Sanity Line

by Zachary Adam

  Mr. Shadow’s muzzle flashed, an instant behind Niles’s own, and he could have sworn he was watching the bullet. There was a buzzing in his ears, then the collective gasp of hundreds of shocked onlookers. A white-hot, searing pain in his left shoulder. There was no tug, no strong shove. That was Hollywood theatrics. Equal and opposite reactions, and so on, prevented a bullet from throwing you anywhere, without also throwing the shooter. Mostly.

  Immediately, the taste of iron blossomed in his mouth, and before he could think much more about anything, he was falling. The Detective Special tumbled from his hand, joining the broken glass from the cup he had dropped to draw it, and he landed heavily in a small pool of whisky, glass, and ice, presently mixing with that sanguineous humour.

  There was a thunderous applause. Through the haze, looking “upward”, he thought he could make out, against a sudden glare, a packed auditorium or theatre, the crowd of blurry faces eagerly applauding.

  He thought that was a curious way in which to die.

  --Vidcund slammed himself against the now-closed door, his ears still ringing. He had not expected the target to be armed. It was against the law for civilians to own handguns – longarm licenses were available, but there wasn’t one registered to Clayton. Sure, he was a cop, but it was against duty regulations, strictly speaking, to bring your sidearm home with you, much less to have it in open carry at all times.

  Evidentially, the regulations were not universal. He made a mental note to remember that. His mouth was full of the tastes of iron and copper – blood and adrenaline. The adrenaline, he was used to… but the blood?

  He found he actually had to fight through his conditioning to figure out where his body was paining him, and once he had, he wished he hadn’t. He gave a breathless gasp – and could have done little else, his left lung having collapsed as the bullet passed through it – sagging to the floor. Slumped against the wall, he’d dragged a telltale line of blood down the wall with him.

  His vision swam. There were alerts going off inside his glasses, what seemed like a hundred and one icons. Heart rate too high, weapon absent (where did I leave that?), four or five contact notifications.

  “Lucky bastard.” Vidcund spat. The taste of iron was becoming a stench. He was bleeding profusely through his shirt and jacket. Dying. How many people had he killed? How many hundreds of cases had he handled without so much as a scratch?

  He had the sensations of floating, as if he was back in his sensory deprivation tank. Everything became more remote, even the pain, as if the entire situation was abstracted. He was in pain, but it was less actual, visceral pain, and more a memory or an understanding that he was in pain. The sounds had a muffled quality, as if coming in from a great distance.

  He had a dim awareness of jackbooted feet arriving beside him, and then, as he looked up to see who was there, everything resolved to static.

  --Something singularly strange was happening. Death, to the agnostic, was a dreamless sleep from which one never awakened. It sounded terrifying, until you remembered there was no you for it to happen to. It was supposed to be the end.

  Still, the brain could survive for several minutes without the heart, and in the haze of dreams, nobody could say for certain that a second of dream took a second to occur. It so happened that dreams had that peculiar, timeless quality. A tiny mote of lucid thought allowed this to come to Niles Clayton’s attention, while his brain frantically tried to make sense of what was happening to him. He’d found himself underwater, and had clawed his way to shore. As he looked now at the lake he’d emerged from, at the foggy shroud of dense mists that hung upon it, he marvelled that he was not freezing cold. Certainly, there were drifts of snow about, or what must have been snow, even with that ashy quality. It was nighttime. All about him was the smell of brandy. It permeated everything, seeming to reek into his clothing and skin, absorb into every pore.

  He looked up, trying to get a bearing on where he was, and screamed out in the silent horror of dreams to see two moons, radiant and terrible, hanging the one advanced of the other in the sky. His head swam, his mind seemed to bubble, and all at once he felt as though he had exploded from the inside, having an internal awareness of himself as being scattered like dust on the wind.

  He now craved oblivion, and hoped this nightmare would soon be over.

  --The assault on Emir Kath High School had begun, as these things often did, well before the first blow was struck. The Cult of the Sleeping Eye was a fragmented and peculiar device, and from the outside looking in, it was difficult to see that it was, in fact, one united body. There was the Cult itself, of course, with Gloria at the head, but there were also two splinter factions – The Sons of Glory and the Glorious Brotherhood, that were, in turn, lead by Gloria’s lieutenants, Crowe and Baha. And, to the extent that wars waged with magic could be said to contain salvos, battles, or anything a normal war might, Baha was to fire the first few warning shots.

  The Glorious Brotherhood, such as it was, was a rather small group, but, as was their leader’s wont, they made up the erudite and socio-political elite of the Sleepers. They had been recruited among the occultists of Kraterburg – of which there were more than the usually-fair share – and from all walks of life, so long as they combined the three vital traits of studiousness, potential, and access.

  It was the access that had given Baha the idea in the first place. His Agency mole had advised him of something new, of a monster, degenerate race with which the Sleepers had not before made use of. And so he worked alone, in the small secret Sanctum he maintained in a special part of his Kraterburg apartments, working the magic of the Golden King to his own ends.

  He could not speak the Glorious Tongue, as his siblingcohorts could. Very few of his cult did, either. Instead, he worked in a language winnowed out from the best parts of Enochian and Arabic, forcing the dusty smoke that was building up in this sealed chamber into denser and denser form, taking on more and more the shape of a humanoid

  – human was too strong a word.

  The creature that finally materialized was short, perhaps a child’s height, no more than a metre. It had a large head, devoid of all but slitted eyes and a disproportionately large mouth of outsized, human teeth. It had arrived unclothed, and as soon as it had appeared in the ashen circle meant to trap it in this sanctuary, it began to wheeze loudly. Several deadlocked moments passed – it should well have left, by now, using its peculiar talents.

  The longer Baha glared at it, however, the less threatening the wheezing became, until the voice died back completely.

  “… What does my master command?” “We have work to do, little doorman.”

  --A school after-hours was one of the more abandoned places one could find, but that abandonment could not be relied upon. The auditorium would be rather crowded, of course, with actors and technicians and all the other student-workers involved in preparing for their show. The main problem was people outside the school coming in, and how to keep the festivities that were to follow confined to the auditorium.

  Nobody wanted to prolong the risk of exposure playing hide-and-seek with frightened high school students. The solution was as clumsy as it was elegant, and it began with a score of Baha’s doormen, who materialized ex nihilo in the key corridors and access-channels, even lingering in the shadowy gables of side-doors and cafeteria loading entrances. Where they went, their wheezing followed, and the paralysis that came with it needed only a moment to strike.

  Would that it had struck anyone else, or else something might have been done, though imagination fails to determine what could now have prevented the tragedies to follow. If it had been any other student who had reached for the door that connected the auditorium-stage to the central corridor, the paralysis would have been noticed.

  For Maria Frost, however, sudden mental stops, nervous trembling and bouts of unsourced fear were a matter of strictest routine, so much so that the students nearest her

  - the few she counted as friends, anywa
y – did little more than coax her away from the door, speaking in gentle tones to her until she inevitably calmed down again.

  They didn’t become particularly concerned about the outburst of silent fear until she proved more stubborn than usual in being talked out of it, and in her dogged insistences, eventually the supervising teacher made for that very same door, freezing just before it and dragging his hand back from the door as though scalded, taking several large and automatic strides away from it before he’d realized he was supposed to be reassuring.

  There was a pregnant pause there, and it likely would have ended in an outbreak of panic even if what happened next hadn’t.

  --The Blighted Grove had been, in many respects, the birthplace of the sleepers. The legend-cycles of the White Keepers, that priestly caste of the ancient Tererrans who had ruled that wood since time immemorial, claimed that when the good and wholesome gods of Earth had finally sealed away the madness that was the gods with which the Keepers had taken issue, the final blow in that war had been struck here. Even the cultists who heard of the legend did not believe it, and the Blighted Grove was chosen for an altogether different reason. This was where they had gotten their start, in years before memory.

  The body of the main cult, what little of it had survived Gloria’s imprisonment and the rumours of her death, had gathered for a great ceremony. Wood had been felled months ago, in the dead of winter, from selected other groves – for nothing properly grew in the Blighted Grove. The trees that remained were ancient and gnarled, but never showed any least sign of life, apart from having failed to decay for years. This wood was itself specially treated. The faithful who had survived the sede vacante period of the cult’s history had kept to ancient rituals and traditions, repeatedly drying the wood and soaking it in baths prepared with certain essential salts, then drying it again in sheds kept fogged by the burning of certain herbs.

  Now, these logs composed the heart of a central fire that burned in the clearing of the grove, throwing up a thick column of smoke that was visible from distant towns like Anfangsburg, Azuldorf and even the suburbs of Tererra itself.

  Antoine Dobson sat on the back porch of his cabin, watching the smoke rise from the valley in which the grove slept. He and his pals were enjoying the tail end of the deer season – more an excuse for drinking, than one for actual hunting. Deer were few and far between this close to the valley of the grove, preferring the richer bounties a few miles further away. For Dobson and his boys, hunting season was an excuse to get away from the wives.

  He cracked a fresh can of the nation’s cheapest and most popular light beer, snatching up his binoculars from the top of the cooler beside him. After spending a moment focusing, he had a good look at the fire itself. The sickly yellow flames lapped at a heap of wood that had to be intentional.

  “Hell of a bonfire, boys. Let’s go have a look.” It took some doing to get the boys rallied – everyone except Antoine was well into the bag by now, but Antoine was a big boy with a bigger liver, and beer had always made him energetic rather than lazy, at least until after the fact. With some cajoling, though, the four were soon on their way – rifles slung over shoulders, extra beer in backpacks. The way was clear enough – though trackless, the valley pretty well funneled them back to the fire, and on their return, they’d have a fairly decent view of the way without any foliage to obscure their vision.

  --

  “Ia! Nyogtha gofn’n, Ya sll’ha, ya hafh’drn, wgah’n Shugg… ” Only one coherent voice was sounded in the din. The revellers, sky-clad and in the full debauchery of their cult’s precepts, had given away from the chant to a cacophony of ululation, screams, and whoops. There was a fevered pitch to all the proceedings, but one voice chanted calmly and coolly among them all.

  As Gloria’s seemingly broken voice slithered expertly over the tones of that dead language of the gods, that fevered tongue which even the most demented of Pentecostals couldn’t touch upon, the sky had grown darker. There was, for this, no outward cause – no great unscheduled eclipse of the sun, no sudden arrival of clouds. The heady smoke of the bonfire may have accounted for it, were it not rising so perfectly and directly into the air.

  The smoke, or perhaps simply the energy of the ritual itself, had quite the affect on the other attendees, who had devolved into an orgiastic conglomeration of most any kind of sin or vice one would expect. All of man’s great debaucheries – drink and drug, sex, violence – took place under that pall of rank smoke.

  As Gloria gestured and orated, as Baha shaped the smoke itself with his gestures, sending tendrils of filamentous glyphs drifting upward before being re-absorbed into the main column, and as Crowe lost himself in the orgiastic worship of his prized sect, the flames abruptly turned a sickly grey-green, no longer giving out nearly so much light as they had before. The effect was one of twilight in the grove, of premature sunset, were there a sun to be seen.

  It was in this sort of pregnant atmosphere that Dobson and his boys were being lead ever further forward into the press – drawn in at first by the ecstatic activity of the outer periphery, and then, too afraid to wander any further away. It seemed the wrong thing to do, and in this hellish inner circle of the rite, there was too much violence. As they walked ever closer to the fire itself, the dancing gave way to orgy gave way to outright violence. They saw things they did not wish to see.

  Just as they prepared to turn back, the great fire collapsed on itself, and Antoine turned just in time to see three great shapes burst forth from it.

  --Maria was catatonic, or so her frightened classmates were assuming. Minutes had passed, but in those few short moments, virtually all of the drama club, and certainly all of the responsible adults meant to be their minders, had tried the various doors leading out of the auditorium. Immediately, before so much as touching any of them, their ears and minds were filled with a most dreadful wheezing. Many had lapsed into panic attacks – Maria recognized this as the first beginnings of fear in people who had never lived with it before. True fear, as a rat in water, as a wolf cornered by a bear. That visceral contraction that comes at the moment the plane is about to impact the cliff. Mankind had forgotten fear, but a few, like her, had learned it anew.

  And through the haze of fear, through the blind panic that would have her clawing at the walls themselves for egress, she became aware. In a single moment, barely filling a second, she achieved a sort of mental clarity that had drawn her attention to the seating.

  If we can’t get out, how could anyone get in? A shade late, she bolted, snapping out of her apparent catatonic trance to rush for the wings. We say late, because it was in the very moment she began to move that things, more literally than she was comfortable with, went directly to hell.

  There was a great groan like a tossing ship, before the wooden flooring of the seating area blossomed outward, shards of wood thrown with such force that later investigators would come upon the scene as though a bomb had gone off. The others shrieked, but their general terror was really only an inspiration for silence in Maria. She saw, through her peripheral vision, huge slugcreatures, the three of them easily filling both the void they had punched in the floor, and then, as they surged forward into the room proper, what little space the small “orchestra” pit had occupied. She didn’t need to watch them retch to know that they vomited up not a meal but their passengers.

  She’d seen them before. Ridden in them before. She knew all about the Nyogtha gofn’n, the children of the haunter of the dark, and had even summoned them.

  With no better option for hiding, she ducked behind the weighty master curtains, and brought her thumb to her mouth, biting hard at the tender flesh there until she tasted blood.

  There was a sensation akin to waking up, without realizing that you were asleep in the first place, a sort of startled jolt as the train of one’s thoughts suddenly dropped from a height onto the tracks of the waking world. There was a sensation of complete immersion. Vidcund could feel, though he saw and heard little
, that he was wearing a respiration mask. As his mind settled back into a calm, defaulted state, he closed his blind eyes and stretched out, with some practice, for that feeling of otherness, that extra-body propiroception.

  To his great surprise, it came to him all at once, and more strongly than ever. He was struck with the sudden sensation of his limbs, each of them, being in two different positions at once, his eyes at once open and closed, his face at once masked and not. The top part of him was at once floating above the surface of an immersion tank, and completely submerged.

  Ah, yes, I remember now… Spurred by the memory of things he had once forgotten, he shifted his focus, lending more and more of his thinking-time to the set of sensations ascribed to the halfimmersed body. All at once, like the cracking of a stressed joint, these were the only sensations he felt.

  He sat up with such a start that he banged his head on the ceiling of the immersion tank. Drifting for a moment, and dazed, he wondered just what in the hell was going on here.

  “Ya hafh’drn n’gah, n’gah’ai, uln g’rahn hupadgh n’gah. Sll’ha sng’wahl. Sll’ha shug.”

  The chanting could not have belonged to a human voice, and yet human he was who waited behind the skull-like visage of Archangel. The Sepulchre of the Grey Angels was their most sacred space, at least to the cultic members of the gang’s higher ranks. It was a place to honour the fallen, but also a place of great rebirth.

  A pentagram of curved lines had been drawn on the ground beneath the altar, upon which Niles Clayton’s corpse had been reduced to dust. Dead these past three weeks, he was to be returned to life. Usually, the “resurrections” Archangel presided over were of a spiritual and metaphorical nature. Today would be different.