Necropolis: Book 4: Hybrids

by Michel Weatherall

  Tamara opened her hand. The cursed Eye of Osiris was nothing more than a fine powder as it sifted between her fingers. The mummified corpse of Nyarlathotep caved in upon itself. Crumbling to dust as a black energy bled out and fell into the Gateway; that purple radiant hole between the universes. Pharaoh Nyarlathotep was gone. Banished back into its prison-universe.

  And as if the portal knew, its lightning blue plasma bolts angrily sparked as the purple Gateway imploded into a singularity, collapsing onto itself, and finally vanished.

  * * *

  Veronica came up behind the confused Leaman with a fist-sized rock, and struck him in the back of the head. Hard! Maybe too hard. Leaman went down in a heap and lay still beside Hiromitsu's body.

  Veronica stood shakily. Her breathing was heavy. Her knees and hands shook. She couldn't even hold the bloodied rock any longer, her hands weakened.

  She took an exaggerated deep breath, hoping to calm her nerves and began weeping quietly. She was going to check Leaman for a pulse, but as she knelt down she could see the dirt on the floor disturbed by his shallow breathing.

  She quickly took the emptied flare-gun and knife. She found a spare flare on the unconscious Leaman and took it as well. Once she reloaded the flare gun she hesitated only for a moment. She knew Hiromitsu was dead. Some sense of sorrow or remorse or duty or obligation held her there for that moment. She knew there was nothing she could do.

  Leaman stirred and groaned. Veronica needed to draw him away from the children, away from the makeshift elevator and that pit. She'd lead him to the beach. It was open. Nowhere to run and hide.

  * * *

  As Tamara took a moment to compose herself, she almost laughed aloud in the suddenly quiet cave. What a group of lost misfits they were. Herself, something more than human, some unknown sort of hybrid. Holding a pocket-universe open was Dante: a young boy and his Shoggoth. And through a circular dimensional window, her mother, a half-remembered ghost... and as she looked at her mother through the dimensional window she saw her... it – whatever form she had morphed into – was hunched over... crying in the darkness.

  “Mama?” Tamara's voice cracked as she began to weep. She rushed up to the inter-dimensional barrier and pushed her hand against it. Slowly, a taloned bone claw pressed on the other side.

  “...mama... please don't cry...” Tamara's voice was barely a whisper as a tear streaked down her cheek and rolled off her chin.

  “Tamara,” whispered Dante, “I can't hold the Gatesphere much longer.”

  As Tamara spoke between her tears, the green-gold flecks in her eyes lit up. “Mama, we're between worlds now.” The psychic energy coursed through her as she moved her hands apart, making an opening motion.

  That inter-dimensional window shimmered and buckled. Shielded by the surrounding black Gatesphere, like an event-horizon, the window broke and tore into a doorway, a portal.

  The thing that was the Remnant-Marie stepped through. Monstrous, hunched over, her form restricted only to the limits of Marie's imagination and emotional anguish. There was no telling where what might have been clothing ended and flesh began; where bone and sinew and claws changed into black shadows.

  Large spikes, hooks, or feathers arched from her hunched back. Her hands, massive elongated skeletal claws, and her face! The brief moments the rippling cocooning shadows parted enough, revealed a fanged death-mask.

  She – it shambled as it walked towards Tamara, belying a sense of great weight. Yet, in some strange and peculiar way, there was a feeling of great tension, like that of a cat wound-up and ready to pounce!

  “Mama,” Tamara reached her hand out. “You're not alone.” Then, without trepidation, Tamara lunged at the Remnant, wrapping her arms around what could only be its waist, and hugged.

  Marie carefully, hesitantly, and gingerly wrapped her bony talons around her daughter and embraced her. “...my baby... I was so scared...”

  The clothing of shadows Marie wore shimmered and rippled, the sharper, harsher edges of her nightmare form blurring and morphing into something softer, more feminine.

  As mother and daughter held each other in one another's loving embrace, Dante hesitantly inched his way towards the shimmering open portal. Blackness. It was all Dante could see. Utter pitch blackness. His eyes had a difficult time attempting to adjust. He couldn’t tell if he were peering into a vacuous dark space of nothingness or at a solid black surface, it was so intense. There was no frame of reference, nothing to judge scale to.

  Then, in the spiraling abyss he saw something. A tiny spot of light across the immense darkness. Another portal on the other side.

  A dark-skinned Arabic man peered through that other portal, across that extra-dimensional gulf, back at Dante. He was dressed in strange ancient clothing and looked confused.

  Dante, unsure what he was witnessing, hesitantly raised one hand and waved. But before the stranger had time to respond or react, the portal closed; snapped out of existence. The enveloping Gatesphere had collapsed.

  As Dante looked around the vacuous cavern, a sense of a degree of normality had returned. He looked at Tamara as she stood, alone. The ghost of her mother was gone, no longer able to exist outside the pocket-universe the collapsed Gatesphere allowed.

  “I'm sorry Tamara,” Dante was nearly crying. “Is she, is she... gone?”

  Tamara tilted her head to one side and smiled through her tears at Dante. “She's alright! She just couldn't stay here.” She walked to where Dante stood, wiping a tear from her eye and held his hand. “Thank you,” and kissed him on the cheek.

  Dante blushed. He felt awkward. He didn't know what to say... so he changed subjects. “What do we do with that?” he nodded his head towards the Shoggoth.

  Tamara smiled, but before she could answer the very ether in the cavern spiked. Both children felt it, looked at each other and spoke the words at the same time. “She's here!”

  Chapter 12: The Rising of R'lyeh

  She had expected to hear seagulls. She could hear nothing but the loud and muffled rush of the deep ocean winds as it ruffled and snapped at her blood-stained garments like some feral monster.

  Amber materialized in clear blue skies thousands of feet over the ocean. The sun reflecting off a myriad of waves caused her to squint. It was early morning and the air was brisk and crisp, her bare legs chilled.

  In her imagination, Amber had half expected to see seagulls. But she knew this was far too far for the birds. She couldn't have been further from land. She couldn't have been further from anywhere. In the middle of nowhere, in the centre of the Pacific, she found herself as removed and as isolated from humanity as she could possibly be.

  The deep ocean wind tossed and whipped her blonde hair about as she attempted to discern details below. The entire oceanic scene, from horizon to horizon, was as homogeneous as it could be. But she knew where she was. She knew she had arrived.

  The Amber-symbiot could sense it; could feel it in her very being; in her bones and flowing through her blood. She could feel it woven into the very fibers of her being.

  Tiny gravity fluctuations in their multitudes – the very fabric of time – coiling and uncoiling; tightening and untightening like a coiled spring, its energy an untapped potential, just waiting. The entire area, for miles and miles, was saturated with microscopic time-space curvatures. Billions of miniature warp bubbles. And beneath it all, she could see its cloaked secret. It was curled up inside a massive eons old warp bubble. Hidden.

  She reached out into the surrounding air and tentatively plugged into the psychic energy battery this place was. The outré alien energy began trickling into her. It began to physically manifest itself in her subtly at first, as little more than a static charge in her hair. Her restraint abated slightly as she reached out further, allowed more energy to flow. An alien energy began coursing through her; rippling like waves through her body. Her skin became luminescent as her eyes blazed with power.

  And finally, the Amber-symbiot completely
abandoned all restraint! The power blasted through her like the floodgates of some colossal dam had burst! Amber's eyes shone like beacons, her clothes charred and blasted to dust, the energy that poured out of her competed with the brightness of the newly risen sun!

  She released a pulse of unrefined energy. The shock-wave thundered into the ocean and for miles it bowed from the concussion, a massive liquid crater.

  The psychic ether spiked as she amassed still more energy! Her naked body radiated energy; dripping and spraying with blinding white raging power.

  And as the ocean began to return, to rush into its emptied aqua crater, she released a greater energy pulse. Far beyond a simple physical concussion, the gravity spiked exponentially, its energy waves crushed until the very fabric of time-space bent, bowed and warped! She had fractured the hidden warp-bubble!

  At this point Amber turned herself into a living channel for the alien energy. It screamed and roared out of her like a blinding river. The bright blue morning sky appearing dark cyan next to her. The energy stream hammered into the breech.

  The substructure of reality buckled under the incredible gravitonic pressure. Reality bent and snapped!

  * * *

  Veronica had to slow her pace or else she would lose Leaman. He was struggling. He was slow, staggering as often as walking. The blow to the head rattled him severely. He must have been concussed.

  He pursued her through the strange island's forest, through the beautiful blossoms of the Sea Poison Trees.

  Veronica tried to avoid the Durian trees with their mulch of thorny dried fruit husks. Her plan was simple, if not thought out to its conclusion: Lead him to the open beach, away from the children. He had already killed Hiromitsu. Who knew what he was capable of? She had to make sure Dante and Tamara were safe. She hadn't thought her plan past the beach. If Leaman turned on her she had his knife and flare gun still. At least she could defend herself if she had to.

  * * *

  Veronica and Leaman stood facing one another on the beach. The sun had just risen, the light dappled and angled, casing long shadows, as the ocean breeze played with their hair.

  Leaman's head was still throbbing. He wasn't thinking straight; his thoughts still focused on making the woman believe he wasn't mad.

  When it began it commanded both of their attentions. A single peel of thunder in the far off distance. As Leaman watched the sun rise his hair was caressed by a cool breeze coming off the ocean.

  The ocean breeze was gentle and refreshing ...then... it suddenly stopped. He wasn't aware of the sound of the wind in the trees until the entire island went silent. A hush blanketed everything. There was a pregnant tension in the air as the island seemed to hold its breath in anticipation. The breeze changed directions, calm and gentle at first, but quickly accelerating into a gale. Leaves were being torn off the trees and the clouds boiled and swirled above in chaos.

  The lapping waves on the eastern beach became a constant inward flow of water forming a bow-wave identical to a sailing ship's.

  The ocean on the island's opposite side began running away, creating a wake. It felt like the entire island was moving; the ocean rushing past! The optical illusion made it appear like the island was ploughing through the seas, in motion itself!

  It played tricks with your eyes and your sense of motion. One moment it felt as if the island was sailing through the seas. The next moment, like the ocean was rushing past. Was the island traveling east?

  Then the ocean level dropped. Leaman had watched the rise and fall of the strange tides of the island for over a decade but he had never witnessed anything like this! Where the tides might normally take a day to fall, now it was draining like a bathtub! The ocean roared past the island's rocky cliffs like a raging river, agitating itself into white waters!

  The oceans were being moved! The ocean level fell down to the secondary plateau-like lower island. Nine-hundred feet in the air now, the forested island sat atop its stalagmite pinnacle-like cliffs!

  The ocean kept dropping! Now Leaman was alarmed! He had never seen the ocean so low. It was draining!

  Below and beneath the plateaued lower island, extended what appeared to be an ancient land bridge. For a decade it lay beneath the sea under Leaman's feet. Hidden and unknown. How many centuries, how many millennia had it been there? While most bridges arched up, this seemed to tumble and slope downwards, like a descending ramp, the lowering waters revealing more and more of the submerged inclining bridge.

  Leaman's island continued rocketing out of the receding ocean, baring all for him to see. All sense of normality had abandoned nature now as even the horizon buckled and collapsed!

  His island was nothing more than one of many eons old ruined citadels in a hundreds of mile wide ring. It was nothing more than a distant extension of a monstrous city; one lone spire on the far outside rim of the Cyclopean ruins.

  Numerous shattered and broken remnants sat in a hundreds-mile ring surrounding the massive submarine necropolis, but submerged no longer! Titanic land bridges seemed to tumble from these outer fractured citadels to what appeared to be down to the abysmal city itself.

  A sea-soaked perversion speared out of the ocean. At its centre sat a truly monolithic mountain sized edifice; so massive was this multi-tiered tower, that its very balcony-like plateaus could easily have been mistaken for islands in themselves.

  Not only was this central to the corpse-city, its stone peaked tomb was epicenter to the entire superstructure's warped curvature.

  But its angles? The pitch of what should have been normal, sane, level ground, was anything but! Where the sane Oceans of the world's surface would normally be convex, it blatantly defied this normality. The entire mind bending superstructure was nested in a gargantuan oceanic crater-like occurrence. It couldn't be called by any sort of geographic nomenclature or terminology, for it wasn't solid or fixed. It was fluid, both literally and figuratively. Like the surface of a dented ping-pong ball, this colossal area was concave, the water-crater's outer edge appearing like a raised rim of ocean. Distances normally hidden behind the earth's curvature were visible now. Sights and images through angles no naked human eye was ever meant to witness. It was poison to the mind.

  Down its concave slopes the ocean did not flow or pour. The water simply stayed, catching and reflecting the sunlight, acting like all was right, a mockery of normality. The entire arching bowl-shaped superstructure was like the very fabric of reality had been warped and bent to its shape; like new laws of geometry and gravity had taken hold.

  There was no context for its scale. No mountains, no clouds, not even horizons could put it into perspective. Where this concave superstructure bent the eye to the illusion of a fish-eye lens, so too did its scale bend the mind to its breaking point.

  It was a sprawling city of chaos and nightmare. Bent, warped upon itself, and scaled for what must have been an eon's extinct giant race.

  And far, far down below, where the strange ocean ended and the edge of the corpse city began, sat – bent and beached – the partially rusted hull of a once gray naval ship; the Japanese Destroyer, the Yamayuki.

  Although nearly lost to the vastness of the sprawling necropolis, Leaman could never mistaken the ship. Its white painted designation number, 129, barely visible on its rusty and bent hull. How long had it been submerged?

  Chapter 13: Sentinel at Insanity's Cusp

  He wasn't used to the alarms. When they went off he was surprised and startled. Nobody informed him there would be alarms!

  Within the past 24 hours the IT technician was moved out of his tiny monitoring office and into a proper hi-tech computer control centre. The term his supervisors used was 'command centre' but he felt that title somewhat pretentious.

  He was immediately put in charge of a team of 3 variously skilled individuals. He hadn't even got their names memorized yet and they all were in the process of getting the new system up and running when the alarms began.