World War Cthulhu

by Shirley, John

  “It is … a mixed blessing.”

  The shape still several feet from Harold’s table grinned with smug satisfaction. Extending a part of itself stable enough to pull the chair opposite Harold’s out from the table, the thousand-faced horror curdled its way around and onto the seat, positioning the amount of it which it had oozed into that particular dimension neatly across from its host.

  “So, Harry, old top, how have you been? Tell me everything. I simply have to know.”

  Harold sat, silent, eyes still downcast, his hand still holding his empty coffee cup. It wasn’t fair, he thought. It had been so long … I was so certain it was over. It has to be over—how can it not be over …

  “Harry,” answered the slightly out-of-phase form across the table from him, “really, now. You know it’s never over, or, more correctly, I supposed, that it’s never going to be over. That’s not the way it works.”

  There was no anger within Harold, no possibility of resistance or even some form of cynical contempt. What could he do? He was, after all, merely a man, a finite sack of sinew and bone and various fluids, more helpless against the thing in his kitchen than a three-legged ant that he might discover on his counter would be against him.

  “Is it?”

  Like it always did, his mind went back to the horrible night in Britain, the storm all about, the smell of blood strong enough to mask that of the rain and mud and sweat. He remembered every detail, every minute fragment of word and scent and noise. He remembered his prayers, so heartfelt, so sincere, and honest enough that they touched the gods. Or at least, whatever his guest that morning actually was.

  “You know what I am, Harry,” said the thing so comfortably entwined within his brain, “I am that to which you prayed so long ago. I am the only voice in all the universe that was willing to answer your ever-so-noble plea. I am that to which you pledged yourself. That to which you owe your existence. I am all, my dear little Harry, all you shall ever need, and all you shall ever know.”

  “Wraps it up neatly, doesn’t it?”

  “He speaks!” Nyarlathotep clapped its hands with joy, a seemingly honest reaction to Harold’s words. A wide smile breaking open the deeply tanned face the Crawling Chaos had finally chosen, it said, “Wonderful. Oh, my dear little Harry. You are ever so kind to me in my eternal loneliness.”

  “What do you want from me?”

  For a moment, the thousand-faced god went silent, head held high, body pulling back slightly, mouth now a grim straight line. Tilting its head slightly, the thing across the table from him told Harold:

  “I suppose I want … well, Harry, what I always want.”

  “But … it’s been so long. So long, this time … I thought, I mean … you—”

  “Ohhhhhh,” came a noise one not familiar with the thing there at the table might mistake for sympathy, “I understand. You thought your days of service were over. That you had done enough … is that it?”

  “It’s been more than three-quarters of a century,” shouted Harold, his spine stiffening ever so slightly—ever so recklessly. “How long does this service last? What’s more, when … what … what do you want?”

  Harold’s retort had started out strong, his voice level and growling. By the end, however, it was not much more than a frightened whine. He had thrown all the defiance he had been able to build up over the decades, and it had petered out on him in less than fifteen words. The reality of his weakness washed over him, was felt by his guest as well.

  “Oh, my poor, poor Harry. First, you had to know you were still in my service. Look at yourself, not a day older since last we saw each other. Not a wrinkle, not an ounce of fat, not a worry in the world. You knew I would return, didn’t you?”

  “Yes …” admitted the near-sobbing man in a low and pitiful whisper.

  “Fine, since we’ve established that much, let us go all the way. Tell me, Harry, the answers to all your questions. Prove to me that you’re a clever monkey. Why am I here? What do I want?” Nyarlathotep went silent for a moment, then a hiss that came from all directions demanded, “Tell me, Harry.”

  The frightened man, knowing the inevitable conclusion of their meeting, bowed his head, breaking eye contact with the Crawling Chaos so as to be able to speak at all. Grinding his teeth together for a moment, finally he said, “I’m your connection to this world.… I mean, one, one of your connections. You can’t—can’t do more than influence things here—”

  “Yet,” corrected the boiling mass steaming on the other side of the table. Harold nodded in agreement, echoing:

  “Yes, yet. Of course. Someday, but for now, you need … agents … here. Those to make your decisions.”

  “Oohhhhh, so long my fingers reach inside your skull, and still …” Nyarlathotep shook what appeared to be its head at the moment, then whispered, “you do not make my decisions, Harry. You make your own. I give you choices, and you make your own decisions.”

  Harold felt waves of conflicting emotion creeping across his brain, urges to scream, to beg, to cry. One by one, he asked himself—what would he scream? For what would he beg? As the tears he could not argue away began to wash his cheeks, he nodded in agreement and continued.

  “I called out for someone to help me, my men … so long ago. You came to our aid. Now … since I … took it upon myself to decide who would live, and who would die … I have become the eternal referee. Whenever you want to … I don’t know what to call it … play, perhaps, with humanity … you work through me. You appear—”

  “As I have now …”

  “Yes … you’re here,” Harold said, as if just suddenly at that moment realizing what the appearance of Nyarlathotep actually meant. “You’re here …”

  The weeping man shuddered, his body pulling in on itself until it seemed to have lost a third of its mass. Pitifully, he asked, “There’s a war somewhere, isn’t there?”

  “Harry, you’re a human being. There is always a war going on somewhere in your miserable little world. Most of them don’t interest me. Look at how long it’s been since I was last here. If I needed you to make a decision about every war your planet spawned, why … you’d be asking for overtime.”

  As the Crawling Chaos chuckled to itself, Harold shuddered in horror. It was coming again. He would be shown combatants along with their battlefields, and he would be expected to choose the winners and the losers. Mountains of bodies, lakes of blood, all his responsibility. And he would be kept alive, eternally young and fit, to wait for the next time he would be needed.

  Most of the time he could ignore the terrible truth of his longevity, the price he paid for every breath. But, he asked himself, what else could he do? It had not been his doing. He had not asked for anything but the lives of his soldiers—

  “And why did you do that?”

  Nyarlathotep’s question dug beneath his skin, stinging Harold, making him squirm. He could lie to himself, decade after century after millennia, but he could not lie to the thing across the table from him. How, after all, do you lie to something within your own brain?

  He had not been lying to himself. He had been begging for the lives of his men so long ago in the rain … but his visitor knew the truth. He had done so out of shame—out of fear. Their deaths would have meant embarrassment for him, his family. To lose his first command, to have them slaughtered out from under him, only weeks after he arrived on the cursed British shore—

  Harold shuddered. He thought on what would have happened to his family. All they would have lost. Of course, he would have been long dead by the time anyone in Rome heard of what had happened, which, when he was honest, was what had actually terrified him. Death—

  Death—

  “Oh, my poor little Harry, perhaps I’ve kept you at this for too long. Maybe I’ve been cruel, keeping your tiny human mind and soul functioning for so long.”

  As Harold looked up, the thing across from him was completely unstable. Swirls of orange vapor revolved around a floating golden and bl
ack striped central oval of flesh, one covered in a hair of tiny eight-fingered arms, all of them clutching and unclutching without rhythm. Small shards of burning ice dripped from the impossible shape, hissing as they shattered against Harold’s kitchen floor.

  “Maybe you were not built for a service so extensive,” the mass emitted, a tone of giggling concern coating its words. “Perhaps it would be compassionate of me to allow you to finally expire. Tell me—”

  Harold trembled at the notion. Never did he think his duties would ever be fulfilled. There had never before been such a hint. “Would you like to die?”

  So many hundreds upon hundreds of years. So many wars. So many peoples delivered into that which waited beyond the veil. By his hand. By his choice. Decisions made without malice, without prejudice. This one or that one. One from column A or one from column B. The e'ne, me'ne, mi'ne, moe of uncaring destruction.

  Billions of lives over the millennia. Billions.

  “Would you, Harry?”

  Like the last time. World War II. His choice had been about how Hitler would deal with the Jews. The Führer himself, during Kristallnacht, had made certain those of the Hebrew faith were driven into the streets—ruined. But not killed. What came later, the camps, the gas, the ovens, the gold teeth harvested, the lamp shades made of human skin, the soap made of human fat—

  “Would you?”

  That had been Harold’s choice. When asked, without hesitation, knowing he was sending millions to their deaths, he had not stopped to weigh their coming horror and pain against his own passing.

  “No …” Harold answered weakly. “No … I wouldn’t.”

  He had picked the Jews for death, adding in the gypsies and all the rest on his own, because he thought it rounded things out nicely.

  “Excellent,” whispered the Crawling Chaos, its tone one well-pleased. Without hesitation, Nyarlathotep unfolded the current conflict which interested it so. And, as always, Harold listened attentively, preparing to make his choice, all the while thinking of his garden, wishing that someday the cardinals might return.

  MAGNA MATER

  BY EDWARD MORRIS

  1

  ”THEN ON YOUR NAME SHALL WRETCHED MORTALS CALL …”

  Two hours’ drive from the Front by Jeep, the dark French hills rise wild with barbed wire, and thin grows the veil between Earth and the godless Deep. Five geologic points ring the black flame-tip of a veritable esoteric iceberg, shadowy woods full of fragments of a vaster tapestry as the bloody battles it memorializes are retold with its remains as audience.…

  On this cold, snowy morning past, at ten sharp, my employer’s empty coffin was laid to rest here in the frosty, pre-dug ground of our own churchyard. We paid well to do it this way, and there were no hitches whatsoever. All of Rennes-le-Chateau breathed a sigh of relief, and went about its other affairs.

  There have been much bigger headlines, of late, even sixty-five kilometers from the Front. Both sides are trying to dig in and not actually wipe out the other. That’s not why they’re here. Not yet, anyway. Things have to get a little more insane.

  And they will. I know that my blood knows that. But not just now.

  My dear, dead mother taught me that the secret to keeping any form of employment is to make oneself utterly indispensable at it. For years, I have done so. I have sacrificed. And I have become the position.

  Those German deserters came sucking and grinning around here again, leaving their tracks in the mud and their dog-end cigarettes everywhere. Nothing escapes my notice, on these grounds. I saw the map sticking out of their tail-end Charlie’s pocket, the feeble-minded one who picks his nose. The X on every map marked a different spot. It would have been funny. Truly. Truly.

  Truly. Not much goes on for miles that escapes my ears, my eyes, my scrying. Pride, I know. An old woman’s pride in her co-collection: the ancient paper books with their bright colors we kept below stairs, with covers which were sometimes recopied in calligraphy or woodblock-press where the old typeface might have occasionally fallen away. DeVermis Mysteriis. The Pnakotic Manuscripts. Biblia Titanica.

  And the eldest, the special one, bound in human skin. The so-called Book of Nicetas, the Lost Book of the Cathars, written by a madman somewhere in the Fertile Crescent. The book that Father and Brother Alfred both said could only be opened on Judgment Day. The Bishop of Carcassone, the Abbé’s immediate superior, had taken that one off the hands of a Diabolist named Alphonse-Louis Constant, who called it “beyond control.”

  All the old books, buried against the final fall of darkest Night. I will miss the fun we had, all we did. But now we have built our Dream, and I must follow my Teacher soon.

  Je me souviens. So many memories, in and out of those old books. The cellar we dug for them was quite a team effort. That other priest helped, and his occasional dashing Mystery Guest.

  Abbé Boudet, tall and distractible, had been a miner or some such awful thing when he was a boy, and really knew how to swing a pickaxe. He was different when he worked, more hard-put than the lanky, distractible bookworm who came stork-walking over here about every third or fifth sunset with his nose buried in some old phantasy or philosophy as he made the trek from Rennes-les-Bains for their little nightly chats.

  Sometimes he did not come alone, or on shank’s mare. Sometimes the mare was in fact a pair of geldings coal-black as night, hooked to a phaeton driven by a fellow of Eastern extraction for the Aegyptian fellow … or was he Somali? My memories of that scholar are somewhat cloudy. Perhaps with good reason.

  I loved Nyarlah, as the black man graciously pronounced his name for me. It was like having a seven-foot djinn in our own parlor, muttering and croaking about hollow pillars and pentagonal geometry and the way that Westerners will believe anything you tell them. It was grand to listen to him talk in that accent, mais bien! But that courtly ifrit exterior masked something I only saw once:

  ***

  We had another irregularly regular guest who was often far less than regular, or welcome. The Abbé’s twin brother Alfred, who’d went to seminary school in other parts, who could have been Berenger … Father, excuse me, Father’s twin, but for the lighter hair and the different lines about his face. (Most of the lines in Father’s face are laugh-lines; his brother’s, the opposite, and burst capillaries in the cheeks and nose. Très chic. Good riddance to the sot. )

  Father Alfred … for I respect the ordination, if not the individual … was over even more often than Boudet. At most social matters outside of the duties of his calling, the man was a cock-up. If he didn’t write it down, he forgot it. Drove me up the wall, half the time he was around. It was like trying to have a conversation with a child.

  His brother told me once in confidence over tea that he could count on his twin for about four or five things, constantly. “Mostly matters of realpolitik between dioceses, the kind we deal with now as the Pharisees try to drum me out of my collar,” was how he put it. Which certainly explained Alfred’s constant presence in the past few weeks. That silver-tongued devil was always underfoot, sucking up the fine Charteuse liqueur, and worse.

  But there was a line Alfred crossed, and he did it to himself. I remember the day the good Father came home at ten in the morning to the rectory, with graveyard dirt and blood under his nails and tombstone chips in his hair.

  ***

  The kitchen door in the rectory tended to bang loudly shut. It was badly hung. I thought I’d left it open. When I came out into the kitchen, Alfred was standing there with his hair gone mostly white and fingernail-tracks in his cheeks, laughing and crying at the same time. I waited, my plain black apron covered in flour. Behind my back, the marble rolling-pin also awaited its orders. I had none for it.

  “The keys,” he moaned to no one in particular, across the parlor sunbeams where he saw no one stand at first, just the tall shadow that made me wince where I stood over in the kitchen doorway. “I can’t find one of the damned keys. This is all wrong.”

  He was to
o worldly for his brother’s work. He got too out of control. Nyarlah slithered through the parlor, and cocked a leathery arm around Alfred’s broad shoulders.

  “You went downstairs,” he said in that voice that had nothing wrong with it and everything wrong at the same time. That rich upright bass of beauty and abomination measure for measure and equal. He sat himAlfred down like a baby on the divan, the way a minder would in a tavern with someone who didn’t need any more down their neck.

  Alfred’s eyes were fogged, vacant. Nyarlah snapped two bony pink-brown fingers in front of his eyes and barked something in a language I didn’t know. “Allons-y!” he continued, more jokingly. “You found the stairway down. Down to the squared circle.”

  Alfred grimaced, eyes at the toes of his plain black brogans, looking like he was swimming up from a black and poisoned tarn. “Knew about that.… Try not to go near. Try to stay out of …” He essayed at an ironic smile in the direction of the black man’s smooth, round pate. “Your hair. Sir.” The smile was all gone. “I. I. I. Ha. You. Work for the Germans, too. You’re … the Devil. You work for …everyone.”

  Nyarlah smiled. It just made my skin crackle. “What else?” he said, in a voice that poured water over Father Alfred’s mouth and nose, and made him sit up.

  Alfred was looking into Nyarlah’s strange eyes. It made me a bit weak in the knees. But to Alfred, it was doing something else.

  Something else indeed.

  “I … don’t remember. I don’t … The way down. I found all sorts of … other rooms, and other … stones, the more I tried to dig up. But there weren’t … keys in any of them, not the way I heard my idiot brother … on about …” He sighed long and heavily. “It made sense. I thought it did. If I followed the five most prominent headstones, the way he hinted at in his journal, then …”

  I had to butt in. “Idiot. Who taught you to read Latin? And you went to seminary school.”