Norman and Arthur returned with a body each in a fireman’s carry, dropping them unceremoniously by the first one. Sir Roger went to where Gull had retreated. Stepping in close he whispered, “It’s going to take all of them. All the girls. And my wife.”
Gull stared at the shorter man, reassessing him.
Sir Roger continued: “You never had any intention of letting them go. But you’re going to need me. Maybe Watkins too. He knows how to operate the machine once the Old One is awake. You need me to keep that…thing…where it can’t get to you. But it will take all of them to bring it on line. You understand?”
“You’d sacrifice your wife and daughter…?”
“That’s a decision I made a long time ago. Who would you pick, yourself or your gray-haired old mum?”
Gull smiled. “When you put it that way, it’s hard to argue. But don’t think I trust you. I’ll be keeping my gun pointed right at the middle of your back the whole time. If I think you’re tryin’ to pull the wool I’ll let you have it and take my chances with old Cthulhu.”
“I would expect nothing less.” Sir Roger glanced furtively at the girls. “What I need you to do is get them all bunched up together. Or better still, let me do it. I’ll tell them… I’ll tell them it’s an escape plan.”
Gull shook his head and held his hands wide in a gesture of disbelief. “Do it.”
Sir Roger explained to the girls and his wife that he needed them to huddle together and link arms tightly. He whispered that it was their only chance, glancing nervously back to Gull to check that his actions still met with approval. Emily looked into her father’s face and saw deceit and betrayal there, mixed with absolute terror. He was truly and deathly afraid of what lay beyond the hatch. He was the only one who truly understood what awaited them. A treacherous fleeting thought skipped across her mind as she wondered who he was betraying.
“Watkins, grab the first one by the legs, I’ll get him under the arms.”
They lifted the dead soldier and swung him out over the hatch, letting go so that he plummeted into the dark to the almost immediate echo of a splash.
“We need the bodies to fall in a triangular pattern,” he said, lifting the next one. “Trust me,” he said, in a whisper.
The second body fell with another splash. “Don’t think, just follow my instructions.” He pretended to struggle with the last body. “We pretend to throw the girls in, but we go in too.” Watkins dropped his end of the body. He glanced into a darkness that hid some nameless monster from the dawn of time, an evil that avidly desired their souls.
“I don’t want to die either,” Sir Roger said in a low voice. Then louder, “Come on man, get it up. We haven’t all day.”
Watkins lifted the body and threw it down the hatch, hoping they had achieved the required pattern. Every fiber of his body cried to him to run. The last place on this or any other world he wished to be was closer to the thing he could hear stirring below.
“I think we got its attention,” Sir Roger said out loud. “Come on, Watkins, let’s get the girls in place.”
The scientist and the butler moved their charges to the edge of the hatchway. Sir Roger thrust his hands into the midst of the clutch of bodies and grabbed on tight. Watkins, followed his lead. “Now, jump,” he said and pushed forward. Watkins squeezed his eyes tight shut and pushed from his end.
Gull watched aghast as their captives tumbled into the noisome darkness below deck. Too late he attempted to bring his revolver to bear on his disappearing captives. He heard a huge splash as they hit the water then momentary silence. A harrowing ululation leapt from the watery pit beneath his feet. It rose in volume, persuading him that it could not be coming from human throats. He ran to close the hatch. As he reached the edge a tentacle the thickness of a man’s trunk wound out from the darkness at his feet. Mud and slime and ichor dripped from it as it snaked about Gull’s waist. He added his own voice to the cacophony that accompanied the oncoming Old One. His cracked voice was unable to encompass the totality of his terror and pain. More tentacles emerged, waving like snake tongues tasting the air. The Old One tore Gull limb from limb, bathing itself in his rich crimson blood.
Tentacles spread across the floor beyond the hatch. They tensed, gripping the surface with suckers the size of dinner plates, levering its body upwards to freedom. Norman and Arthur as one, emptied their revolvers into the horror facing them, then turned heel and ran. The floor bulged and buckled as a body far bigger than the small hatchway forced itself upward. With a terrible rending sound the iron deck split, curling backward like pencil shavings. The ancient creature pushed itself entirely into the growing light of a northern dawn seeping through a series of skylights above. Gull’s fleeing assistants looked back seeing their fate gathering itself to begin pursuit. The floor sagged under its incredible weight. Momentarily they thought they might be saved as the horror slid backwards, the floor sagging back into the depths.
Shaking itself, the being they thought of as Cthulhu, but which bore another name entirely, hauled itself along the bowed deck and slid free from its watery dungeon, moving inexorably toward them. Norman stood to face his doom, reciting aloud the twenty-third psalm. Arthur legged it toward the stairway. Neither man completed his self-assigned task as the tentacled monster gathered them into its red-lined maw, their screams failing to rise above the beast’s howls.
For the longest time Emily, her parents and her birthday guests huddled in waist deep water, listening to the nightmare sounds overhead. They huddled together shivering from the iciness of the water and the fear that had infused their very bones, at every moment expecting the return of the ancient one. Sir Roger whispered a stream of reassurances, though no-one really believed him.
They listened to its progress across the decking, the reducing volume of its hysterical wailing signaling its passage. A tremendous shudder passed through the entire structure causing waves to splash to shoulder height. A horrendous rending noise followed hard behind the shock. Then nothing. They stood shivering, all staring towards the light above. Nothing moved, no sounds reached their ears. Eventually Sir Roger said, “I think we are safe to make our way out of here. Everyone hold hands and follow me.”
A curl of deck dipped into the water ten yards distant. The jagged edge served as a rude staircase though its sharpness rendered progress slow. With the assistance of Watkins and Sir Roger the ladies made their way to freedom. Apart from a gash to Lady Sandra’s calf they emerged safely from the capture chamber. Overhead a large portion of the roof had been torn away to provide an escape route for the Old One.
“I have never been so frightened in my life,” Lady Hant said and began to laugh as relief flowed through her with every beat of her heart.
All eyes turned to her. Smiles crept onto the faces of the girls, infected by her laughter. To her father Emily said: “How did you know it wouldn’t eat us?”
Sir Roger’s cheeks reddened. He cleared his throat, stared fixedly at the floor then raised his gaze to meet that of his only child. “I didn’t.”
Lady Hant’s laughter ceased abruptly.
“When Gull claimed it was Cthulhu in the capture chamber I must admit I despaired. Were it he, there was no hope for any of us.”
“You didn’t know whether it was Cthulhu or not?” his wife asked.
“No.”
“What if it had been?”
“It was a calculated risk.”
“Calculated?” she asked.
“I calculated that if I did nothing we were dead anyway. I hoped that the Old One would consider the chance to escape more attractive than feeding.”
“I thought the beast needed souls to bring it to life,” Emily said. “Was that not the whole reason for our kidnap?”
“The beast, as you call it, was always alive and awake. It needed souls to give it the strength to lift the ship it was to power – like throwing a faggot onto the fire.”
Emily gasped, covering her mouth with her palm. “How could
you…?”
Lady Hant continued: “How could you even consider such an abomination?”
Sir Roger said: “With a war against the Kaiser looming there were men in Government that began to panic.”
Watkins added: “Sir Roger stood against them from the beginning, Mum. Even though it was his invention, he was four square against the capture engine being used for this purpose. In the end they didn’t have the stomach for it.”
“This place has been mothballed for the past three months. All that was left was the safe disposition of the beast.”
“Thank goodness it has gone,” Emily said.
“But it’s free somewhere out there in the world. I shudder to think of the destruction it may cause should it wish vengeance.”
“And will it?” Lady Hant asked her husband.
Sir Roger slowly shook his head. “Who can know how such a mind works. It is unknowable. But I dread to think what it is capable of should it wish us harm.”
“I pray it will not,” Emily said.
“We may need to pray for all of mankind,” Sir Roger said, taking his daughter’s hand into his own and squeezing gently.
The Strange Company
Pete Rawlik
Danielle Thornton stood in the observation blister of the strato-sphere as the bleak landscape sped below. The setting sun cast long ominous shadows across the wild lands. Behind her, Sir Arthur was strategizing with her husband Philip St. John, while Captain Edward Norrys and Doctor Eric Clapham-Lee coaxed more speed out of the drive. This was the calm before the storm, and they all knew it. The last few months had been a whirlwind of globe-spanning terror. She and William and those they had called friends had been forced to give up their exploration of the more remote regions of the world, and instead focus on doing what Philip had suggested was their true calling. Gone were the days of standing triumphantly over raided tombs and unearthed artifacts, no longer were their days filled with long dead bones, gleaming gold, or carved idols. No, these days the strato-sphere and her crew were in constant battle against those who had found a way to harness the inhuman and eldritch forces of the universe, the enigmatic Lords of the Dragon!
To Danielle, Philadelphia seemed a lifetime ago, but it had only been eight months since their mysterious benefactor, who they knew only as N, had set them on the trail of the Dragons, fettering out their agents, foiling their plans, and when they could, destroying their strongholds. Philadelphia had been the beginning, but that had led to Providence and the devastating conflict with the necromancer Joseph Curwen and his legions of undead servitors. They had gained a friend in that battle, the resurrected medieval alchemist who would only identify himself as Number 118, but still a valiant ally. Providence had led to Arkham, and then to Dunwich where the Dragons had enslaved the population and sought to breach the veil of reality itself. Wilbur Whateley, who had been something less than entirely human, had himself been the key to opening the gate that would span both time and space. The gate had been Whateley’s sister, a thing even more monstrous, less human than Wilbur had been; she had been an invisible thing that walked on myriad elephantine polyps and strode across the land like a demigod, devouring all that stood. Number 118 had thwarted the monsters by activating a resonator inside the opening dimensional gateway. The resulting explosion had obliterated the conjoined siblings, the thousands of gathered cultists, and the fleet of enemy aerostats. Only the armored strato-sphere had been blown clear, her crew essentially unharmed, but the Round Mountains and the communities of Dunwich and Aylesbury had been wiped clean, vaporized into a glassy flat plain by what the radiomen had dubbed the Dunwich Horror.
They had searched for 118 for days, but in the end, the Strange Company, for that is what the more sensational periodicals had long ago dubbed them, had to accept the inevitable, 118 was lost, he had sacrificed himself to save his friends, and the world in the process. They had sworn vengeance, and N had not only sent word expressing his condolences, but of a new clue as well. Documents had revealed a link to a warehouse in Prague. The Strange Company took a day in Arkham, which allowed Captain Norrys to meet with researchers at the Miska-tonic Institute of Technology and discuss their upcoming expedition to the Antarctic. As the sole survivor of the Shackleton-Scott Expedition, his experience in that icy, wind-swept wasteland would be invaluable. Such knowledge would be useful, not only to the men of learning, but to the captains and crews of the aerodynes Arkham and Miskatonic, former leviathan hunters, now retrofitted for exploration.
Crossing the Atlantic had not gone well. The strato-sphere had caught the attention of a bull leviathan that had wandered down out of the upper atmosphere. Whether the thing had seen the tiny airship as food or a potential mate wasn’t that important, either way the thing had latched its ropy tendrils around the globe of speeding metal, and wasn’t interested in letting go. Danielle had tried to reach into its mind with her own, but the thing’s brain was simply too rudimentary to respond to any of her subtle commands. Jermyn had grabbed his rapier and taken to the decks themselves, swinging and leaping like a full-blooded Ophiri, but to no avail, his single blade was no match for the thousands of drifting tendrils that entangled the ship. In the end, Clapham-Lee had no choice but to route power from the engines to the shell of the ship itself producing an electrical charge that finally forced the leviathan to recoil in agony and retreat back into the sky.
The strategy had left the strato-sphere free, but crippled, and they had limped across the sky and sea like a skipping stone before coming to rest on the desolate island that was Bermuda. It took two days for a ship of Ophiri to speed from their base in Anchester to bring supplies and parts for repairs. Magnificent aerialists, The Ophiris prehensile feet were made for the weightlessness generated amongst the negating plates, though their large fingers made tool manipulation difficult. Still under Clapham-Lee’s direction and with the assistance of Norrys, the ship was back in operation after just three more days. It was good to leave Bermuda behind, it was a sad little place, and it reminded her of all the other trans-oceanic station islands whose trees had been sacrificed to the steam engines that had come to dominate the last century.
Prague was a trap; a contingent of the resurrected had been waiting for them, commanded by Gregor Samsa, a horrid little man who had made a deal with alien forces to himself become something alien. He wasn’t as nearly incomprehensible as the Whateleys, but had voluntarily become something akin to a giant coleopteran, and that had made Danielle’s skin crawl, and it had been her that had crushed the man’s head underneath a machining press. Her only regret was that their target, Joseph Nadek, one of the few remaining Dragon Lords had escaped, and fled into the wilds of Transylvania.
That had been two days ago, and now they were speeding through the Carpathians towards what was presumably the endgame. N’s array of telescopes at the lunar colony had spotted Nadek’s ornithopter at Castle Ferenczy. Count Ferenczy, one of the world’s leading industrialists, had finally revealed himself, or been revealed by Nadek, as the leader of the Dragon Lords. The lunar observers, Mi-Go friendly to the cause, reported a fleet of airships, enough to threaten any nation, in various stages of construction around the castle. Such a show of force would not go unnoticed for long. The British fleet would soon be heading east, and after that the Germans would mobilize their subterranean forces. To the south the Turks would deploy their own air fleet, under the command of their brilliant but maniacal Admiral. The Russians, not to be outdone, would follow the orders of Czarina Anastasia and their armored mammoth cavalries would march west. Even neutral Switzerland, had its battalions of flesh golems. The armies of five nations would rush headlong into conflict with an enemy they did not know or understand.
The more Danielle thought about it, the more she believed that the world stood on a precipice. The combined armies might be able to stop the forces of the Dragon Lords, but what then? With so many soldiers, so many machines, so many national heroes, could a conflict between the great powers be avoided? I
f it started in Europe, could it be contained, or would it spread to the colonies, engulf the globe and lay waste to everything in its path? Would the Moon and Mars be spared? Was there anything that the Strange Company could do to stop it? Would the whole world end up like the gray, cold landscape that was passing below?
Thornton turned away from the window and joined St. John and Sir Arthur around their maps. She didn’t need to be psychic to know that they were both frustrated and uneasy. “Do you have a plan?” she inquired reluctantly, fingering the strange canine amulet around her neck.
St. John took her hand in his and held it tight. “I think we do. God help us I think we do.”
Twenty minutes later St. John, Sir Arthur, and Captain Norrys were standing on the rear service deck, the wind whipping around them. Norrys had an arm around a steel strut and was staring down at Castle Ferenczy below. He had to scream to be heard over the howling sky. “Are you sure this is a good plan?”
Sir Arthur placed a hand on the man’s shoulder and laughed. “Edward Norrys was one of the world’s greatest pilots. That’s why Scott and Shackleton took him to Antarctica. It’s why he survived when all the others didn’t. You have to remember that all that is there inside you. All that knowledge about gravity, aerodynamics, wind shear, and wing design, you have access to all of it, and you just have to put it together.”
Norrys nodded. “Just give me a minute to dredge it all up.”
St. John placed his hand on Norrys’ other shoulder, “Sorry Ed, it’s now or never.” With a quick nod to St. John the two lifted the plump little man over the rail and tossed him over.
Jermyn gave St. John a wicked smile. “What’s the matter Phillip, did you expect to live forever?” Then he tossed back that dark black mane of hair and followed Norrys.
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