Steampunk Cthulhu: Mythos Terror in the Age of Steam

by Jeffrey Thomas

  The Reverend rightly assumed any of these New Valusians walking around of their own volition were acquiescent in the hell the young woman he’d buried had been put through. He had no compunctions about firing into their midst, but he directed his aim at the statuesque Susannah Coyle, furiously levering his tri-repeater arm and cutting loose with a rapid barrage.

  The New Valusians weren’t used to facing gunfire and scattered, dropping their makeshift weapons in their mad flight.

  Susannah Coyle didn’t budge. To his amazement, the fifteen bullets he had flung in her direction all stopped and hung suspended in mid-air a few feet from the porch, spinning in a tight group.

  When he lowered his smoking arm, frowning, he became aware of a deep thrumming in the air.

  The door to the house opened and two muscular white-clad men armed with primitive, two-handed stone headed mallets appeared.

  “The Pacifier Field,” Susannah explained, flicking the spinning bullets one by one with her finger until they bounced down the porch steps and rolled harmlessly in the dust at the Reverend’s feet. “An electromagnetic generator. It protects our Nesting House from those who do violence. It’s on its most agreeable setting now, but when I order it directed against your person, it will repel all your metal components, even from each other. That suit of yours will come apart and fly to the compass points.”

  “It’s not a suit,” said the Reverend.

  He planted one foot on the porch step.

  It groaned beneath his weight.

  Behind Susannah, the two men shifted their grips on their weapons uncertainly.

  As the Reverend advanced, he met with an invisible membrane of resistance that caused his metal body to shudder uncontrollably.

  But it was a membrane, not a wall.

  He pushed on.

  He lifted his tri-repeater arm as if to stick the barrels against the woman’s forehead. She didn’t move.

  It took a maximum effort to extend his arm to eye level. Once it was there, he had to grit his teeth to hold it in position, his face reddening. His aim was shaky. It was like trying to keep a steady hand in a high wind while holding a ballooning handkerchief.

  He glared down the barrels of his rifle arm at her.

  When he tried to engage the firing mechanism, he found it impossible. A bolt on his elbow joint rattled and blew free of the housing. He heard the clicking of his pressure gauge needles, the hiss of excess steam billowing off him as his internals did their utmost to compensate against the irresistible field.

  There was the unmistakable groan of bending metal.

  Finally, with a gasp, he let go, his gun arm practically springing back from the porch. The three rifle barrels slid from their housings and clanged to the ground as the bolts holding them slipped free.

  He frowned deeply.

  Susannah smiled.

  Then the Reverend twisted and lunged at her with his human arm, straining to grip her slender throat with his fingers, like a man reaching through a window up to his armpit.

  She stumbled backwards and raised an arm in signal to some unseen viewer…but stopped and turned to look behind her, as if someone had tapped her shoulder.

  “Yes, lord?” she said, though he heard no audible voice.

  The Reverend inclined his head. She seemed to be addressing a flanged copper phonograph tube situated over the door beside a glass eye. The lenses within the eye shimmered and turned.

  Susannah stared at the eye.

  “Are you certain, lord?”

  She nodded, then turned back to the Reverend.

  “My master is intrigued by you. He will admit you into his presence, but you must relinquish your weapons.”

  The Reverend glared. He wanted inside the place, but should he put himself at their mercy? He couldn’t see any other way around it.

  He took out his LeMat pistol and gripped it by the barrel.

  One of the guards stepped off the porch, hesitated, and took it, slipping it through his own sash.

  Satisfied, Susannah raised her hand. The thrumming sound ceased. She held up two fingers. The Reverend looked over his shoulder. There was a small shed beside a tall metal windmill just across the yard. His eyes caught a shimmer of golden light along the fan blades and noticed that the head seemed to be set upon a turret, positioned so that the fan pointed toward the house. The mill fan revolved against the wind.

  “No tricks,” said Susannah, “The Pacifier will be set to setting two.”

  She turned and went into the house. The brutes with the hammers flanked him.

  He followed her inside.

  She led him down a dim hall, his heavy footsteps straining the floorboards. Passing one sunlit room after another, he saw evidence of the same horrors Concepción had suffered. In the first large room there was a row of fifteen or twenty iron beds, each with a covered feminine form, brown limbs dangling loose from beneath bloodstained sheets, a naked, branded haunch visible. A man and a woman carried one of the bodies out on a canvas stretcher and fell in line behind them.

  “Not enough volunteers for your breeding experiments?” the Reverend remarked.

  “What do you know about our breeding program?” she asked.

  “All that a woman who escaped from this place could tell me before she died.”

  “And her offspring?”

  “Food for the buzzards.”

  “That’s a pity,” she said, glaring back at him. “To answer your question, the Brethren do not serve the master in that capacity. Only the Mexicans and Indians we gather for that purpose.”

  “Who is your master?”

  “You’ll meet my master soon enough.”

  And you’ll meet mine, he thought.

  “I imagine kidnapping women doesn’t very well insure their loyalty to your master.”

  “My master doesn’t require their loyalty,” Susannah said. “Only their wombs.”

  Through another doorway he saw a smiling nurse going from basin to basin spooning from a bushel of ground meat. From each of the basins pale, scute-covered tails writhed and infant hisses sounded. More bastard aberrations. Reptiles somehow born of women. But what had fathered them?

  The stretcher-bearers veered off into the next room. There was a leather curtain across the doorway. The Reverend heard the sharp sound of a blade striking a block.

  “What’s in there?” the Reverend demanded, halting so that the two men behind him thrust their hammers into his back with a dull clang.

  Susannah Coyle looked over her shoulder, her face impassive as the chopping sound continued.

  In a moment another nurse emerged with a bushel of ground meat identical to the one the first nurse had carried. She smiled politely as she shouldered past them and went down the hall to the nursery.

  “If you please,” said Susannah, gesturing for him to continue.

  The Reverend’s jaw worked behind his lips. He would see this place burned. But first he would see its architect.

  The hall ended in a thick oak door which slid open revealing a spacious closet into which Susannah stepped.

  No, not a closet. It was a wooden elevator that only went down. The guard carrying his pistol stepped past him and laid his hammer in the corner, then manned the control lever.

  Susannah raised her imperious eyebrows expectantly. The guard behind the Reverend prodded him with his hammer.

  The Reverend smiled grimly. Suddenly his iron elbow snapped up. He flattened the nose of the guard behind him and sprang into the elevator, bringing his full weight to bear.

  It wasn’t a huge leap, but given the considerable mass of his metal body, he instantly smashed through the wooden floor and plummeted feet first down the shaft like an anvil.

  The guard struck his head and fell silently. Susannah shrieked like an outraged catamount. She reached out in free fall and clamped her hands on either side of his face, wrapping her long legs about his torso. She dug her nails into his cheeks, scrabbling to get at his eyes.

  The Reve
rend flinched away as her claw-like fingers slashed open his face. She was strong. Reaching up, his hand found one of the pressure valves and twisted it open, venting a blast of scalding hot steam into her eyes.

  Susannah wailed and released the Reverend’s head, clutching at her scorched face.

  The Reverend saw the rapidly approaching light at the bottom of the shaft and said a quick prayer that the trust he placed in the angel Nisroch’s workmanship was not unfounded.

  His iron feet struck the ground with tremendous force, but the hydraulic compensators in his heavy legs did their job, his more fragile components suffering no more than a jarring bounce. Susannah Coyle and the guard were not so fortunate.

  The Reverend found his LeMat among the splattered remains and returned it to his holster, then smashed through the wooden doors.

  He stepped from the gory shaft bottom into a roughhewn tunnel reinforced with steel supports.

  The tunnel was artificially lit by some kind of electrical lamps that made the underground structure as bright as day. The lamps sprouted like brilliant blossoms from vines of brass tubing that ran the length of the passage.

  He saw one of the glass lenses with the accompanying phonograph tube positioned high on the wall, regarding him like the fearful eye of a hooked fish. A distinctive reddish tube led from the back.

  The Reverend picked it from among the others and followed it down the tunnel.

  Ignoring tributary passages down which he could discern the churning of mysterious machinery, he came at last to a sliding door covered in brass sheeting. The red tube disappeared behind the wall.

  He slid the door open.

  The room was a grand bedchamber. The floors and walls were plated in cool reflective brass and draped in regal purple cloth, the ceiling domed and covered with a vast mosaic depicting clothed, three-eyed serpent men lounging on daises while lines of naked, bent backed humans toiled to erect great streamlined cityscapes and bizarrely angled monuments. Dominating the scene was an enormous reptilian figure with the body of a snake and humanoid torso and arms, like the bastard things that had burst from Concepción’s womb. It bore a cloak of many-colored feathers, and its inhuman eyes were great jewels.

  In a corner of the room, the red tubing ended in a workstation like a telegraph operator’s desk, with a glass bauble and a kind of diadem fixed on a stand. Flickering upon the bauble was a miniature picture of the corridor and the ruins of the elevator. As the Reverend watched, the skin on his arm rose, for the picture moved. He saw the ends of a pair of ropes dancing at the bottom of the shaft, and realized he was looking at an actual moving picture of the spot through the glass lens.

  The New Valusians must be descending on ropes.

  His gaze fell on the luxurious circular bed. A naked Indian woman lay on her belly. Her body was covered in fresh cuts, a fresh black brand burned onto her buttock. The offending iron, the end still glowing hot, lay discarded on the floor. He went over and picked it up.

  The woman’s pain-glazed eyes met his. She raised one feeble finger, indicating a curtained side door.

  He nodded and went to it.

  He found himself in a tight, circular staircase. His anger mounting, he descended the stone steps three at a time, winding downwards, until at last he came into an even more immense chamber, where a strange, steady rasping noise pervaded the cool air, echoing off the unseen walls.

  Too late he felt a tingle in his frame like the one the Pacifier Field had elicited in him on the porch. A great invisible force took hold of him as soon as he stepped away from the stair. He was whisked end over end into the air, finally clanking against some unseen object suspended from the ceiling. The branding iron flew from his hand and stuck there too. He flailed with his human arm and wrenched his head about to try and see what had a hold of him. It was a great mechanical arm terminating in some kind of powerful magnet. It held him firmly by the small of his back.

  Below, a fantastic figure reared up beside a boxy control console.

  It was not unlike the snake babies, but a fully-grown specimen, red scaled, with three expressionless black eyes and a flicking forked tongue. Its lean, muscled arms were banded in gold armlets, and it wore a baroque golden diadem upon its head, the design of which accentuated its third eye. Beneath its waist, a grotesque, glistening barbed hemipene retracted like a huge snail before his eyes into a protective fold in its serpentine underbelly.

  The Reverend curled his lip in disgust at the creature. He was unable to move, nor could he free the branding iron. He remembered his pistol and reached for it, but the holster was empty. It must have been drawn out and was now lodged behind his back somewhere.

  The serpent man twisted a silver knob on the console and the great magnetized appendage hissed along a pneumatic track on the ceiling, bearing him along. It slithered beneath him, watching.

  A metal walkway extended partway over a great black abyss carved out of the stone. At the end of the walkway was a squat copper device of indeterminable purpose. The Reverend could see no bottom to the hole, but in the shadow at the edge of his vision, maybe a mile down, something huge and vaguely metallic moved like the tail of a great, scaly trout glimpsed in the murk of a lake. The magnetic arm swung out over the chasm, and the enormous thing stirred beneath the Reverend’s dangling feet.

  The serpent man raised one of its clawed fingers to the diadem. The Reverend felt an itching sensation in the center of his forehead which quickly evolved into a stabbing pain that drowned him in a wave of nausea.

  Suddenly he lost all sense of place or time. He no longer hung from the cavern ceiling, he was floating free, tumbling end over end in directionless space, bombarded with overlapping interrogatives that slashed at him like a storm of knives.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about!” he hollered above the din in his mind.

  The onrush of demands coalesced into a single image, that of the stylized Nehushtan symbol on his shoulder plate.

  The symbol glowed like fire. Then it cooled into a black emblem on a regal purple standard fluttering before a grand, columned temple carved from a wall of rock far beneath the earth in the center of a red lit city. A city not of men, but of serpents.

  Yoth. The city’s name was Yoth. The last bastion of a great empire the serpents called Valusia, that had risen and fallen eons before the furthest hairy ancestor of man had ever loped across the earth.

  The serpent folk slithered along the alien balustrades of their subterranean city and paid obeisance to the Nehushtan beneath the strange arches of the monolithic temple, wherein, among the thick clouds of burning incense, a terrible shape moved among the high columns.

  Yig. Yig was its name. The Father of All Serpents.

  But far down in the depths beneath Yoth, a pair of reptilian scientists discovered a dark and immense toad-like shape squatting among cold, blue-lit caverns. They prostrated themselves before the toad-god, Tsathoggua, and spread his worship of ritual murder and bestiality among the decadent folk of Yoth.

  The incense ceased to burn in the temple of Yig.

  As the heretics wrested control from the Yiggians, the high priest led Yig’s faithful away from the evil of the toad worshipers, away beneath a faraway mountain called Voormithadreth. The Reverend saw them, slithering out of their underground kingdom with the Holy Sign of Yig before them, keeping the savage and bestial Yothans at bay.

  “Why’re you showing me these things?” the Reverend demanded.

  Then among the reptilian exodus he saw a single figure part from the rest. The red scaled thing that even now regarded him. God, how old was it?

  He saw it skulk among the caves and alleys of the earth, as the time of men came and their civilizations took root.

  He saw it driving out the savage Yothans wherever it found them, in nests beneath human cities, where they stole the women of humankind and mated with them, producing the mad offspring the Reverend had already seen.

  He saw the red serpent man come into the camp of a
great band of Semitic nomads in the desert. The nomads had stumbled across a nest of Yothans, and many were dying of their poison. To their leader, the red serpent gave the Holy Sign of Yig, fashioned from a wooden cross with a brass snake upon it. The Nehushtan. It drove the Yothans away, boiling their cursed blood with the truth of Yig.

  “No,” whispered the Reverend, as he came to understand what the thing had shown him. Lies. It had to be lies.

  Yet Numbers 4:8 resounded in his mind.

  And the Lord said unto Moses, Make thee a fiery serpent, and set it upon a pole: and it shall come to pass, that every one that is bitten, when he looketh upon it, shall live.

  A wave of alien amusement invaded and mocked his mounting outrage. It made him feel ignorant and childlike. He pushed it aside angrily.

  “Lies!”

  In the shadows deep beneath him, the great unseen creature shifted. He could hear its breath, faintly.

  Yig? he thought. No. A new word pushed into his consciousness.

  Amphisbaen.

  And with the word, there came a terrible image of the red serpent man astride a colossal worm beast with a head at each end.

  The Reverend shuddered and looked away, back down the walkway.

  There, in the doorway of the stairwell, he saw the naked Indian girl leaning against the frame, staring, long black hair matted, blood trickling down the insides of her thighs.

  The Reverend’s eyes flitted briefly to the console.

  The girl nodded, then shivered in pain and slid to her knees.

  “Why then do you father your abominations on the poor women your followers steal?” the Reverend called down to the serpent man, to distract him, and to preoccupy his own mind, lest the poor girl be discovered.

  Then he saw the red serpent’s plan.

  He saw it callously tupping the squealing women. They were only breeding stock. Cattle to incubate its seed and bring forth monsters. Oblivious of any hypocrisy, it had no army to command, so it had decided to father a great horde of these mindless hybrids out of practicality. Then it would drive them with the Sign of Yig like hunting hounds into rabbit warrens, into the deep heart of the befouled city of Yoth. Let the corrupted creatures fight it out. Then the red serpent would ride the Amphisbaen into the midst of the city, pull down the crude, blood-soaked basalt altars of Tsathoggua and restore the defiled Yiggian temple. Then further, down into the blue-lit caverns where the toad-god itself dozed in corpulent slothfulness upon hundreds of spindly legs. The red serpent would bring fire to Tsathoggua and its infidels.