She slumped against the brick wall, any luminosity either dimmed in the bright light, or faded altogether. Her tentacles shuddered as I touched her. They were still warm, but the T-shirt I’d tied around the one had turned black and shiny. Behind me, I heard Meghan gasp.
“What is that thing?”
“I just told you.” I didn’t want to complicate matters by explaining the new cosmogony (I was only just learning it myself) that included not only Earth and its multitude of species, but the Great Old Ones, the Hounds of Tindalos, the Interlocutor and, most urgently, the dritch.
“We have to get out of here,” I said. “Come here and help me.”
Nobody moved. I decided to phrase things differently. I did not want the dritch to ex-animate me. I felt barely animated as it was.
“Come here and help me right now,” I repeated. “We have to get out of here.” I turned to the Interlocutor. “Can you walk?”
I forced my arm under her upper arm. She gave a hoarse cry, and I felt her tentacles flex. Then Meghan appeared on the other side.
“It’s so big,” she said. We both heaved, and the Interlocutor’s huge bulk wobbled up from the dirt floor, taking us with it. Together we staggered toward the stairs, flanked by Mehri and Sam as we made ridiculous sounds of encouragement: here, almost there, and when we reached the stairs, now, up! and then keep going until I smashed into the door frame. There wasn’t room for all of us to go through. The Interlocutor, Meghan clinging to her side, collapsed onto what was left of her scooter. She turned her head toward me.
“Everything will happen soon,” she said. “There will be no more contact between me and you.”
“We’ve got to close that door,” I said to Mehri and Sam, who were still keeping their distance.
Hardly taking their eyes off the Interlocutor, they helped swing the door shut. With the deadbolt thrown, it felt pretty secure, despite the mess I’d made of the frame.
“What the heck is a dritch?” Mehri asked.
“You must come,” said the Interlocutor.
“We need to get out of here. If the Church people come back – and this Church has a lot of members – they’ll throw us in that cellar, and the Interlocutor says the dritch is coming back.” “Come with me now,” said the Interlocutor, “into the dark.” Meghan’s eyes widened. “Oh my god.”
The Interlocutor had extended her tentacles and was weakly trying to pull the scooter toward the front door, leaving smears of oily black ichor behind her. She had never looked more slimy and alien.
“It’s okay,” I told the others. “She needs our help.”
“Nate,” said the Interlocutor. “My departure ...”
“Here, wrap up your, uh, arms, and we’ll ...” I turned to the others. “Help me. We’ve got to push her outside. Help is coming – for her anyway. But we all should get out anyway ...”
There was a crash from the cellar, and we all jumped as something slammed into the door from the other side. There was the sound of rough, chitinous feelers probing the edge of the door, looking for a way out of the cellar and into the Church.
“Get out now,” I said. “Hurry.” As the others helped with the Interlocutor, I remembered where I’d heard my phone hit the wall. I searched around in the wreckage. There was my pocket knife; I scooped it up and kept looking.
Sam called, “Nate, didn’t you say we should hurry?”
There it was! I pocketed my phone and caught up with Meghan, Mehri and Sam, who were gingerly guiding the Interlocutor out the front door. The scooter, warped and broken, barely rolled well enough to act as a rickety dolly. With a clatter of the crash bar, we pushed through the door into the Church’s dark parking lot.
“Push me,” the Interlocutor said. “The dark. This way.” She gestured toward the far corner of the Church’s compound. “You, Nate. Alone.”
“It’s easier if we all help.”
She looked at the others and said to me, “It is not fair to bring your friends. They are not ready. Not everyone can live on the borders between worlds.”
I wasn’t sure what she meant, but if the dritch broke through the door – or went back through its tunnel and ambushed us in the dark – I wanted everyone out of here.
“She says you’ve got to go,” I told the others. “Thank you. You saved us. But now, I need to take care of her. Someone is coming for her, and she says it’s best if they’re not seen. Get to the stadium. We’ve got to figure out something to disrupt the ceremony tonight. Anything.”
It turned out they had all come in Meghan’s car. “We’ve got some ideas,” she said. “If we can get enough people together.”
“You’ve got to be smart about it, Meghan. There’s an awful lot of Church members. They’re not afraid to hurt anyone who gets in their way. But if the ceremony tonight is a success ...” I didn’t know how to describe to her the enormity of what that implied, so I wimped out. “Have you heard from Lovecraft?”
“Not a word,” Meghan replied. “His so-called underground doesn’t seem as if it does much. Frankly, we’re talking about forming a group of our own,” she told me excitedly. “I want to call it ...”
I shook my head. “Meghan. GO. Really.”
We arranged to meet at the Shirazis’ house, and I breathed a sigh of relief when Meghan started up her little Volkswagen and they drove off. I pushed the Interlocutor to the edge of the Church’s freight yard. She peered around at the urban bushland, up at the sky and then she spoke. “There is something that must be seen.”
CHAPTER 22
THE GHOST TRAIN
The night was clear, and looking back at the Church, I saw its ancient metal smokestacks outlined against the stars. I pushed the scooter, focusing on what the Interlocutor had just said. What must be seen? Despite her pain and weakness, she seemed to know exactly what she was doing. That was more than I could say for myself.
“Your friends,” the Interlocutor said, “your friends call me it. To them, I am a thing.”
“To be honest,” I said wearily, “you take some getting used to.” I decided to change the subject. “Where are we going? And when we were inside, how’d you know the dritch was approaching?”
“I hear,” said the Interlocutor. “I want to get you into the dark.” Before I could ask why, she unfurled a shuddering tentacle, pointing straight up, past the trees and the far-off glow of the city. “We come here so you can see. To show you this.”
The sky was clear, splashed with glowing swirls and clouds and galaxies of stars as if some genius painter, turning in their sleep, had dreamed infinity, their brush filled with light.
“You are right, Nate,” the Interlocutor said. “The forces we have are so small. You just have yourself, and your friends new and old, and me who is, as your friends say, only a thing. All around us, in this city alone, thousands are driven by want and greed and fear to grow up angry and predatory. They are feral, thinking only to use others for their own gain. From these, the Resurrection Church of the Ancient Gods has recruited its hungry many. Brought together by the Great Old Ones themselves, by the rulers of a planet that, through their science and formulae, they hope to intersect with yours.
“But they too are very small. Look how small they are, look, look. Even the Great Old Ones, who delight in twisting and deforming nature, fail to twist all species and all its creatures to their will. They have twisted humans to change the world, to make it more like their world, to warm the atmosphere and pollute the air and sea and soil, but still nature resists. Still living things find ways to live. Because your world itself is alive. It turns in the sun; and, like blood in a huge beating heart, its oceans throb and pulse to the sun on one side and the moon on the other; and it has seasons that make its atmosphere surge and bellow and blow from pole to pole and around its warm equator. It is a world full of pain and sweetness and death and great danger; the earth is a jewel in a universe of living things, and even as we run and hide and every second feel more desperate, there are forces working aro
und us to disrupt the plans of the Great Old Ones, and to send them back to reform and revive their own world, the world they’ve spoiled.”
“I wish they’d hurry up,” I said.
“And look at your friends. I am saying that even though it seems as if you are feeling alone, you are not. Just think why they came here.”
“It’s a good thing they did, Interlocutor. They came here to save our butts.”
“They did not come to save my butts. They came here to save your butts.”
I didn’t say a word. For starters, the Interlocutor had referred to being called a thing. It was my first taste of extraterrestrial sarcasm. I wondered if indeed it, or she, had feelings, and if we had hurt them.
The silence clung to us. Above us the stars hung so bright I could almost hear them hissing and sizzling, a million points of pure energy. And then I thought of something. But first the Interlocutor coughed wetly.
“And now I must go. They are coming for me,” the Interlocutor wheezed. “I am shutting down.”
“I just thought,” I said, “there is another thing. Who is this sorcerer dude? I’ve heard the Church people talking about the sorcerer. They seem afraid of him, or her, whatever. Maybe if I can contact him, or her, this sorcerer person can help us. Wait a second – what did you just say?”
“They have hurt me, and I have been too long ... in this air. Too long – trying to intercede. It is time for me to go.”
“You mean you’re ... You’re not dying, are you?”
“They are coming for me.”
“Can I help you?” I touched the Interlocutor on her shoulder, or what passed for a shoulder underneath her ragged clothes. Through that greasy fabric I felt a pulse, struggling and slow, and the fading of that great internal heat.
“You should go,” she said. “I have signalled them – the car, the am-bew-lance, it is coming for me. They don’t want you ... people ... to see them ... they are not dangerous to you, but they are coming to help me. It is the way things are arranged.”
Through the surrounding bush, I could hear the rattle of something big coming down the tracks. A glimmer of light outlined the smelly bulk of the Interlocutor hanging over her wrecked scooter.
“When will you be back?” As I spoke the Interlocutor stretched and I heard the ripping of fabric. Numberless tentacles, uncountable in the dark, flexed and extended, and I smelt dank alien smells of ammonia and rotten eggs.
“Go now – quickly.” Sure enough, the flashing lights of the ambulance strobed through the trees around us, lights blotting out the stars. “I will tell you this ...”
I had turned to run, but as I looked back the Interlocutor shrank in her scooter, wrapping her tentacles around herself. “Sorcerer is not a person. Sorcerer, too, is a thing.”
“You mean – look, I’m sorry you got called that. It’s just – all this is new to us, and I never knew anything, I mean anyone, like you existed, but you’ve been a big, uh, support ...”
“... not a thing like me.” The Interlocutor buried her head in her rubbery arms, and shrank in her seat like a flower retreating before the night. She let out a weak cry, and her tentacles, wrapped around her, flexed and convulsed like firehoses.
The Interlocutor looked at me dully. Her voice was a harsh whisper. “Go.”
She closed her eyes, and suddenly her body came loose in its seat and she leaned forward over the broken controls and was still. The wind was rising again, and above me clouds were shutting out the stars. Suddenly what she had called an “am-bewlance” loomed out of the dark. It was huge and black, and it rolled down the train tracks with the rumble of well-greased wheels. I pulled the Interlocutor back from the fence as the locked gates were torn off their hinges and fell aside, and the rail car crashed into the neglected freight yard that the Church had taken over. It seemed that the Interlocutor’s panic button had worked. I felt a surge of relief.
“They’re here,” I said. “They’ll help.”
I put my hand on her shoulder but she did not move or speak. The heat was fading from the oily bulk under my fingers, and I realized her rescuers, if they were coming to save her, had come too late.
I turned and, as fast as I could, jumped the chain at the road entrance, which hurt me all over, and pushed my way into the trees and back onto the tracks, then out toward the lights of the city. I looked back; light flooded from the ghost train. From a sliding door in the side, silhouettes (human, as far as I could see) were lowering a sling of some kind. I heard a man’s voice: “She’s dead!” Suddenly I was blinded by a spotlight from the black boxcar. “What’d you do to her, you son of a bitch?”
I ducked into the bushes until I came to a curve in the tracks, then I ran until I reached Barton. I headed down the street, away from the train tracks and this mystery boxcar and its mystery destination.
My phone buzzed. Without looking I put it to my ear, expecting to hear my father.
“Dad?”
“Nate! Where in the world have you been? Your father ...”
“Mr. Lovecraft ... Howard ... I’m coming from the Resurrection Church. I had a plan ... but it didn’t work out ... so I tried to help the Interlocutor. That didn’t work out, either. Are you and Dad working on that barrel?”
“It has been finished,” Lovecraft announced proudly. “Every angle rounded off. Meanwhile, your father has gone out, I know not where.”
Without going into every detail of what had happened since last night, I confessed to Lovecraft that I had attempted to steal the parchment back from my father and pass it to the Proprietor, but that, evidently, I had failed.
“I beg your forgiveness, Nate,” he replied. “I was complicit in that deception. Your father was afraid you would try such a thing. Before we retired for the night, I helped him make a counterfeit that you would easily find.”
I felt a surge of anger. “Aren’t you guys smart.”
“We were afraid you might try to take things into your own hands ...”
It would have worked. Lovecraft kept talking.
“I am in the process of mustering reinforcements. If the ceremony ...”
“I’ve lost this whole day,” I said, “locked in a goddamn basement. Somebody’s got to help my father.”
“If they get here in time, this can be turned around.”
“If if if,” I said through clenched teeth.
I ended the call and sighed, and looked ahead down the dark corridor of the train tracks. Out there they were assembling: The Resurrection Church of the Ancient Gods, their legion of followers, the Great Old Ones, the Hounds of Tindalos. If Dad and Lovecraft dropped the ball, my father would die.
I started running. As I put distance between myself and the Resurrection Church, I slowed down, out of breath. All around me the stars were vanishing, the darkness thickening as clouds blew across the moon, and street lights flickered, rocked by a rising wind. I ran across Gage, past the FreshCo, so as to stay off the street where I could be spotted, through the big parking lot that was always empty except for idling semis or cops on their break. But tonight the lot was filling up. Cars came out of the darkness and out of them swarmed excited families, who headed across Barton and down the side streets toward Ivor Wynne. The crowds shrieked as the wind rose; I felt a slap of rain and zipped up my hoodie. The air around me thundered, as if the Great Old Ones themselves had burst from the crumbling walls of their adopted church and were whirling through the streets toward their coronation.
The sky opened up in a cloudburst, and I threw myself against the cinder-block wall of the neighbourhood car wash. As lightning lit the sky, I looked up at the golden domes of St. Vladimir, and the clouds seemed to flex and grimace into living shapes with the excitement of the approaching ceremony.
Then I remembered what Lovecraft had just said. Everything was going great, except that “your father has gone out, I know not where.”
Why would Dad go out, as the Hounds drew near, when he and Lovecraft had just finished the enclosure t
hat would keep him safe? I remembered what Dad had said the other day, when I’d walked him to the bus: “I can’t have that goddamn Church taking everyone away from me.”
Then I realized exactly what Dad had in mind. Suddenly I did something I hadn’t done since I was a little boy. Without thinking or planning or believing that anyone was listening, I started to pray.
“Just let my dad get out of this,” I said. “Don’t let him get killed by these bastards from the Church, or by Yog-Sothoth, or get fed to a dritch, or torn apart by the Hounds. Just keep him safe. To me, you can do anything you want. Just give me this.”
I squinted against the glare as three bolts of lightning struck – first the rusted smokestacks that were now the Resurrection Church, then the suns and crosses atop St. Vladimir, then the distant light towers of the football stadium – all the frail and fragmentary shields we put up against the hissing immensities beyond us, the light years of space and the indifferent, unstoppable millennia that were converging tonight, all our hopes that, for one brief instant, they might shed a single tear for the human race. I ran out into the rain and as the storm raged, I kept running.
PART 3
THE LEAGUE OF UNMARRIED GENTLEMEN
She bent her head, thinking. “The serpent is a sorcerer. We must find a sorcerer to tell us what is the danger.”
– Brian Moore, Black Robe
CHAPTER 23
DOOMED
The rain stopped by the time I reached the stadium, but black clouds loomed as if a mountain range had magically risen over the city. I avoided the growing crowd as much as I could. If someone spotted me, I didn’t want to be surrounded. Some of these people had been at the Church the night before, and could recognize me as the troublemaker who should have been gobbled up hours ago.
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