He tried to curse and couldn’t.
The path abruptly leveled and widened into a clearing. He must be at the top of the mountain, because he saw no more slopes up. He also saw no slopes down, and no sister mountains off in the distance.
For all the world, it was as if he had climbed a mountain and at its top found a flat plain, a featureless collision of blue-green grass and slate gray sky.
Almost featureless. Dotting the plain like rotted canine teeth were stone pillars. They were as tall as the skyscrapers of Manhattan but thinner, and hanging on the nearest, fifty feet off the ground, John saw rusted iron chains.
John’s bones felt like ice.
Above, circling birds.
“The right time an’ place.”
John turned and saw Hodder standing at his shoulder. He shuddered, sucking in cold air to steady himself.
Then he looked past the bald man and saw no slope, but only more featureless plain. The mountain, with its paths and its trees, with John’s borrowed car and Hodder’s cabin and altar, was gone.
A bird called, sharp and short.
John fainted.
***
John hung on a wall.
There were pins under his shoulders; his arms tingled, asleep, from having their circulation pinched by the pins. His legs felt no sensation at all. His eyes and ears itched.
“So, then,” Dr. Bender said, leaning in close to John’s face. “Have you got words for us?”
Behind Dr. Bender John saw the cavernous empty space of the professor’s laboratory. It seemed even larger than it had before.
“Not yet.” John felt strangely remote from his body. His attention felt small and local, as if his mind were cleared of all other matters. As if he were simplified. “Soon.”
Dr. Bender nodded, rubbing his fingers together. “Time to sleep some more then, John.”
“Can I get down now?”
“And do what?” Dr. Bender laughed. “Walk?”
John Hanks looked down at his legs. His legs, his body, his arms—all of himself that he could see—was featureless wood.
“Don’t worry,” Dr. Bender said. “We’ll speak again.”
***
John hung on a rock.
It was a pillar, not a boulder. And there were no pins under his shoulders—he hung from rusted iron chains that were manacled to his wrists.
He woke to the sharp feeling of his head being punctured, and he shook it, dislodging something hungry and cold. He opened his eyes in time to see a large black bird, flapping slowly away. The bird didn’t go far—it settled on the top of another rough stone pillar, within a stone’s throw. At the peak of that pillar it perched and glared at John with a baleful yellow eye.
John couldn’t feel his arms, and the pain in his shoulders was intense. He looked down, and saw that he was thirty feet off the ground. Below him was blue-green grass in a flat plain that seemed to extend forever; above him was slate-gray sky.
The wind blowing through the stone whistled two tones, one lower than the other. The skin on John’s back prickled as he recognized the two drone notes and their strange interval, accented by the occasional cries of birds.
Before the pillar stood the man named Hodder. Hodder raised his arms to the gray sky and began to chant.
John had climbed the mountain for these words, and they burned into his consciousness.
amatim shikaram nipqid, he heard.
amatum sha belim anaku—
amatim shikaram nipqid!
shepum sha kalbim imratz!
The pain in John’s shoulders dimmed as the old man chanted the strange words. The tingling sensation of sleep in his limbs spread up through the shoulders, into his chest, into his legs.
His head.
The next-to-last thing John thought he saw was Dr. Enoch Bender. If there had been anyone to take his dying deposition, he would have sworn he saw the professor standing behind Hodder with an ear cocked and a pen furiously scribbling notes in a stenographic notepad.
And then the sky cracked—
John understood the song—
and he was no more.
MINE OF THE DAMNED GODS
Sarah E. Seeley
The echoes of her moans grew more distinct as I followed the abandoned mineshaft to the pit where my Pa held her captive. The cool, humid air tasted slick and dirty, like oil with a hint of rottenness seeping up from undigested victims long trapped in the bowels of the earth. Crumbling black walls of coal sucked the intensity from my headlamp, and smudged my t-shirt, jeans, and the industrial nylon of my backpack as I repelled foot-by-fist into the chamber no man had entered since the day they struck pure chaos nineteen years ago. She’d been here all that time. People’d heard her, sure enough. But nobody dared to wonder if she was more than a ghost or a warning to their ears for getting too close to a place where thirty-two men lost their minds, and their shit, and tore each other to pieces.
The infinitesimal significance of my own existence thickened on me as my fancy Mago Scarpas touched down on the floor of the pit. He was here. Probably hibernating until the time was right. I could see him looming in the shadows if I wanted, but I didn’t go looking.
Naked and caked in soot, she stooped on a heap of coal and rubble. Left arm flung across her waist. Her slight form rocking as her body attempted to cry or scream. She couldn’t manage it, though. Only those moans sighed out, soft and desolate, like a faun who’d lost her mama and was slowly starving to death. Except she couldn’t die like I knew she wanted to.
She still looked a girl, not a day older than seventeen, with matted blonde hair that draped in clumps around her shoulders and hung halfway down her spine. Aside from her belly she was thin, but had enough meat on her bones to pass as healthy if she weren’t so filthy. Clamped around her left wrist was the heavy, two-inch long metal cuff with strange symbols embossed on it like I remembered. I didn’t know how it worked. I didn’t know why she was special, why she hadn’t gone stark raving mad long before I was born. I only knew I was almost a man now, and I couldn’t ignore her pleading thoughts in my head no more.
“It’s you.” The cherubic whisper of her voice was thick from unseen cosmic static filling the air and blanketing her mind. Her right hand rested on her knee, clutching a rusty spike that dripped blood to a tiny splatter sunken in the dust by her foot. A long pink seam in the flesh of her swollen belly was the only testament to her desperation.
“You called me.”
“Did I?”
“Yeah, Ma.”
She turned her head slowly to meet my eyes, as to a great dark fiend, such as I was. Her lips quivered and stretched into a strange, limp smile. I couldn’t quite discern from her thoughts whether her fear or her wonder governed this expression. Perhaps they were one in the same. “You’re still alive. I haven’t seen you in a long time.”
“Twelve years,” I said.
“How old you now?”
“Eighteen.”
She swallowed. Her doe-brown eyes glistened and pinked in the light of my headlamp. Her voice hushed to a whisper, “I think she’s coming tonight. Could you take her away with you? I can’t stand to watch it again. Not this time.” She held out a blood-caked hand to me. “Help me?”
I licked my lips. I didn’t want to touch her, fearing I’d drive her mad if I messed with her head, even just to induce her and block the pain. But I couldn’t say no. This was what I’d come for. “I’ll try,” I said. I took her hand and bled my thoughts into hers until she’d settled down on the ground, contracting in hushed, noiseless breaths.
The body came out first. It was full-term, but withered and blue, slimy with blood. Headless. The little she-thing wriggled and kicked in my hand as I pulled it to me in shock. The head came out separate a minute later, a tiny, faceless orb of overgrown skin, cartilage, and tentacles that had parasitized itself clean off. I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised, given that Ma and Pa were of vastly different species. It just wasn’t right, was
n’t fair.
“Can I see her?”
“She’s dead, Ma,” I whispered. “She didn’t stand a chance.”
The temperature of the air dropped, filling my chest with the tang of needles and turning my breath to mist. That eldritch force crawled across my skin like ants tearing flesh from a corpse one tiny bite at a time. I hated my flesh. My mother’s conscience burned within me whenever my thoughts turned dark and apathetic. Her own suffering was so senseless, yet she called me back from the void of a universe that I knew felt nothing for the life it excreted into existence. I saw glimpses of it from time to time, but I cared only because I cared about her.
I let the two lumps of infant corpse slip from my fingers and pressed my palms, slicked in Ma’s blood, to the front of my skull. If I didn’t let myself molt, I’d go blind with rage and terror in about a minute. An icy burn seared my flesh as it melted into a rubbery, knotted texture like porpoise skin studded with grain-sized barnacles. My nails grew out, curled and blackened. Claws extended through slits I’d already made in the fabric of my shoes. The tentacles normally suppressed by my human genes snaked out around my lips and throat. Sliming my clothes was about as pleasant as shitting my pants, and equally humiliating. Coupled with the fact that human emotions were poorly adapted to handle shifts in physical identity, I could either cut them off or remain at the mercy of the greater fiend stirring in the darkness where I dared not make my presence obvious by looking.
Ma pulled one of my remolded, talon-like hands into hers and squeezed. “It’s alright, Eustace. Go now. Go before he gets you.”
The shrill hiss of steam made me leap up. A space opened in the surface of a sleek, black twenty-foot-long pod cocooned in the lowest layer of coal in the floor, less than a dozen feet away. A plume of dust and smoke swept out from that void, carrying a strange smell that reminded me of dead fish pickled in paint thinner.
Wet growls rumbled low and deep enough to vibrate my bones. A huge shape emerged from the void in the pod. I saw him in eye and mind. And he saw me. My headlamp flickered and buzzed until it popped, plunging Ma and me into total darkness. I could see in the dark when I wanted, but I didn’t want to see him coming. I didn’t want to listen to my Ma’s submissive wails of disgust as he violated her one more time. If I left her here, I knew I’d hear her cry out to me as I fled. If I stayed, I knew he’d kill me.
Dust crackled as he slithered toward us. I slid the remnants of my infant sister into his path and hoisted Ma to her feet.
“What?”
“Come on.” I pulled her arm across my shoulders and we ran.
“You can’t take me out of here,” she said, seeing my thoughts. “He’ll hurt people, kill people.”
“Don’t care. He’d do it anyway.” Claws didn’t make my repelling rope any easier to tie on right.
The soft crunch and slurp of my Pa consuming the little corpse made Ma gasp out in grief. “No. No!”
He was coming. I left the rope and pulled Ma to my hip.
She shook her head and tried to pull away. “There’s nothing left for me up there. The world’s all changed and I ain’t. I don’t know it anymore.”
“Listen.” I kept a firm grip on her arm, willing myself not to numb her into a stupor. I couldn’t carry her if she passed out. “You ain’t no lab rat. You’re my mother, and I won’t leave this pit without you again.” I couldn’t see her face, but I sensed her thoughts grow cloudy and chaotic. I shook her arm to regain her attention. “Ma, please! You called me to come. Let me help—”
The Elder Thing struck a heavy blow to my chest, slamming me against the wall. I sank to my ass, gasping for breath. My fingers discovered four long shreds in my shirt, beneath which four slender cuts began to bleed. A huge, rough, slimy limb clamped around my neck. Unable to cry out, I thrashed and slashed at the Elder Thing, cutting his skin and making him roar. Claws clamped into the skin under my jaw. I knew he wanted to tear me apart, starting with my head. With my mind.
My reality shriveled as the void of dark, cold nothingness that was the Elder Thing’s thoughts pulsed through me. I wasn’t me anymore, but two creatures in one. My consciousness kept disintegrating, like the human and alien halves of my core identity were being ripped away from each other and liquefied a little at a time. Soon I felt only fear and spasmodic reflexes reacting to the pressure driving my skull and spine apart. He took pleasure at my torment. He left enough of my cognition intact to sense it.
As suddenly as the attack on my psyche had commenced, the Elder Thing released his grip both inside me and out. I got to my feet somehow. My mind was blank. I couldn’t speak, couldn’t move.
“Hold onto me, Eustace,” Ma’s voice pleaded.
I climbed onto her back and she began to scale the wall of the pit. He followed us up the wall all the way to the mouth of the mine. I wanted to scream.
She carried me out into the open, into the wooded hillside. He stopped following us there. Don’t know why. I tightened my grip around Ma’s shoulders and let my head sink against the crook of her neck as I slipped out of consciousness.
***
The smell of Clorox, and the fresh sick it masked, roused me. That, and the hand shaking my shoulder.
“Eustace,” Ma’s voice called.
Burning pain stung my chest. I clutched at bandages instead of gashes and blinked up at two male nurses dressed in green scrubs. My shirt was off. My pants were still on, still soaked in slime. I sat upright in the hospital bed, didn’t see Ma, and started hollering for her.
One nurse, a dark-haired man about thirty with sea-green eyes and freckles, pressed a latex-gloved hand firmly to my shoulder and said, “Take it easy!”
Ma came from somewhere on my right, took my hand and squeezed. “I’m here, baby. I had to go away for a little while and get cleaned up. But I’m back now.” She forced a smile, her eyelids drooping in a glazed, half-aware expression. I frowned, a little dumbfounded to see her in a white hospital gown with black polka dots and a matching pair of pants. Her long, straw-colored hair made a strange contrast against the pale blue undertone of her skin. I was looking blue myself, which happened sometimes after I molted. Thankfully, all my non-human features had gone dormant again.
Damn, she was pretty. If I knew anybody who could take care of her and resist the Elder Thing to protect her like she needed, I’d set her up on a date in a heartbeat. Except I knew that no decent guy her actual age would meet up with a girl who still looked like a kid. And the ethics of setting up a 36-year-old woman who looked and felt seventeen with a kid didn’t sit none too right with me either. The horror of just how irrevocably messed up her life was twisted me up inside.
I scratched my face and found another set of bandages stuck over the punctures around my jaw. I stared at the bizarre bracelet on her arm for a while, wondering if anybody had asked her about it. Then I fell back onto the angled mattress and groaned, taking in the further complications that were bound to come from involving all these well-meaning hospital people in our escape from the mine. Someone was going to split us up, ask questions, go poking around where they shouldn’t and get themselves in trouble. Though I’d seen too much of the underbelly of existence to believe in any sort of god, I prayed to whatever benevolent forces may be to bless my Ma’s heart for doing it anyway, hoping to save me, or get me whatever help she thought I needed that we couldn’t take care of ourselves.
***
Ma sat in a banged-up folding chair, teetering back and forth on the four uneven legs, frowning at the shriveled exoskeleton of a praying mantis on the windowsill of the outpatient office. It was a small town hospital with sixty-five beds on two levels. The unscreened window was locked open with about an inch of space beneath the sliding pane, letting in flies with the humid summer air that was only slightly cooler than the greenhouse heat inside the room. Clutched between the mantis’s pincers and mandibles were a couple of wasp legs. Five slender white stalks topped with berry-red caps stuck up from the mantis’s belly
like a collection of mutant sewing pins. “I wasn’t blue before the mine,” Ma said.
“They can treat it, Ma. You’ve just got a little less oxygen sticking to your blood than normal.”
“Who’s gonna pay for… for treatment and things?”
“The good old state of Kentucky.” I paced around the room, waiting for the town investigator to arrive and ask us a bunch of dumb-ass questions I couldn’t answer in any way that’d make sense. To make matters more complicated, the hospital had found my driver’s license in the wallet I kept in my backpack and called up my foster mother. She was on her way to meet us. She wanted to help us, but I didn’t know what to tell her about the girl who’d rescued me from the mine a second time when I’d made up my mind to rescue her.
I wanted to get Ma as far away from this town and the fiend in the mine as possible, to give her back some chance for a normal life if I could. No more monster, no more suffering, no more dark energy to cloud up her thoughts.
“Wasn’t so slow before neither,” she lamented a little softer. Her mental fascination for the dead insect started to grate on my nerves.
“Do you have to stare at that thing? It’s disgusting.”
“Nah, its God’s work.”
“God’s work? You’re crazy.”
Her frown deepened, hurt. “Least that thing’s natural. I ain’t seen natural things in a long time.”
I sighed and pinched the bridge of my nose. “I’m sorry, Ma. If anyone can find God’s hand in predators and parasites, its you.”
We didn’t say nothing for a long minute or two. Then Ma reached for the trash bin next to the office desk and scooped the dead insect off the sill. “Did you know he’s superstitious?”
“Who?”
She swallowed. “The… that thing I lived with.”
I looked at the back of her head while she gazed out the window.
“It’s scared of us, you and me,” she said. “It didn’t want to spawn neither. It was looking for a way out. Out of the mine. It… it changed me, Eustace.”
Redneck Eldritch Page 4