Lovecraft Ezine Mega-Issue 4 Rev1

by Price, Robert M.

  Asche launched himself at the creature and tackled him across the midsection. “And a monster who preys on the weak is proper?” He punched the beast beneath the ribs, and felt one of them break. The creature groaned in pain, and Asche punched the broken rib again. The groan turned to a scream, which was answered with an echo from down the tunnel. But that echo was different, a different pitch, a different voice, a different word. Asche turned, and in the darkness he saw the source of that echo.

  Monsters like the one he was fighting, monsters of all shapes and sizes. There were tall ones, short ones, fat ones, thin ones, old ones and small ones. They were huddled in the dark, huddled in fear, too afraid to move, too afraid to act, too afraid to do anything but cry out for him to stop. And he did, for he knew instantly that something was wrong, that he was wrong, that he had somehow misjudged the situation. Slowly, carefully he backed away.

  “What is this?”

  The beast with the broken rib coughed. “This is my family. I brought them here to keep them safe.”

  “Safe from what?” demanded Asche.

  “The soldiers, the ones who aren’t there anymore, they did something. In our home, where we have lived in peace for centuries, hidden from men, they did something. Those soldiers and their masters, they did something. They did something to the land, to the earth, to the graves that reside within. The dead have turned, they’ve gone sour. There’s nothing to eat there anymore, we were hungry.”

  “So you came here?”

  The ghoul made an almost human gesture of incredulity. “Where else? Berlin is ripe with death, but we are many, many mouths. And the tribes who lived here before us, they have cleaned the cemeteries out. We didn’t think the freshly dead would be missed. We aren’t killers, only scavengers.”

  Asche nodded, and ordered the pack of ghouls to follow him. He took them deep within the winding labyrinth that led to his home. There, amongst the ancient catacombs that Berlin had long forgotten, and that he called home, the ghouls found a place to hide, and thrive. Asche gave them his home, and in return they gave him the same.

  It would take him days, maybe even weeks, but he had to know, he had to see. He would travel by night, resting by day, moving from graveyard to graveyard. It had been decades since he had left the city, but he had to know what had been done. What had the Nazis done that made the earth and the dead turn sour? He had to know what had been done in the place that men had named Auschwitz. What monstrous thing would make even ghouls flee?

  Chapter 2. Deadman Detective

  by Glynn Owen Barrass

  Hurst hadn’t slept in days and the whiskey didn’t help, not anymore. Each time he closed his eyes skeletal faces appeared, pale limbs like twigs broken beneath the boots of well-fed Nazis. The smell of death lingered with the memories, the disgust rumbling through his stomach like acid lava. Far beneath the camp of atrocities, Auschwitz, a Nazi gun muzzle flashed, and another companion fell.

  “You dirty rat bastard!” Private Johnson howled. His rifle discharged, and a cry from their attacker indicated the other man had fallen.

  Cat and Mouse, tit-for-tat hellhole, Hurst thought and knelt, touched the corpse’s still-warm shoulder.

  “Angell, Peter P. Rest in peace,” he said under his breath.

  The corpse replied, “Thank you sir, it’s been an honor.”

  Johnson still screaming, Sergeant Wilson grabbed him by the shoulders, and threw him against the tunnel’s concrete wall. “They’re gone, man! Stand down, stand down!” The private whimpered, his shoulders slumped. The sergeant released him.

  “Hurst?” Wilson hissed.

  Hurst looked up, encountered the sergeant’s wide-eyed gaze.

  “You sense anything down there?”

  Hurst shook his head. The man had spoken of his ability to talk with the dead. It came with the tumor, inoperable and unwanted. It only worked on those he touched; Wilson should have been briefed on that.

  “I need to get closer,” Hurst replied. “Flank me.” He nodded to the G.I.s behind him, the final two not counting the distraught Johnson. Both men nodded. Hurst gripped his Smith & Wesson Victory tighter and crept down the tunnel towards the latest Nazi corpse. Bare bulbs, suspended by wire twenty feet apart, left plenty of shadows for ambush, by humans, or worse.

  Tunnels under Auschwitz. Rumors about secret Nazi experiments worse than those practiced not so secretly in the vile camp above. Hurst had been pulled from the Sanatorium in Maine; Military Brass saying his country needed him, again. Reinstated to the MIS (Counter Occult Division), then a plane to Berlin and Auschwitz. Thousands of corpses; he’d spoken to over a hundred this week alone.

  Hurst missed his cell, missed the quiet, the drugs that drowned the headaches and nightmares.

  “Hey, you? They call you the Deadman Detective, don’t they?” A whispered voice. Private McCormack, flanking him with his Springfield rifle.

  Hurst raised his thumb, continued to creep.

  “It was you, wasn’t it, killed that Nazi fucker?”

  Hurst’s stomach turned. He blinked and saw Chaya. Fed to the gas chambers two weeks short of her fourteenth birthday. She’d overheard a Nazi officer telling another prisoner about a safe place under the camp. He’d take her, if she was good. Both women dead now. Dumped naked in the mud. The officer, Hjalmar Frank, had resisted interrogation whilst alive. Last night Hurst had snuck into his cell, slashed the man’s wrists and made it look like a suicide. Frank’s corpse had been most talkative when Hurst said helping him might just save his soul from Hell.

  Hurst had lied.

  Frank didn’t know much, just about the quarters near the entrance to the tunnels. This morning, hiding Nazis and death followed.

  “Who knows?” Hurst asked with a hiss.

  “Don’t worry,” the private replied, “just a few of us. Your secret’s safe.”

  They reached the empty oil drums where the Nazi had made his final stand. “No secrets are safe here.” Hurst sighed and holstered his revolver. “And I hate touching this, this filth.” He reached down and gripped the corpse’s black-clad arm.

  The graveyards had been emptied. Asche had witnessed this first hand, but no normal grave robbers were to blame, for the corpses had been stolen from under their coffins. Thousands gone, dragged from their graves and no tool mark remained to reveal how myriad holes had been carved beneath the cemeteries of Berlin. But each hole led to a tunnel, the tracked labyrinth of the Nazis’ underground secret.

  Asche and a dozen ghouls had been searching the tunnels for hours now, the tracked areas having given way to narrow concrete corridors lit erratically by bare, dangling bulbs.

  The ghouls followed their noses, followed a ‘sourness’ that pervaded their ruined ecosystem. This underworld was meant to be Asche’s realm, but he was lost now, the ghoul beside him the leader here as they tracked the source of the ghouls’ woes.

  “Not far now,” the ghoul that called itself Mr. Rib said in a guttural, confident voice. It was a surprise to all then when the tunnel shook. The light bulbs flickered and trembled above their heads. Asche almost lost his footing as a hoarse voice behind him grumbled, “Cave in, run!” It hadn’t even finished the words when it swept past him on all fours, followed by its loping companions. Asche remained conventional, neither flying nor running like a quadruped. His footsteps echoed along the cracking concrete.

  Mr. Hurst. Wake up.

  “Uh, what the…” After the shadows of the tunnel system, a bright light assailed his retinas. He squinted, tried to focus on the figure leaning over him.

  Still unfocussed, he saw long, black hair in pigtails, large beautiful eyes. Nothing like the bald skeleton they’d brought him from the mud.

  “Chaya?”

  Mr. Hurst. If you don’t wake up soon you never will.

  “What…” He groaned. His body felt broken, and yes, he wasn’t breathing.

  Just open your eyes.

  He did, to a hell of pain and noise and movement. The b
lackness about him roared, shook around him as he tried to breathe, only to choke down dust for his trouble.

  What happened here? One moment he’d been reaching for the dead Nazi, felt surprise as the corpse chuckled. Then the explosion, the hiss in his ears and oblivion.

  Booby-trapped. Hurst groaned again and rolled onto his side. A pain stabbed the side of his head; it felt wet there, warm and sticky. He hacked up the debris blocking his throat and took long, haggard breaths. The tunnel ceased shaking, but his ears continued to scream.

  His foot touched an obstruction. A voice yelled in his skull. “My eyes, aw dang I can’t see a thing. Hurst, sir? Is that—”

  Hurst pulled his foot away and the voice cut off abruptly. McCormack, dead. But what about the others?

  He tried to speak but gasped instead. Spitting more filth from his mouth, he croaked, “Anyone here? Hey, I’m alive here.”

  Silence but for the roaring in his ears, and then a voice sounded that was mostly growl. “We have a live one here. A human. An Ally soldier, maybe.”

  A human? As opposed to what? Strong hands dragged him to his feet. He saw feral eyes in the darkness, glowing white orbs in pairs. Then the lights came on, and he screamed.

  “Pull yourself together man!” Had he passed out again? He could hear properly now. The voice, German accent. Cold breath in his face.

  “American, yes? What are you doing here?”

  Hurst opened his eyes to find himself face to face with a waxy, corpse-like visage. Hooked nose, thin, gray lips. The eyes were blood-red orbs beneath the shadow of a trilby’s brim.

  “Me? Heh,” Hurst replied. “Usually drink, usually kill, usually cause trouble.”

  The corpse-man’s grip on his shoulders tightened. “Don’t make me—”

  “He speaks with the dead, Asche.” A throaty, subhuman voice. Something big loomed up beside this ‘Asche.’ Tall, like a rubbery-skinned, naked gray ape. It had a dog’s muzzle, slightly pointed ears, and eyes, eyes like those of its friend, Asche. More of the creature’s ilk stepped forward. Hurst felt too dazed to be horrified.

  “Is that so, Mr. Spleen?” Asche tilted his head, squinted momentarily then released him. He turned on his heels and strode through the rubble, his trenchcoat dragging against the corpses of Hurst’s companions.

  “Well, speak with your dead friends, Hurst,” Asche said. “We have work to do.”

  “Asshole,” Hurst said under his breath, brushed his uniform down, and followed.

  “You need not be here, this is my country’s problem,” Asche said for the second time. The concrete tunnel had been replaced by damp rock with hints of ancient, chipped bas-reliefs along its weathered sides. Hurst walked amongst the ghouls now, grinning horrors that leered and winked on occasion, mostly when he checked his scalp for further bleeding.

  “I came here to find Nazis,” Hurst replied. He gripped the rifle he’d pried from Wilson’s dead hands. “I’ll go home when that’s done.”

  “This is my home,” Asche said with a snarl; then the procession paused. “You hear that?” he asked.

  The ghouls grumbled. One said, “More cave-ins, Mr. Asche?”

  Hurst looked up, saw the light bulb above him shake ever so slightly.

  “No,” Asche continued, “Something is happening, up there in the camp.”

  “Then what’s that I hear ahead?” the same ghoul asked.

  “Trouble, and the answer to our questions,” Asche replied.

  As Asche and the ghouls started moving again, Hurst whispered a prayer to a God he barely believed in anymore.

  Chapter 3. A Light in the Darkness

  by Brian M. Sammons

  Screaming out of the dark tunnels came a horde of nightmares made flesh. Most were naked, some wore tattered remnants of clothes, and all were obviously dead - as evident by their wounds, lividity, or decay. Yet they still moved. The dead charged into battle with a cry that sent shivers down the spines of a man who regularly spoke to the dead, another for whom death was a memory, and a pack of corpse-eaters from the underworld.

  “Run?” The gangly Mr. Spleen asked.

  “You’ll never make it,” Asche replied.

  “My thoughts exactly,” Hurst said, raising his revolver in a two-handed shooting stance. He fired a round into the chest of the closest shrieking corpse. The dead thing, once a woman in her thirties, now a withered monstrosity of gnashing teeth and grasping claws, staggered a few steps but then kept running forward.

  Hurst adjusted his aim towards the woman’s head. The small, quick-moving target took three swift shots to hit. That brought the thing down, but it also meant that he had nowhere near enough bullets, and now the rushing dead were right on top of them.

  The ghouls charged, all fangs and claws and terrifying howls, while Asche squared off with two of the cadavers. One was a German Wehrmacht officer missing an arm, the other an emaciated Jewish grandfather whose skin was a bright pink due to carbon monoxide poisoning.

  Asche aimed a kick at the naked Jew’s knee, shattering it and dropping the corpse to writhe on the ground. The one-armed soldier clawed into Asche’s throat, but its hand only came away with bluish-gray powder. While Asche could not die from such wounds, it still hurt like hell when pieces of him were torn away unexpectedly.

  Hurst fired the remaining two rounds in his revolver, dropping a dead little girl who came at him low and fast. He let his gun fall, as he had no time to reload, and reached for his knife. Unsheathing it, he saw one of the ghouls nearby get its dog-like head wrenched from its loam-shrouded shoulders, and he doubted very much that his six-inches of steel would do any good.

  Then, from a branching tunnel, lightning hissed into the dark. The bolt of deadly brilliance daisy-chained several of the corpses together, causing them to tremble and sputter. In a matter of seconds cold, dead flesh blistered and smoked, charred and cracked, before finally liquefying and sloughing off to reveal blackened bones beneath. When the deadly tendril of electricity stopped, what was left of the smoldering husks fell lifelessly to the ground.

  For a brief moment, everyone in the tunnels was still and silent. Then another lightning bolt rocketed out, followed by a third and then a fourth. One by one, groups of the raging dead were blasted and scorched until finally only Asche, Hurst, and a pair of bloodied ghouls remained standing.

  Once Zeus’ fury had subsided, a clanking sound came from the tunnel where the lightning had originated, and an iron-clad man slowly trudged towards the stunned quartet. The figure’s head, chest, arms, and legs were strapped in homemade armor, and on the stranger’s back a large backpack-like device whirred and sputtered sparks. Tiny arcs of electricity traveled down the man’s arms to sizzle between twin tuning forks that jutted out of the top of leather gauntlets. On the armor’s crude breastplate was drawn the number 769804.

  “Who or what are you?” Hurst asked, taking the time to pick up and reload his revolver.

  The iron man said nothing, pointed at the number on his chest, and surveyed his gruesome handy work.

  “Your name is a number?”

  The stranger turned his metal facemask towards Hurst. A pair of brown eyes stared at him.

  “English?”

  “American,” Hurst replied.

  “The number is all I have left. The Nazis took everything from me, and gave me this number.” The man spoke with a thick Eastern European accent. “So I want it to be the last thing they see before I burn them away.”

  “Surely you had a name before the Nazis?” Asche asked.

  The metal-clad man turned and raised one sparking hand towards the dead man. “Nazi?”

  Asche raised his hands, palm out. “Your impressive weapon would do no good against me, and while I am German, I was never a Nazi. Not all of us marched to the beat of Hitler’s drum.”

  “Enough of you did to decimate my people, kill my wife…” His backpack began to hum louder and the sparks dancing on the end of his raised hand were no longer so tiny. “…and murd
er my children.”

  “Ah,” Asche said with sorrow in his rough voice, “You’re a Jew. I am truly sorr-”

  The armored man screamed something, but the sizzling crack of the lightning bolt drowned out his words. The electrified arc also blasted away Asche’s left arm, his shoulder, and a good portion of his ribcage.

  Hurst raised his gun and blinked his eyes to clear his vision of the flash to see the strange German he had just met still standing, although looking very pissed off.

  “Damn it, that hurt,” Asche said. Motes of ash rose from the ground, swirled around his missing side, and slowly coalesced to restore what had been burnt away. “As I was saying, you can’t kill me. I’ve never been a Nazi, and if you hate them then perhaps you should come with us. I would guess that those other dead men you cooked are part of what’s going on down here which stirred up the grave-eaters, and that reeks of Nazi evil to me.”

  “Uh…yeah,” Hurst said, finding his voice again. “So are you in for coming with us if it means you can kill a whole bunch of those bastards? We could sure use your firepower.”

  The electrified man thought about it for a moment before nodding.

  “Good. I’m Hurst, and I’ve heard that one called ‘Asche’ by those things.” The American pointed at the two remaining ghouls. “So can I get a real name for you?”