulhu’s lackeys ushering in the new world order any more than I want the Nazis to do it.”
A crash alerted me to a struggle in the back of the house. Leo had just stepped out of the back door and the sound was just outside. There were two gunshots before Leo came back inside, slamming the door and carrying a machine gun and with a rifle slung over his shoulder.
Rutland spoke up as soon as Leo was back inside Ammi Pierce’s shack. “Plea
se remember that I tried to end this differently, Dr. Doran.”
A hum filled the air around us and the whole world seemed to heave with an unseen force. The walls shook around us, dust and dirt fell from the ceiling, covering us each with the debris from the old house.
The walls were shuddering the worst and as Leo and I spun, trying to discover the source of the tremor, our eyes fell upon Nancy and William as they sat there ignoring the house falling apart around them.
“Nancy, get away from the wall!” I shouted over the hum and the rattling of the walls.
Wherever Nancy was, she wasn’t capable of hearing anything in this world. Leo ran forward and grabbed the prone girl by the ankle and her father by his wrist. A quick tug through the effluence of deceased animals and the Dyer family was safe from the rattling walls.
Leo came back to me, a dutiful soldier awaiting orders. “Is the back clear?” I asked him.
He hefted the machine gun and turned toward the back door. “It will be.”
That left me with the issue of the catatonic William Dyer and his quickly fading daughter. I moved to Dyer and flipped him over. His face had a smear of something on it that I couldn’t identify. Lifting his chin, I pulled open his eyelids and looked into them.
With my trained eye, an eye well versed in the poisons that leak from one world and into the next, I could see that this wasn’t some sort of medically related issue. William Dyer simply wasn’t in his body at all.
When a person leaves their body, it is almost never entirely. When I went to the Dream Lands, or when a person or being possesses another entity, they have to leave a trail of themselves behind or they will never find their way back. It’s never much, and usually the traveler is unaware that a piece has been left, but unless purposefully severed, that link is always there.
I could see, only barely, that small link between William Dyer’s body and his consciousness. He was elsewhere, but he still might be able to find his way back.
The Adventures of Andrew Doran: Box Set Page 31