Dead Easy

by Mark William Simmons

  The three things scampering around this apparition were even stranger in aspect. About the size and shape of deformed children with flat heads, it looked like someone had strapped giant tortoise shells to their backs and big bird beaks to their faces. Between them they had several rifles or long guns and one was handed to the cat-headed fellow while the others were being loaded by the turtle monkeys.

  Cat-head shouldered his gun, swung it in our direction and began to fire.

  The first bullet zinged less than a foot away, past my shoulder!

  Chapter Nineteen

  The second shot came within a foot of Samm who had just fallen against the port gunwale. That was when I simultaneously registered the sight of a scaly green hand on her oar and the sound of a splash behind me.

  We were under attack!

  Not by the beast men from the submarine but from Deep Ones who were preparing to swarm our lifeboat! The rifleman was shooting at them!

  Irena shrieked as a webbed hand reached up, caught her hair, and yanked her head back. I grabbed her to keep her from going overboard and lost control of the tiller. There was a brief struggle and the next thing I knew I was holding the neatly severed arm of Irena's attacker. Not ripped off via superhuman strength, mind you—that would have been semi-understandable. Neatly severed with surgical precision, shearing cleanly through bone as well as flesh? I looked at my bloody hands for a clue, found none, and shuddered. Maybe some fanboy might think these were cool superpowers or something but this was just as scary as hell. Especially as I was still holding the severed arm and wondering if it would taste like chicken.

  I wasn't just thirsty, now; I was hungry! In a very wrong way!

  Four more Deep Ones joined their fallen teammates in Davy Jones Locker room as I found the willpower to toss the arm and sit back down. By the time I got the boat back under control, I found that the submarine had come about and was closing with us. As it pulled alongside, a roped step system was unfurled. After Samm and Irena climbed up, I picked up Suki and slung her around my neck. She purred as I climbed up after them.

  Two of the turtle-monkeys remained on deck and assisted us into the hatch and down an interior ladder. Their leader had disappeared for the moment.

  We were led down a short corridor to a cabin and given basins of water and towels. An adjoining head contained a corner cabinet of metal. This was demonstrated to be a shower with ornate, antique fixtures. It and a sink had hot and cold running taps. The cabin was paneled in wood, carpeted, and furnished in the Victorian style. There were two wardrobes and two dressers of surprising craftsmanship. Even the two sets of bunk beds were stylish beyond the utilitarian.

  As much as we were taking in our new environment, we were studying our "hosts", as well.

  About the size of ten-year-old children, they had the heads of beaked monkeys with a fringe of long, dark hair circling their skulls. The crowns of their heads were depressed like concave bowls and filled with a clear liquid like water. Their torsos were shelled like turtles or tortoises but their scaly limbs were longer with webbed hands and feet and they smelled like fish. Their dark, beady eyes shone with a fierce intelligence.

  As we were studying the creature who was pointing to the basins, the shower, and the towels in turn, another like it entered bearing a stack of folded clothing with a note pinned to the top. The creature placed the clothing on top of a small table, unpinned the note, and handed it to me.

  Please take a little time to freshen up, the note read. The kappas will bring you to the salon when you have made yourselves more presentable. It was signed "D". The paper itself was imprinted stationary with the motto: "MOBILIS IN MOBILI N" at the top in an embellished woodcut script.

  I looked at the others and suddenly realized what a bloody and grimy lot we were. "I'll allow ladies first for the shower as long as there's hot water left for me," I said gallantly. And foolishly.

  Despite the narrowness of the chamber there was some unseemly debate over the possibility of two people sharing the shower. It was, of course, grossly impractical for any pairing outside of a couple of circus contortionists or a man and a cat. Which was how I got a surprising complacent Suki clean.

  The shower was appointed with a selection of sponges and scented oils in bottles on recessed shelves. The towels were roughly textured but highly absorbent and the clothing was of a grey material with a unique feel and quality, yet not readily identifiable. The waistbands on both the pants and the tops were elasticized and the cut of the arms and legs allowed total freedom of movement, yet conformed to the body sufficiently as to not render the wearer shapeless. The boots were cut low, from sealskin, and extremely comfortable.

  The ladies had dressed while I was in the shower. Once I was decent, I emerged from the head and looked at Samm. Any ideas before we meet with the captain?

  Her brow furrowed. "Some of this seems familiar but . . . I don't know. Ever since my throw down with Marie Laveau, my brain is like Swiss Cheese!"

  "Hah!" I said.

  "Hah . . . ?"

  "Yeah." I smiled. "For once we're all on the same page." I knocked on our cabin door." "Let's go see if the wizard will give you a brain, me a heart, Irena a way to go home, and Suki—" I looked down at the cat. "Aw hell, the analogy starts off lame and then crashes and burns."

  "Could be an omen," Samm agreed as the door was opened by one of the kappas.

  "Let's go," I sighed.

  We were escorted back through a central corridor where we had first descended into the submarine and then led through an elegantly appointed dining room. A table, covered with a white linen tablecloth, was set with expensive crystal and china and ornate, golden tableware.

  We passed through into a library filled with books. The shelves circled the room, taking advantage of the maximum amount of space allowable. It was furnished in black violet ebony inlaid with brass. Curved, brown leather divans of immense size were positioned at the opposite end and the beast-headed rifleman reclined upon one, reading a book and smoking a long-stemmed pipe. He closed his book and stood as we wove our way toward him, moving around a large table that dominated the center of the room.

  Gesturing with the curved stem of his pipe, he indicated the adjacent divan and said in a low, rumbling voice: "Mr. Cséjthe, Mesdames Pantera and D'Arbonne, welcome aboard my boat. Please be seated." He sat back down and patted the cushions next to him. "Come sit beside me, my silent deserter. All is forgiven for it seems we still share common purpose." Suki hopped off our couch, trotted across the floor, and jumped up to sit beside him. Now I felt the weight of two pairs of cat's eyes on me.

  A full minute passed in silence as we studied each other from a distance of perhaps two meters.

  Our host wore a red velvet smoking jacket over blue silk pajamas. His feet were encased in sharkskin slippers and his hands were like a man's with long tapered fingers, though the nails were trimmed to be unaccountably long and pointed. His head, however, was that of a Bengal tiger, with orange and white fur striped in a pattern of black stripes and bands. He gazed at us with calm golden eyes and then said: "Forgive me; I speak very rarely these days. My troops tend to be an uncommunicative lot and I have fallen out of the habit of human speech. I am Prince Dakkar. Your host and, I hope, your ally."

  I stared hard at him: Tyger, tyger, burning bright . . . I knew that name from somewhere.

  "Mr. Cséjthe, are you a fox?" the tiger-headed creature continued before I could pin it down, "or a hedgehog?"

  I shook my head. "I'm not a shape-changer. I'm—a man." Still lacking a definitive answer on that front.

  The tiger-man shook his head and chuckled. "I apologize. The question was meant metaphorically." He held up the book. "I was reading Lance Morrow's Evil: An Investigation. The author uses Isaiah Berlin's essay on Tolstoy to ask the question about the true nature of evil . . ."

  I nodded, catching up now. "'Multa novit vulpes, verum echinus unum magnum.' The fox knows many things but the hedgehog knows one big thing."r />
  "You know your Latin, Mr. Cséjthe."

  "Better than I know my Greek. The Latin is from Erasmus Rotterdamsus' Adagia back around 1500. The original comes from a fragment attributed to the Greek poet Archilochus, Sixth Century B.C."

  "Ah," our host said, "then perhaps you can answer the question as Mr. Morrow has framed it. Do you believe in Evil, Mr. Cséjthe? And do you perceive it as one, big thing? Or do you see the wrongs of the world as a series of smaller, unconnected incidents? Are you a Hedgehog? Or a Fox?"

  Maybe a week ago it would have been surreal. Certainly inconceivable two years previously to imagine myself discussing the unification theory of wickedness with a monster beneath the Gulf of Mexico. But in light of recent events it all made for a certain perverse sense. The problem was I was way past patience for dabbling in theoreticals any longer.

  "I'm more of a Badger, I guess," I finally answered. "Had my run-ins with what people would call evil; a lot of it small, petty, and seemingly unconnected. Had a few brushes with something a lot bigger, too. Just touched its hem, felt its shadow, heard it breathing in the night. Thing is, your parents teach you not to play in traffic at an early age. As a young man your D.I. teaches you not to pick up unexploded ordinance or stand up in your fox hole or bunch up on patrol. The government comes along and hits you with infomercials: buckle-up, don't drink and drive, this is your brain on drugs, smoking kills, only you can prevent forest fires! You figure certain things out for yourself: don't stand next to guys throwing rocks at men with machine guns . . .

  "So, like a badger, I go my own way, stay out of trouble, lay low. Don't mess with evil and hope that evil won't mess with you."

  I took a deep breath. "But some things don't know any better than to leave a badger alone. And a cornered badger has the baddest reputation in the animal world of anything you'd want to face. So, you want to know my take on Evil—upper case or lower? I'm an equal opportunity kind of guy. It messes with my friends or family, all I care about is the practical, not the theoretical. It's in my face? Then there's no guesswork involved: one of us is going down!"

  Tiger guy tossed the book aside. "How pleasantly simple-minded and anodyne for you," he rumbled. "From the way my lieutenant here behaved these past five months I thought, perhaps, that you might be the key." He rose and towered over us. "In deference to her I shall set you ashore near one of the refugee camps close to the Pontchartrain Sea before continuing my war against these abominations from the depths. I bid you—"

  "You're a Fox person, then," Samm said.

  "What?" He turned and peered down at her as if considering a bit of leftover antelope meat.

  "You're making war on the many little things instead of the one big thing," she said, looking back up at him without flinching.

  The beast-man folded his hands behind his back but not, I noticed, before clenching them. "Madam, ever since I awakened to this new age, I have been consumed with finding the answers to what troubles my beloved oceans. That men continue to conquer and enslave and oppress one another comes as no surprise. But the oceans have always been a peaceful refuge from the ways of the surface world and I have been called out of my eternal rest to find them invaded and corrupted by alien armies! Armies whose general I cannot yet perceive! You will tell me where I may find their leader that I may take the fight to him and bring this war to conclusion once and for all!"

  Samm, not the least bit intimidated, smiled and said: "The first part's easy: his name is Cthulhu and he can be found in the dread city of R'lyeh. The second part is going to be a little tougher . . ." She pointed at me. ". . . because only he can stop him."

  The impact of her pronouncement was lost on me because I had finally shaken off the thin patina of shock and done the math.

  "Holy shit!" I said. "Prince Dakkar! I know who you are!" I looked at the others. "We found Nemo!"

  * * *

  "I called myself a freedom fighter in those days," Dakkar mused before the great lensed window of the grand salon. "And so I was in many ways and many places. I lent finances and aid to oppressed people and countries in many places. But I was also a terrorist, wreaking vengeance for the deaths of my family at the hands of the British during the Sepoy Rebellion. I tried to disguise my vengeance from myself, labeling it as a noble war against all wars." He shook his head. "All I did was widen the scope of my vengeance from one nation to many."

  I nodded. "I know something about that: monsters and monstrous things. If they don't out and out kill you, they infect you and eventually you become them."

  We were looking out through the thick glass as the Nautilus made for the first set of coordinates. The room's lights were off yet a pale blue illumination filtered back in from the external beams lighting up the waters outside our window.

  "It was Verne who brought me to my senses," Dakkar continued. "Our conversations and, of course, the manuscript."

  "Which one?"

  "The first. The second, you understand, was a fabrication. Well, they are both fabrications to a degree. There was no Professor Aronnax—that was Verne putting himself into the narrative. Other details . . ." He made a dismissive wave with his hand. "It's the second book that is the larger work of fiction."

  "Timeline discrepancies for one," I remarked.

  "Yes, well, even though I had retired from overt acts of aggression and piracy before the publication of the first novelization, the public's imagination was piqued. Certain agencies and individuals began to get a sense that what most took for fiction might actually have a basis in reality. The hounds were loosed, so to speak. Over time I found my trail growing warmer and my precautions less than sufficient. I prevailed upon Verne to compose a sequel and 'kill me off' so as to cool the ardor of my overly enthusiastic fans."

  "Interesting," I said. "So, there was no Lincoln Island. No erupting volcano and scuttling of the Nautilus, sending the two of you to a watery grave . . ."

  "Oh that last part was true," Dakkar rumbled. "The latitude and longitude for the fictional Lincoln Island? Hogwash! Sleight of hand, misdirection to send the searchers in the wrong direction. But the second set of coordinates you found on that damnable altar, that was where I was sheltered at the end. The volcanic underpinnings were more prominent back then and provided more cover but there is still a significant sea cave entrance if one knows where to look. I was an old man and dying—though many years after Verne's fictional laying-me-to-rest. I suppose fiction inspired fact. When I knew that my life was to be measured in hours rather than days, I settled my ship—"

  "Boat."

  "What?"

  "A submarine is boat, not a ship."

  He stared at me.

  "In proper naval parlance, that is."

  The stare became a glare. "Do not presume to tell the captain of the vessel he has built as well as commands what sort of thing to call it!"

  "Um, okay."

  "As I was saying, I had settled the Nautilus beneath the volcanic shell of the island that would be named Palmyra, and set the pumps to evacuate the . . . Nautilus . . . three days later. Later that night I fell into a deep slumber and dreamed I was in the Palace of Vishnu. "

  He fell silent and for a number of leagues we stood and gazed out at the blue nirvana of the ocean depths together.

  "I dreamed many things," he said finally. "Things that I may tell no heathen. I do not know why I even tell you of this save that we are likely doomed in our task and doomed men should never lie to one another. So, I will tell you why I am here and why I will do what I must do.

  "In the dream beyond this dream which we esteem as real, I was told that I had lost my path. I had made war upon my own karma in making war upon my fellow man. To achieve Moksha or Samadhi, one usually follows a yoga, a path, to achieve spiritual perfection. There are four possible ways. When I was young, I practiced the Rāja Yoga, the path of meditation. As a husband and young father, I practiced the Bhakti Yoga, the path of love and devotion. In the House of Vishnu I dreamed that I was taught the Jñāna
Yoga, the path of wisdom. Then I was told I must atone for the wrong acts I had committed. I must return and walk the path of right action, the Raja Yoga.

  "In this last matter I believed I might awaken to a new life, reincarnated as a beggar or a Dalit or even an animal or insect, doomed to live out a life of crushing humility, subjected to the pain and loss I had inflicted on so many others.

  "Instead, I was shown a great and terrible face, the face of the giant squid that had nearly doomed my vessel and crew many years before. This, I was told, this was the face of the Destroyer of Worlds and that Shiva had decreed that it must not stand. I was given three secrets and told I must return and walk upon the other side of the same path to balance the Raja Yoga."

  He turned to me. "When I awoke, I was lying upon my bed in my chambers, just as when I had fallen asleep. The air was stale but my ship was watertight. I did not know how much time had passed so I hurried about to make sure that the timers did not activate the pumps.

  "I shall not bore you with all of the mordant details. I discovered that the timers had long since failed and that I had awakened in a different century. A different millennia, actually." He reached up and touched his face. "How I discovered that I was no longer human but rakshasa."

  "Rakshasa?"

  "A demon or unclean spirit in my religion, Mr. Cséjthe. Such are magicians and shape changers. Handy abilities, actually, for the mission which I have been assigned. This freakish appearance is little impediment for this, my third life. I have long been a creature of solitude. Since the death of my wife and children my only solace has been the sea. Only in its cool blue depths have I found the peace and quiet that gives my savage heart ease. Perhaps I shall take again the name, Nemo. Prince Dakkar lost his title when his family was murdered and his ancestral lands seized. He lost his name when his body grew old and infirm and finally died at the bottom of an undersea grotto in a collapsed volcano under an accursed island. It is only fitting that I reclaim the name that is no name."