Dean shook his head. “No, the ones that close to New Orleans are all in the city, herding people to the thing that’s made its home there.”
“Oh.” I should have felt relieved. I wasn’t.
The helicopter suddenly banked left. Oscar screamed.
“Sorry if I startled you,” Dean said, looking at the map fastened to the windshield. “I heard a report a few hours before you arrived I want to check it out. It’s not far off our destination. Besides, if there are Collectors around the monolith I have enough nerve gas to knock ‘em out for as long as we need.”
I stared at Dean and then looked back at Oscar. Oscar shrugged and mouthed the words: nerve gas?
I had to know. “How did you get nerve gas?”
Dean laughed. “Did you think we Doomsdayers would just dig holes and sit things out? We’ve been preparing for something like this for years now. If someone came on my property what would I do? Use harsh language or ask them nicely to leave?”
Me and Oscar didn’t reply.
“Exactly,” Dean said. “They would be scavenging for food and they wouldn’t be in their right minds. Worse still, they could be looters, crazy and hell-bent nutjobs. I couldn’t take out a whole group by myself, so I chose the best thing I could think of. People aren’t people anymore when they’re hungry and desperate, Trent.”
I hated to admit it, but Dean was right. “But how did you get it?” I noticed Oscar had moved closer to listen. As if he could hear anything over the thump-thump-thump of the rotor blades.
Dean laughed. “The internet, of course. You can find just about anything you want to know there.”
In minutes the familiar skyline of New Orleans came into view. I sat up and rubbed my eyes. Above and around the city, smoke filled the air.
“Refinery’s burning,” Dean said. “And God only knows what else.”
We flew in closer and Dean looked intently through the windshield. I guess he was on the lookout for any flying creatures. Thankfully, there weren’t any. But the city drew closer. Too close.
I began to get nervous. That wasn’t on the agenda. “We aren’t going into the city, are we?”
“Just for a moment; I want to see this if it’s true.” He banked the helicopter left again.
In less than a minute we were over the city of New Orleans, and I instinctively knew where he was heading. A few seconds later we were looking down on the creature that occupied the site of the Superdome.
I thought my eyes deceived me. I rubbed them hard, then opened them again. This was no optical illusion.
I saw multitudes of people, all bunched together. Collectors kept them penned in. The thing in the water sent its tentacles out, seeking; in moments scores of people were imprisoned within its slimy appendages. Just as in the video, the being lifted its prey to its gaping maw, dropping them into the wide expanse of its cavernous maw. I closed my eyes in horror.
Thank God I couldn’t hear their final screams. It wasn’t just one tentacle picking up humans for food; over a dozen of these huge, rope-like feelers writhed in the air, scores of humans within them.
I watched with mounting despair. Hundreds of thousands of people must have gone to their deaths in the gullet of this monstrosity, to be digested over endless eons.
And still it fed; its hunger was one that would never be satiated. Its single eye darted from one score of humans to the next as the cyclopic beast raised them into the air, as though keeping careful count of the people that succumbed to its endless hunger.
It had no need; other eyes darted back and forth across the sky and land, ensuring its servants kept the food supply moving.
I looked off to my left and now I saw the triangular structure of the monolith, standing triumphant in the ocean off the east.
“It’s true,” Dean muttered, his hand shaking on the collective. “The report is true. I just can’t believe it.”
We hovered only a few seconds more. That was enough. To see so many people waiting to die made my stomach writhe. I swallowed the rising vomit back down as Dean veered the Bell 206 away.
Now the monolith came closer and closer. To see it with my own eyes was awe-inspiring to say the least. Its gargantuan size and alien purpose defied our small, primitive minds. Dean circled it twice, ensuring no Collectors had gathered at its base. Seconds later we landed.
The ground to which the monolith was attached was a myriad of colors, reminding me of the abalone you find in seashells. It glittered in the perpetual twilight. We left the helicopter and made our way to the monolith.
I wanted to touch it, had to touch it. To make all this real, to make myself believe I was actually here doing this with my friend Oscar and a man I hardly knew. I moved slowly up to the tall edifice and reached out my hand.
I didn’t know what to expect. Would it send a fatal shock through me and strike me dead, or would something even worse happen? I held my breath, my heart pounding, and brushed my fingers on wall of the alien structure.
Nothing happened. The monolith’s surface felt as strange, alien, as it appeared. Initially it was soft and spongy, but on the second touch its surface was hard, like marble. I stared at the symbols and what Dean had called glyphs. They were without end, covering the structure’s walls completely. I felt detached, as though I was in a daydream.
I was about to touch it a third time, to run my fingers across one of the glyphs, when Dean called out and broke my reverie.
“I’m going to draw the symbols now. Trent, Oscar: start the chant. I’ll join you when I’m done.”
I looked at Oscar and we did as we were told. I began and Oscar followed suit.
The words seemed easier now to chant, and as we mouthed these alien words Dean ran from corner to corner with his spray can to paint the rocks with the warding glyphs – just as he had planned - while we waved our hands in the gestures taught us.
It must have taken him an age to circle the monolith, but time ceased to have meaning to me and Oscar. We were lost in the chant, our minds and bodies at one with the mysterious incantation and movements that came naturally from our lips and hands.
It was on Dean’s return that our luck changed.
I saw it out of the corner of my eye. A lone Z bird, racing down to me. I broke off my chanting and ducked just in time to avoid it, but it plowed right into Oscar. Man and alien bird went down in a rolling mass of wings, arms, yells, and screams.
Judging by its size it was either diminished by hunger, or a youngster that become separated from its flock - if flock is the right word to use for these deadly flying monstrosities.
They fought. The Z bird’s beak darted, trying to land a blow. It felt an eternity: watching, powerless to help my friend. I turned and tried and to spot Dean. That’s when I heard Oscar scream; a heartbreaking cry of unendurable agony. My head snapped back, just in time to see the Z bird’s razor-edged beak tear Oscar’s ring finger from his hand.
The bite wasn’t clean; Oscar’s finger remained attached to his hand by a thin tendril of skin and tendon. The bird rolled with lightning speed, like a crocodile, then found leverage and tore the digit completely from. Oscar’s hand. White, sinewy tendons emerged like overcooked spaghetti for a brief second before the ruined hand was covered by gushing blood.
I spied a loose rock. I grabbed it, threw it; it hit the creature square in the face. Its beak opened and spewed out Oscar’s finger and tendon.
Oscar who was holding his hand, too dazed to even register the pain. The snapped end of tendon hung like loose string.
“Dean!” I yelled. The Z bird loped to one side and then to another. I found another rock, threw it and hit the bird right in the face once more. It gave one last, hideous scream and took flight.
“You aren’t so tough on your own, are you, motherfucker?” My triumphant cry was accompanied by Oscar’s scream of agony as his brain finally registered the damage done to his hand and sent messages of exquisite pain throughout his body.
Dean arrived seconds l
ater, his pack open. He grabbed Oscar’s hand and began wrapping it in bandages. He turned and glared at me. “Start the chant again, Trent!”
Somehow I remembered the words, and began the incantation. This time I wasn’t lost in the chant; under I could hear Dean talking to Oscar, trying to calm him with reassuring words. Then to motivate him, to force him to finish the required task. “I know it hurts, but you have to chant with Trent. You have to, or all is lost. Come on, Oscar! Otherwise the trip’s a bust, and we’ll be here forever.”
I continued the chant, repeating the hand gestures. Dean’s words had worked on Oscar; my friend got up and began chanting the words of the incantation, doing his best to make the required gestures with his deformed hand. Blood flew from folds within the bandage as he gesticulated.
Now Dean joined in, leading us as he had promised.
The lines became harder to recite. Dean pointed to one of the warding glyphs he sprayed during a falling-off period of our chant. The glyph glowed - a bright, greenish-yellow illumination - and then the ground began to shake.
We kept up the chant until Dean had us all in a mad frenzy. The words I will never forget.
All–et-ah, muine flagara glon estovah en glu-ee!
Over and over, we recited them till I thought I would go insane.
All–et-ah, muine flagara glon estovah en glu-ee!
All–et-ah, muine flagara glon estovah en glu-ee!
All–et-ah, muine flagara glon estovah en glu-ee!
All–et-ah, muine flagara glon estovah en glu-ee!
“Is it working?” I gasped in a hastily-snatched pause.
Dean nodded. There was a smile on his face, a hint of triumph. Hope surged in my chest, and I took up the chant more forcefully, strengthened by the prospect of victory.
Then the unspeakable happened.
The ocean exploded behind us. Seawater rained down in great sheets that threw us to the ground.
I looked up and saw the source of the aquatic eruption. Sheets of water fell from its barely discernible form, a creature of massive dimensions that, impossibly, grew bigger as it emerged from the sea.
Dean slowly got to his feet, coughing up gouts of salty fluid. He recovered his backpack, frantically searching inside it. I back to the thing in the water. Still it rose, yet to reach its full height. It dwarfed even the monolith.
Dean found what he was seeking: a triangular-shaped notebook. He flipped through the pages and stopped, reading. Then he screamed to us: “Say what I say, and do what I do! No hesitation, no stopping!”
There was nothing else we could do. Shaking off saltwater, Dean ran towards the new behemoth and began chanting new verses. We followed, reciting the best we could, and made the same gestures he did with his hand.
After a few seconds he motioned for us to stop and then yelled: “All-en-Atah, Varthru!”
A second later the thing materialized before us, revealing its true, hideous form.
All I’ve said so far…the horrors pale into insignificance compared to this being whose very appearance made me want to tear my eyes from their sockets.
Oscar began screaming, and I knew his mind had snapped. I did my best to stifle my own screams, but incredibly Dean kept on chanting.
I managed to tear my eyes from the mind-bending mountain of horror before us. I watched Dean draw out a tiny bottle from his pants pocket. He uncapped the lid and threw the contents of the bottle at the creature.
A fine, mist-like substance drifted around the base of the monolith and its terrible twin. The new visitor screamed from its myriad mouths in an agony that I felt rather than heard. My left eardrum exploded. Blood seeped from my nose.
The beast screamed again. This time all I heard was a vast ringing inside my head. Oscar was balled in a fetal position, crying and screaming uncontrollably.
I marveled at Dean! He stood still and defiant, his sanity intact, his strength of purpose undiminished, defiant before the monstrosity that towered above us. He continued to recite the words of the chant, which now sounded like they were coming from a distant, endless tunnel.
Dean produced another bottle from his shirt pocket and repeated the process. The visitation roared again, but Dean stood his ground and continued the incantation. I looked for Oscar, and my heart plummeted at the sight of him running wildly around the monolith’s base, screaming and gibbering unintelligible nonsense.
The behemoth roared again. Amazingly, impossibly, Dean matched its timber and volume. He seemed to grow in size and his body wavered, flickering in and out of my vision after each word.
“Save us, Dean, save us all.” I repeated my new incantation, my new chant.
Dean’s voice took on another quality that was not his own. I witnessed, with awe and terror, the two battled for dominance. Dean matched the creature at its every move. The cards, previously so heavily stacked against us, seemed finally to be in our favor.
Then the cosmic dealer showed its final hand, and damned us all.
The thing screamed again. Tentacles shot out and wrapped themselves around the monolith’s base, and with a nauseating, pulsating heave it pulled itself onto the island.
Dean began anew with an even louder voice and the behemoth reeled backwards, but its tentacle-feelers didn’t relinquish its hold on the monolith. It held on tight, tighter and a loud splintering filled the air. The monolith’s surface began to crack.
Oscar stopped his insane screaming then, staring at the monolith with fresh horror. I called out to Dean but my cries went unanswered.
Dean’s mighty voice issued one final command and the entity performed another mighty, unfathomable pull upon its stone captive. I watched in horror, feeling an impending and inescapable sense of doom and damnation as the New Orleans monolith broke in two.
Dean uttered his final word. At that, the creature vanished. Water rushed back to fill the space it once occupied with the speed only Nature, abhorring a vacuum, can provide.
From the corner of my eye I saw Dean slump to the ground. Fragments of alien stone rained down upon us, accompanied by a choking miasma of seawater and unknowable masonry dust. The top half fell into the ocean with an almighty splash.
In that instant Oscar’s insanity returned. He ran a few feet forwards, stopped to gibber into the heavens, and then ran in the opposite direction to reissue his maddened cries of laughter and despair.
I no longer felt pity for my friend. His insanity was a relief from the final horror. I actually envied him.
Dean was no longer the implacable champion of mankind that defied the terror from beyond our comprehension. His new incantation was a hymn of despair for our planet.
“We are here forever, I’ve damned us all, damned us all!”
He ran a few feet before tripping over a loose rock. His head struck a fallen piece of shattered monolith. A shard from the broken transporter. Inoperable forever more.
The water became very still around us.
I looked around at what we had done. I wiped my eyes and said the only thing that came to mind, from my very soul.
“Ohhhh, God. Please, God…please…”
The God I had prayed to since childhood was unable – or unwilling – to hear me. New gods had taken His place.
And the Earth’s new heavens roiled, boiling with an alien hunger.
THE CONTRIBUTORS
Aaron J. French (a.k.a. A. J. French) edited Monk Punk, an anthology of monk-themed speculative fiction, and The Shadow of the Unknown, an anthology of nü-Lovecraftian fiction. His next anthology Songs of the Satyrs will be published in 2013-14. Aaron's recent article on Thomas Ligotti appeared in issue #20 of Dark Discoveries magazine, where he is also an Associate Editor. Aaron's fiction has appeared in many publications including Dark Discoveries, Black Ink Horror, Something Wicked, After Death..., Bedlam Journal, and The Lovecraft eZine. He is also the Reviews Coordinator for Hellnotes and a member of the Horror Writers Association.
Jonathan Green is a writer of speculative fiction, with m
ore than forty-five books to his name. He has written everything from Fighting Fantasy gamebooks to Doctor Who novels, by way of numerous Black Library publications and myriad short stories. He is also the creator of the Pax Britannia steampunk series for Abaddon Books. To find out more about his current projects visit www.JonathanGreenAuthor.com
John Prescott lives in the deep south and spends time with his two sons, Grafton and Gavin, and his wife and two cats. Author of the hugely popular Revelation Chronicles trilogy (the third and final volume, The End of All Things will be released at the end of 2013) and co-author of the forthcoming YA fantasy Elli Caskell: Monster Hunter with Catherine Swinford. He is the President of White Silver Publishing where he wears many hats. He works full time and umpires girls fast pitch softball. He loves all facets of art and has a huge passion for anything fantasy-based.
Adrian Chamberlin lives in the small south Oxfordshire town of Wallingford that serves as a backdrop to the UK television series Midsomer Murders, not far from where Agatha Christie lies buried, dreaming in darkness. He is the author of the critically acclaimed supernatural thriller The Caretakers as well as numerous short stories in a variety of anthologies, mostly historical or futuristic based supernatural horror. He co-edited Read the End First, an apocalyptic anthology with Suzanne Robb (author of the acclaimed thriller Z-Boat) and has many other projects in the pipeline.
Say hello to Mr Golien at www.archivesofpain.com
James R Powell is a native of Mississippi, where he quietly resides, surrounded by the dark woods that provide inspiration for much of his work. He has numerous cats, and a vast accumulation of old books and weird things. He has worked with a variety of authors, including Neil Gaiman, Brian Hodge, and Scott Nicholson. He has done design work for actor Lance Henriksen, and has painted guitars for Eddie Van Halen.
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