Earl had done it to me too, I realized, when I seeped into his thoughts and he’d turned my own crushing will back on me. Had the fiend given him some device like Cassie-Jo’s cuff, something that protected him from the chaos? It seemed absurd. I hadn’t seen any cuff on him, and the Elder Thing was too vulnerable to grant some mere vermin a power that could be used against him in any way.
I withdrew my tendrils and let the Elder Thing’s will meld into my own. It was a gamble. If I lost my mind I wouldn’t be able to stop him.
A terrifying sensation swelled around me, as if the earth shifted beneath my feet and I sank into an ocean of tar, cumbered, forgotten. The forest became a writhing jungle of black worms in my vision, snaking around me, stretching me, squeezing me, biting at my senses in jarring waves of heat and cold, light and dark. I let the vision envelop me. The pain ceased. The ground turned solid beneath me once more, and the black worms once more became leafy shrubs and trees silhouetted amid the orange light of the sinking sun beyond the hills.
The Elder Thing called me to come to him, his will tugging at me like marionette strings. I pulled away from the tree I had leaned against. After taking three steps forward I stopped myself. With a shiver of astonishment I took a step back. Then another. His thoughts jerked at my own, but just as I had been unable to crush him he was now unable to crush or control me. It seemed whatever the Elder Thing and my human parents shared in common, they couldn’t pry far into each other’s minds when they were calm and focused without taking a licking. If my prediction was correct, the fiercer and deeper we sank our vices into one another, or into a nearby entity that couldn’t defend itself, the harsher the recoil when the defender interfered and those tendrils snapped. And snap them I did. With a cool, deliberate lurch of thought I withdrew from the fiend’s grasp, and the weight of his aura lifted from my limbs.
Weary from the struggle, I swept up the axe—when had I dropped it?—and rushed toward his burbling roars of fury. He was a dark mass in the darkening forest. I swung the axe down where he might have a spine, hoping to paralyze him by degrees until I found his head and hacked it off his shoulders. The blade stuck fast in his flesh. I wrenched at it, but he flung me away and I slid on my back, plowing twigs and soil. I rolled and pushed myself up to my knees, then ducked as the axe whizzed over my head and its blade flashed out of sight.
His form groaned and struggled in the darkness. “You are magnificent,” he whispered in my mind. “But you are weak. You fear the change, as all things do.”
I glanced over my shoulder to search for the axe. The rope I’d stolen and used for a belt had come off, so I gathered the waistband of my slimed shorts once more and scrambled to my feet. I found the axe head, broken clean off the handle near the rocky outcropping it had hit..
The Elder Thing’s flesh scraped the ground as he dragged himself toward me. I left the axe blade and ran on. If I got Cassie-Jo out and kept her away from him long enough, it might buy us some time to figure out how to manipulate that cuff against him. Maybe we could cut him off from her thoughts and her connection to the cosmos, starve him to death.
“Go on to the mine, my foolish spawn,” he goaded. “Fate and I will meet you there.”
“I don’t believe in fate.” The lie twisted at my heart, knowing how I’d felt after kissing my Ma. I withdrew my thoughts from the fiend’s once more and ran on.
***
Trees grew thicker, the shadows darker and deeper as I came down and rounded the hill. The wooden skeleton of some old structure loomed over the mouth of the mine. I clambered past it and braced against the logs and rusted iron struts in the wall, gasping out like a dying man choking on his own spit. I knew she was inside. She had to be. If she wasn’t, I’d be dead and she’d be trapped with him forever. “Cassie-Jo!”
I heard nothing except the moan of the breeze through the dirty tunnels.
“Ma, please be here! It’s me, Eustace. I need… I need…” My shorts slid to my ankles and I fell forward into the dark. My face and knees slammed into rocks and grit, smarting my skin and bones. I rolled and writhed in the soot, fighting my mind and my body as my molt penetrated deeper than ever before, threatening to alter me in ways that might be irreversible. The energy had become so strong in this place, a kind of energy that conformed to it what it didn’t destroy.
I didn’t know what I was becoming, but I didn’t want to lose my humanity. If I couldn’t shift back, couldn’t keep the energy inside, I couldn’t return to civilization without destroying it. I couldn’t touch Cassie-Jo or anyone else ever again. I’d be alone. Alone was not something humans had evolved to cope with. Alone would kill me—the two-thirds of me that could care. Now I knew what she was so afraid of when the Elder Thing called.
Something rapped me hard upside my head, sending a burst of pain through my skull and slashing my right eye. I screamed and clapped my clawed hands to my eye as hot fluid rolled down my face like tears. A second blow above the temple knocked me nearly unconscious. A hand clenched my hair and dragged me deeper into the darkness and the chaos. My shorts slipped off completely. I was too disoriented to fight back.
The hand hoisted me to my feet and its owner slammed me back against the iron struts in the wall. I gasped in shock and clutched at an iron pole jutting out between my ribs. I couldn’t scream. Could barely breathe. Laughter echoed off the round walls, ghoulish and triumphant. “Well well well, if it ain’t my little boy Eustace. I thought I killed you.”
I jerked my body left and right, desperate to dislodge myself, to crawl off the pole. Earl’s shoulder slammed me back again.
“It’s nice of you to meet up with us here. I’ve gotten myself into a bit of a predicament, you see. The Old Thing wants me to knock her up again. Much as I’d like to, I ain’t as young and perky as I used to be.”
He punched me hard in the balls. My knees buckled and I curled over, dry-heaving. My flesh tore and my ribs cracked from bearing all my weight on the pole. I was scared shitless and I couldn’t even cry out. This was it. I was born in this mine full of misery, and here I would die.
The sleazy old man caressed my head as I wept from agony and hysteria. “Don’t be afraid, my boy. I’m doing you a mercy. It’s not like you was gonna have any kind of a life among good normal folk with your tenties hanging out all the time.” He yanked one of the tentacles expressed between by nose and upper lip, jerking my head and tweaking my neck at an awkward angle. I heard a clicking sound, like a knife flipping open. I wanted to lash out, try to claw at his eye or his hands. But I held back. Any attack I made wouldn’t stop him, just make him madder and meaner. I couldn’t see nothing. My gored eye still hurt like hell, and I kept the other one squeezed shut.
“Where’s… Cassie-Jo?” I wheezed.
“Oh, she’s here. She’s just being a good girl, holding still and keeping her mouth shut like I told her to.”
“What did you do?”
He chuckled. The blunt edge of a hunting knife scraped back and forth across the suckers on the tender underside of the tentacle. I tasted the iron tang of blood on the blade and knew without searching that it was hers. I winced but refused to plead with him to spare me pain or spare my dignity. He said, “There’s a lot of mysteries hidden in the ground ordinary men wasn’t meant to find. But I ain’t ordinary. I know my place in the universe, and I knew about the technology and power of the Captured Ones long before I found me a live specimen. I heard his pathetic call. I dug him out. I made a deal with him. If I healed him, he’d serve me, like a genie in a bottle. But he tricked me. Suppose I knew he would.”
I felt and tasted his musty breath hissing right in my face as he curled the tip of my captured tentacle between his fingers. “I took material from his damaged pod, his ball-and-chain, his Webowax—that’s the name for it. I forged it into a brand-new, smaller Webowax, that slave bracelet thing, and I brought my daughter to him as an offering. But any new artifacts I forged to take command of his power wouldn’t take the script becaus
e of one extra little symbol he added to her band. Oh, he told me I couldn’t take control until after he’d restored his body and rejoined himself in full to the pulse of the universe, that it were the only way it worked. But I knew he was trying to escape his own bondage. So I trapped him in here by carving a few little symbols of my own into the walls of this mine that’d suck his energy away so fast his brains would shrivel up before he could shake a wing if he ever tried to leave. Thanks to you, though, he broke out of my trap. Fortunately, the little slave bracelet breaks easy enough, too, if you just cut it off from its host.”
“Cassie…” I coughed, choking as my own blood rose in my throat and filled my mouth.
Earl spat in the darkness. “There’s still a way I can fix this. I’ve already carved new command symbols into the band. Unfortunately for you, my boy, you’re his one mistake, and his last desperate chance to reclaim that connection and regenerate. When he comes for you, I’ll be waiting. The Old Thing will be my slave, and his power will be mine at last.”
“It ain’t as easy to control as you think,” Cassie’s voice called with its familiar quivering distance from the shadows. “It’ll change you eventually, and you’ll be alone. Alone with the ghosts like he was.”
“Keep your mouth shut, bitch, or I’ll cut your legs off next.”
The familiar crackle of wet flesh on gravel, and the cold, electric prickle of the Elder Thing’s energy sent a shockwave of panic through me. I wriggled, scraping my shoes against the ground and ripping fabric as I gripped Earl’s shirt with one hand in a futile effort to pull myself forward off the pole.
He tore away from me, laughing full from his belly. “Come to me, Papa Mayhem. I’m—”
I heard a loud crunch, followed by his body thudding to the ground as he shrieked in pain. I opened my good eye to see him cradling his right knee while he shuffled toward the slight figure I made out as Cassie-Jo, knife swishing as he swung his fist through the air. I wrapped my thoughts around his once more, hating every inch of his vile carcass. Instead of snapping my connection like he had in the motel, he spun and waved his blade at me like he might throw it. He was in too much pain to throw me off.
She shoved into his back with her shoulder. He threw himself on top of her, pinning her throat with his arm and raising his blade. Something exploded inside me. I kept his raised hand from sinking the knife into her until he pulled himself off her and dropped it.
He crawled toward a black bag and unzipped it. He drew out the metal cuff fused tight to the flesh beneath the hand he’d cut from Cassie’s arm. As he pried at the Webowax, he wheezed, mouth gaping open and closed in fury and astonishment. I relished watching the life quickly bleed out of him and his body growing still, and I thanked the careless stars that whatever power he had stolen wasn’t deep enough to save him.
The wet crunch of the Elder Thing persisted. A softer sound drew my eye back to the darkness where Cassie-Jo’s figure crawled toward me. She let her papa’s gun slip from her hand and retrieved his knife, cutting away a length of skinny nylon rope around her waist that pinned her arms to her sides just above the elbows. A second knot of rope binding her ankles came off just as quickly. Her left forearm ended in a dark stump where her hand and wrist had once been. I couldn’t see her face well, but I heard her breath quiver, weak, suffering some kind of torment I didn’t understand that I suspected had something to do with being severed from the Webowax.
She used the pole slicked with my gore to climb to her feet. Without a word, she drew my arms around her shoulders and pulled at me until I walked myself off the poll. I collapsed on top of her. Instead of pushing me off, she kept her arms around me, entwined the fingers of her right hand in my hair and held on. “I’m so sorry,” she whispered. “For everything.”
I groaned and shook my head.
“I just want to go home to my mama,” she whispered, “but I know she’s gone. Papa killed her. I’ve got no one left but you.” A sob caught in her throat. “I can’t watch that thing do it one more time. Not you.” She took several quavering breaths. “We can still stop him.”
“How?” I croaked. I knew she was talking about the molt, or that change beyond the molt that neither one of us could return from if we gave in. But based on what Earl had said, I wasn’t sure either one of us could survive much longer without the Webowax, let alone fight and kill the Elder Thing.
“I still have a choice,” she said. “I know I’m shriveling up fast inside, but…”
The Elder Thing’s burbling growl shuddered through me, and I caught a whiff of his fishy paint-like stench. I closed my good eye and clung to Cassie-Jo tight with both hands as the aura of impending doom squeezed in on me. “I warned you to go,” his voice whispered in my head. “But you couldn’t stay away. Now, you will die. Submit to my will, and your suffering will be short.” The wet-smack of the creature older than the dinosaurs who had fallen to Earth from across some distant darkness drew toward us in a weary shimmy. He’d known Earl would be waiting for him, and he’d set us up to incapacitate each other before he returned.
I was afraid to die, and I knew Cassie-Jo was afraid to lose me to this fiend’s appetite. She said, “If I go through with this, Eustace, it’ll change us both.”
“It’s… your choice. Either way… I… love…” I couldn’t say no more. All of my breath had escaped through the hole in my gut.
My mind screamed like I sank once more through some bottomless abyss, drowning, deafened with the roar of the cosmos, surrounded by blackness. I felt the chaos bend around us, felt the cold of the universe sink into me deep, and sucked in a full, pain-free breath in shock. I reared up and clutched my side as the sticky hole in my flesh sucked shut. The torn flesh of my eye sealed over like a scar mass. As if in answer, the eyelids of my good eye sealed themselves together too, and the seam melted from existence. Both the organs I’d once relied on to sense light and chase out my fear of the dark were liquefying. There was no pain, only a hot draining sensation, but the change horrified me. I screamed and rolled away from Cassie-Jo, thrashing and clawing frantically at my face.
Her hand clutched at my arm, nails digging into my flesh. Her screams and her horror of the change were just as frantic as mine. “Help me,” her voice pleaded in my mind. I took her wrist to pry her fingers from my arm and interlaced the fingers of my hand in hers. Her skin was slick with slime and grew knotted like toad flesh in my grasp. Her nails grazed my knuckles as they lengthened and twisted into claws. My hair tore away from my scalp like a slimy carpet of grass and slumped into a pile beneath my head. My ears sank into my skull, leaving canals that attuned themselves to disturbances deeper than sound. The seam of my lips grew tight as it, too, began to shrink. My tongue stretched and forked into three separate wormlike tendrils inside my mouth, the attachments pulling deeper into my throat as if my tongues had become rubber bands. Two of the new tongues flickered out among my lengthening mane of tentacles. Where the tentacles continued to increase in chemical sensitivity, the rubbery tongues had numbed and become enlivened instead by the thick, inky character of unnatural energy in the air. A strange hunger enveloped me, an urgent thirst for the poison of the deep things.
The scientists say nature doesn’t strive toward a perfect form by evolution or crude mimicry. But I was being birthed again, birthed into a form, the only form, that could eat the darkness and live forever. I knew now what the fiend feared, because he’d not faced the prospect of death for some time, back when he was whatever he was before he became a god. Gods like the thing I was becoming were nature’s bastard slaves.
My throat contorted to turn my screams into a deep, wet, gurgling roar, damning me forevermore to utter none but the cursed speech of that dark force which conforms or destroys without mercy. A mass of wet, bristly flesh slammed into me, tearing my hand from Cassie-Jo’s. The Elder Thing’s claws tore at my thighs and stomach. I kicked back and lost my shredded shoes, blind and deaf to all but the forces older than light, heat, and matter tha
t buzzed through every particle of my body. I scrambled back the way I’d come only to meet with the wet wall and another slashing strike to the head.
He snared my tentacles in his talons, and I roared as his other paw of needle-sharp claws plunged into the back of my neck and his own tentacles constricted around my throat. He wanted to twist my head off, willing me by his cosmic voice to submit to the pain of his invasions into my mind so he could leech the energy out of me when my sanity broke. He might succeed in terrifying me out of my mind if his claws managed to pierce my spine and paralyze me.
His weight bore me down on my stomach. I swiped to cut his tentacles and he thrust my arm back, nearly breaking it out of its socket. Cassie-Jo’s aura wrapped around his, wrenching his crushing thoughts away from me with a burst of pain, and his supernormal screech rang through my head. His voice withdrew and his weight eased enough that I wormed out from under his grip. I lashed out with my claws and another set caught me by the wrist. “Don’t hurt me,” Cassie-Jo said in my head. “I’m trying to help.”
“I can’t see!”
The claws jerked away. I opened my mind and let my thoughts lick out all around me. The extrasensory feedback was vivid and staggering. I clutched my bald, leathery skull as a giddy sort of high wrenched reality wide open. There was so much beyond what my eyes could have ever seen. Light revealed so little of all that swirled and pulsed in that living blackness where my foe had been entombed for an eon that seemed so minuscule now. The past spread out flat, smooth, and featureless behind us like a cartoon horizon, while the future of things bore steadily toward us, crumpled, dense, and ever obscure until it hit us and unfolded as things do. The endlessness of time was incomprehensible to my human psyche, yet the full force of that actuality threatened to explode my will to exist like a firehose bursting down my puny mental esophagus.
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