by Paul Crilley
-64ak/4.”
Graves stares at me. “Those are coordinates.”
“For?”
“Alternates. That’s why they were after that globe. It was like . . . a map.”
“To what?”
“I have no idea.”
I look at Graves expectantly. “Well? We know what they wanted. Open up the Slip. Let’s get out of here.”
“The Slip’s not here. Besides, we’re not leaving yet.”
“Why the hell not?”
“Because we need to find out what’s actually going on. That’s what all this has been about. Or did you miss that?”
“No, I didn’t miss that. I just thought you could do it without me. I’ve undergone a traumatic workplace experience. I could probably sue the Company for worker’s compensation. Hey . . . I might never have to work again.”
Graves snorts. “Good luck with that.”
“Why?” I ask suspiciously.
“Because the Company makes sure it’s absolved of all responsibility for that kind of stuff. I’m not saying they wouldn’t . . . you know . . . lend a hand if you went crazy. Or give you a few free sessions with the in-house shrink. But compensation? Not a chance.” He sets off toward the stairs.
I wait a few seconds, then kick the altar and follow. What choice do I have?
The cellar stairs take us up to a door that opens into a long corridor. A faded carpet travels the length of the passage, and oil paintings hang on the walls. I stare at the closest one. It’s some kind of monster. A massive creature with tentacles hanging from its face and bat wings on its back. The next one is a painting of space, but hanging between the stars is a glass tetrahedron, inside of which is a huge eye staring balefully at the viewer.
“Was I kidnapped by a Dungeons & Dragons cult?” I whisper.
“What is Dungeons & Dragons?”
“It’s a game.”
“Then no, you have not been kidnapped by a Dungeons & Dragons cult. The people we’re dealing with are very dangerous.”
“Which is why we should leave,” I say, checking over my shoulder as we make our way along the corridor.
“These people are responsible for me losing my job!” says Graves. “And now I know where they are you want me to run away?”
“Not run. More . . . strategically withdraw. You know, so you can come back with reinforcements.”
“Reinforcements? Led by the Inspectre? So he can take all the credit? No thanks.”
He stalks along the corridor, and I follow close behind. I’m not sure if the place is a manor house or a small castle. Either way, I’m not very impressed. All I see is a cold stone building with too many corridors. Don’t know why anyone would want to hole up in one. Heating bills must cost a fortune.
Two times we almost run into robed cultists, and both times we just manage to dart through a door to avoid being discovered. We finally stop before a massive iron door. Graves puts his ear to it and listens, then nods at me.
“They’re in there,” he whispers.
Graves ducks down into a crouch and opens the door a crack. The mutter and grumble of conversation drifts out from the room beyond. Graves waits a few seconds, then slips through the door.
I follow. We’re on a wide balcony high above a wide room. The balcony is dark, but a fierce orange light flickers up the walls of the room below. I can hear the spit and crackle of a fire.
“A new age is upon us, people,” calls a voice from below.
Grave glances at me, eyebrows raised. Then we both inch forward toward the balcony railings.
“The new moon approaches. It’s like . . . new . . . and . . . big. You know? Cosmic. No—eldritch! Yeah, that’s the word. Eldritch. And the time of the Unbinding draws close, you know?”
The space below slowly inches into view as we creep forward. It’s a huge sitting room, the kind you get in Victorian ghost stories. Leather suites surrounding mahogany tables. Books lining the walls, a huge hearth with a fire roaring in the grate.
All the cultists are there, their attention turned toward the Egyptian-looking dude who stuck his fingers into my brain. Next to him is the woman I saw fighting Graves back in the Rip a few weeks ago. She’s wearing a robe as well, but hers is trimmed with gold.
“Who’s he?” I ask.
“I don’t know.”
“The stars are all lined up in this super-cosmic alignment, right? All ripe and juicy for the mighty Cthulhu’s release from R’lyeh. I’m loving the energy here, by the way. You’re all super committed to the cause, and I love that about you. Really. Super cool.”
I sense Graves stiffen at these words, but I’m too busy watching the Egyptian guy to ask what’s wrong.
“We’ll usher Cthulhu into the world, yeah? Begin a new age where the Old Ones won’t, like, bow down to earthly powers? Where they won’t be imprisoned by these horrible human beings. You know what I’m talking about, right? They’re just awful. Present company excluded. You guys are super awesome.” The guy gives the cultists two thumbs-up. Then he points at one of the cultists. “You. My man. Come forward. It’s okay. Come on.”
The cloaked figure lowers his hood and approaches. “My Lord Nyarlathotep. How may I serve?”
“You may serve . . . by dying!”
An inrush of panicked breath from the cultists, then Nyarlathotep cracks up laughing. He puts a hand on the terrified cultist’s shoulder. “No, no. I’m just messing around with you. It’s cool. It’s all good.”
Nyarlathotep then shifts his hand and lightly touches the man’s face.
I can feel the power resonating from Nyarlathotep even from where we’re hiding. It’s like a silent thunderclap, a wave of pressure, oily, cloying. It flies outward in a shock wave of heated air, carrying the sweet stench of gangrene and burning hair, the copper taste of blood. It tingles over my teeth, setting them on edge as if I’d bitten on metal.
The priest standing before Nyarlathotep folds in on himself, as if he’s collapsing from within. His face ripples and flows into his mouth and pulls, the skin bursting and reversing itself with a wet sucking sound. And instead of running away in fear and terror, the other cultists rush forward to be touched by Nyarlathotep.
Every one of the cultists shakes and comes apart before my eyes. Bones splinter, flesh tears. Their ribs split open, spilling organs onto the floor. Skin and muscle slough off their limbs, their arms and legs turning backward at the elbow and knee with sharp cracks. The cultists’ necks and spines stretch, drawing them up taller—seven, eight feet in height. Barbed spines burst through the skin. Their faces are stretched and frozen in tormented expressions of pain, their eyes filled with blood, their mouths Os of eternal horror. Tentacles erupt from their faces, writhing in the air like the tentacles of an octopus.
Their limbs are too long for their bodies. Their fingers are spindly twigs, and on the back of their wrists they have a single black claw. They stumble and lurch around like newborn foals getting used to their legs, and where these claws connect with the other cultists, the flesh tears open like melted butter and drips steaming to the floor.
Soon there are only two humans left standing. Nyarlathotep and the woman, the latter staring around with a twisted grin on her face. The nightmarish creatures stalk around them, tasting the air with purple tongues, their tentacles writhing and probing.
“The Hounds of Tindalos,” says Nyarlathotep, looking around with paternal pride. “You guys are beautiful. Seriously. I love you guys. Yeah? And now it’s time for you to scour the multiverse and wipe out the unbelievers, okay? Right? You’ll all help me break the Old Ones from their eternal prisons, won’t you? I’d really love that. It would be super, and I bet once it’s all finished we’ll be rewarded. Like an endless pool party. With cocktails and no hangovers. Does that sound good to you?”
The hounds begin to howl. The sound is earsplittingly loud.
“Listen to them,” shouts Nyarlathotep, “the children of the night. What music they make! Love the enthus
iasm, guys, just lower the tone, yeah?”
The hounds fall silent and stare expectantly at him. He smiles brightly.
“Thanks! Loving the obedience. Now, I want you to follow my loyal priestess here—she’s awesome, yeah? her name is Dana by the way—to the alternate that holds the spear. Can you bring it back to me? I’d really like that. It would be like the best early Christmas present ever.”
He then turns around so his back is to us. I lean forward and see he’s fiddling with something on a low altar. Messing around with switches.
A blinding crack of light opens up in the air against the far wall of the room. It rips through reality, a jagged blue-white tear.
“Go, my hounds. Go forth and, like, conquer and stuff. But have fun! You have to have fun in your job because, like, what’s the point otherwise?” He points at Dana. “You know what I’m talking about, right? ’Course you do.”
Half of the hounds bound through the Rip, howling and hissing as they do. Nyarlathotep turns to the woman and takes her hand.
“And you, my super-sexy love. Find the Spear of Destiny, yes? Get the Jesus-poker for me, and I’ll search for the Jewel of Ini-taya. Then we’ll get together and have brunch and compare notes about how amazing I am.”
“I will, Exalted One.”
“Hey now, no need for such cumbersome titles.” He smiles. “My lord will suffice.”
She bows her head. “As you will, my lord.”
“Off you pop, then.”
She runs toward the crack and leaps through it. It flares once, then winks out of existence.
There are still about ten or so hounds waiting in the room. Nyarlathotep looks upon them. “Are you ready?”
The hounds howl in response.
I turn to Graves. His face is pale, troubled. He gestures for us to back up.
Before we move, an eerie silence drops across the room. Graves and I are still staring at each other, but we slowly turn our heads, looking back at the scene below us.
Nyarlathotep and his hounds are staring directly at us.
Graves and I scramble to our feet and start running around the balcony, heading for a door on the opposite side of the room. The hounds howl and shriek, lashing out, tearing at each other in their rush to get to us.
“Why don’t we go back the way we came in?” I shout.
“Because my Slip is in the kitchen. Now shut up and run!”
One of the hounds uses its comrades as leverage and leaps up to grab the balcony to my left. Graves turns and fires his gun. The hound’s arms explode into black goo, and it drops onto the others with a shriek of hatred.
Graves yanks the door open. We bolt through, and he yanks the door closed behind us.
“Can we lock it?” I ask.
“Do you have a key?”
“What? No!”
“Then no, we can’t lock it.”
He runs down a set of stairs. I follow, slipping and stumbling in my haste. He leads us deeper into the bowels of the house while behind us the hounds howl and screech as they give chase.
Our surroundings change slightly, the walls becoming bare, plastered stone. No one else is around. I notice that Graves is slowing down, looking a bit confused.
“Do you know where we’re going?”
“Of course I do!”
We reach an intersection. Graves runs left, then stops and turns right. He grimaces apologetically as he passes me. “All under control.”
Wonderful. That makes me feel so much better. I pause briefly to listen for pursuit. It’s still there, but distant now. We seem to be pulling ahead, losing the hounds in the twisting corridors.
Graves leads us down another flight of stairs, along another corridor, and then we find ourselves in the kitchen. It’s a huge room, easily double the size of my ex-home. Huge tables and industrial-sized ovens dominate the space.
Graves slows to a walk and grins over his shoulder at me. “There. Told you I’d find it. No problem. No problem at all.”
Yeah. That’s why he looks so relieved.
We hurry across the kitchen, and Graves pulls open the back door. Blue light spills inside. I peer around him and see the rectangular Slip standing in a messy courtyard.
“Masks!”
We put our masks on and leap through the Slip as the howls of the Hounds of Tindalos grow louder.
Chapter Nine
I follow Graves as he strides through the DDICS office toward his little huddle of cubicle heaven. Ash is sitting at her desk, reading through files and checking something on her screen.
She looks up as we approach, her face pinched with guilt.
Graves slumps into his desk and starts typing away on his keyboard. Ash stands up as I pull my own chair out and sit. I spread my hands over the surface of the desk, take a few deep, calming breaths. They don’t work.
“I didn’t know.”
I look up at Ash. She’s playing with an elastic band, nervously twisting it between her fingers.
“About . . . what he did.” She throws a glare in Graves’s direction.
“I believe you.”
“Really?”
“Really. Only a sociopath like Graves would do something like that.”
“Nyarlathotep,” says Graves loudly.
Ash frowns at him. “What?”
Graves twists his monitor around. On it are various images of different people and monsters. I recognize Nyarlathotep immediately, but there are others. A huge creature with lethal claws on the end of its arms and a long tentacle for a head, a winged birdlike creature with a single red eye, a grotesquely fat woman covered in small tentacles, her mouth hanging open so wide it’s bigger than her actual head, etc.
“Who are they?” I ask.
“Nyarlathotep. Some of his nine hundred and ninety-nine forms. That’s who we’re dealing with,” he says to Ash.
“Graves, are you sure?”
“Oh, yes. I saw him.”
“Then we need to take this upstairs. Now!”
“No!” snaps Graves.
“We have to! We’ve been after this guy for years.”
“Exactly. And if I take this upstairs, we lose the case. And our chance to get our old jobs back.”
“I don’t get it,” I say. “Who is this guy? Why’s he so important?”
“Nyarlathotep is . . . he’s the messenger of the Old Ones. He carries out their will in the multiverse, while they’re all locked away in their prisons in the Dreamlands. His only goal is to set them free, to cause as much chaos and destruction as he can. He has cults all over the multiverse, all over the worlds. He uses his followers to further his aims.”
“He’s one of the CBC’s most wanted,” says Ash.
“And we’ve never had a lead on him. Until now.”
“Okay.” I think about this. “And he wants the Spear of Destiny why?”
Graves turns the monitor back and types into his computer. “The Spear of Destiny,” he says. “Otherwise known as the Holy Lance, or the Lance of Longinus. It’s the spear that was apparently used to pierce the side of Jesus Christ when he hung on the cross.”
“It’s just a legend, though,” I say.
“No such thing,” says Graves. “Not in our line of work. The stories connect the spear to several rulers over the centuries. All of them thought the spear gave them special powers.”
“Like?” I ask.
“Charlemagne. Apparently he carried it with him into forty-seven battles. Won every single one of them.”
“Because of the spear?” asks Ash.
“That’s what he believed. They say as soon as he dropped the spear he lost the next battle and died. Similar story with the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick I Barbarossa. And Alaric, the king of the Visigoths. Napoleon was after it too.”
“And they all believed this spear gave them power?”
“Not just power. They believed it gave them the power to control the destiny of the world. But they all died as soon as the spear left their possession.”
“And these legends are the same across all realities?” I ask.
“No. There are variations. But all realities that are similar to yours—Class C, we call them—have the same legends. For instance, in your reality, it’s said that Hitler had a raging hard-on for the lance. Some say he actually started the war just to get his hands on it. General Patton and his men retrieved the spear from Hitler himself in 1945, and Hitler committed suicide soon after. After Patton handed it over, he died in a car accident at his army camp.”
“And this is what Nyarlathotep is after?”
“You were there,” says Graves. “You heard him.”
“Yeah. But . . .”
“But?”
“It’s crazy talk.”
“Listen, idiot, if you can’t accept this kind of thing as real from now on, you’re going to have a hard time settling in. This spear exists somewhere, and in some alternates it will have the powers listed here. If Nyarlathotep and his hounds have the location of the alternate where it has this power and they get their hands on it . . . well . . . that’s not good for anyone.”
“But what does that have to do with the Old Ones?”
“I don’t know,” says Graves uneasily.
“If this is so important, maybe Ash is right. Maybe you should tell that Inspectre guy?”
“Wash your mouth out!” snaps Graves. “We can handle this. It was my case to begin with.”
“Yeah, but—”
“No buts. If we crack this case I get my job back. Which means Ash gets her job back. Which means you don’t have to clean up brains and blood anymore. Unless you like cleaning up brains and blood? Is that it?”
“No.”
“Then shut up and listen to the plan.”
I look at him expectantly. So does Ash.
“Which we have to come up with first,” adds Graves.
“Well . . . first thing is to stop them getting the spear,” says Ash.
Graves points at her. “Good thinking. We figure out why they want it afterwards.”
“So that means we need to travel to this alternate. The one in my head?” I ask.
“Do you remember the coordinates?”
I think back. “The first one was 58384-689fh-63al/7.”