Lovecraft Ezine Mega-Issue 4 Rev1

by Price, Robert M.

  “Laszlo Scheiber.” He raised his mask to reveal the face of a small man in his forties. He flashed a twitching smile that appeared to be an almost forgotten expression to him.

  “So, Laszlo, what’s the story behind your thunder guns?”

  “I made them.”

  “I gathered, but how? I mean, I’ve never seen technology like that before.”

  “Oh, I had a…spell.”

  “A spell?” Asche asked. He was almost fully reassembled, with just his hand needing to reform.

  “Yes, there is no official classification for it. One day I just left my family, my job at the Eötvös Loránd University where I taught physics, and my home in Budapest. For three years I did God only knows what. Then in 1937 I woke up in a hotel in Boston, America, with no memory of those missing years. I returned home to find my beautiful family waiting for me. They had plenty of questions, but they did not accuse or condemn. I got my job back at the university and for a while everything was fine again.”

  Laszlo’s voice turned bitter. “Then my country went mad and joined the Germans and Italians in their Axis. After that, being a Hungarian Jew meant being less than human. My own countrymen rounded my family up and gave us to the Nazis. In time we arrived here, Auschwitz - hell on earth.”

  “Come,” Asche said, whole once more. “That battle could draw attention. We had better move.”

  The odd companions continued to move through the darkened tunnels, heading towards unknowable horrors, but Laszlo Scheiber was not finished with his sad, strange tale.

  “Watching my family die one by one until I alone remained, I slipped back into madness. My mind looked for someplace to burrow away and hide from the nightmare around me. Eventually it came to the wall something had built in my head to keep the memories of those missing years locked away. I think with nowhere left to run from the horrors of Auschwitz, my subconscious broke through that wall. What I found on the other side was amazing, terrifying, and…surprisingly promising.”

  “What was it?” Hurst asked.

  “A vastly more advanced alien intelligence had taken up residence inside my body for all of those missing years, while my consciousness had been whisked backwards in time to a colossal underground city of basalt. There I inhabited the body of the thing that had invaded me. It was an incredibly inhuman form that even now defies detailed description. And yet, as terrifying an experience as that was, I was allowed some measure of kindness. My alien hosts allowed me to study their massive libraries. I was granted access to their wealth of knowledge they had amassed over the eons. They did this to keep me occupied and docile. When it was time for the alien explorer to return to its own body and time, they sent my mind back home as well, but they attempted to wipe all memory of the fantastic trip from me.”

  The older man smiled ruefully. “They were not entirely successful. One of the things I remembered fully was the amazing lightning weapons they had created to fight some other race of polypus horrors. So when the Soviets liberated Auschwitz, I was free to find the materials I needed to build this.”

  “So now you’re out for justice.” Hurst nodded while he tried to wrap his head around Laszlo’s incredible tale.

  “Justice, vengeance, I don’t care as long as Nazis burn.”

  Chapter 4. Act of War

  by Bruce L. Priddy

  Something deep within the bowels of the earth roared. The entire planet seemed to roll in response, from pain, terror or both. The tunnel before the rag-tag group of eldritch companions collapsed. The bare bulbs lining the ceiling burst. A darkness thick with a choking cloud of dirt and dust swallowed the group.

  Laszlo’s deadly tuning forks hummed to life. The electric arcs illuminated the tunnel in a blue twilight.

  “Thanks,” said Hurst. He coughed out the words, waved the dust away from his face. The ghouls hacked along with him.

  “You spend your days burrowing in graveyards, one would think you would be used to this,” said Asche. As gravity pulled the disturbed earth from the air, his fingers become tendrils of dust, flowing into the spaces between the boulders blocking the tunnel.

  “We eat the old bones,” said Mr. Spleen. “Not dirt.”

  Asche’s fingers reformed. “I can make it through…” He looked to Hurst, Lazlo and the ghouls.

  “We dig, then,” said Mr. Rib.

  Asche shook his head, “The blockage runs deep. Digging would take too long.”

  Hurst turned to Laszlo. “You seem to know your way around here. Is there any other way out?”

  The metal man’s head nodded. “Yes, but…”

  “But?”“From plans I was able to secure away from the Russians, the route leads up to the camp,” said Laszlo.

  Hurst cursed under his breath and kicked a pebble. “Into a camp populated with the worst the NKVD has to offer.”

  “It gets better,” Laszlo continued. “In the compound this route leads to, the rulers of this place, before and now, have kept secrets behind iron doors and iron locks. I was never able to look inside, to see what those iron doors hid from the world. Perhaps it is time, yes?”

  “Between us and those secrets,” said Asche, “…are a legion of the tomb’s rejects.”

  Laszlo stomped away, the sound of his metal feet against the earth echoing through the tunnel.

  “Where are you going?” asked Hurst.

  “It seems to me we are all dead men,” said Laszlo. “We might as well meet death face-to-face, and see how many Nazis and Soviets we can drag to Hell with us.”

  The others needed no further convincing.

  Hell met them half-way. Horrors engineered by the architects of war and madness clogged the tunnels beneath the worst-place-on-earth. The ghouls became gibbering carmine blurs of tusks and talons. With lightning powered by something that confused the lines of science and magic, Laszlo obliterated dozens upon dozens of the howling resurrected. Hurst and Asche met the living dead with bullets. When bullets were exhausted, the men turned their guns into blunt weapons to crush skulls. Such close contact with the unholy risen left them both covered in the piceous ichor that had replaced once-living blood and tissue, colored their faces in a gory war-paint that left them almost indistinguishable from their macabre enemy.

  At the stairway leading to the surface, Mr. Spleen gouged through the throat of the last resurrected, then pulled its head away. With the undead legion put down, Hurst, shoulders heaving from rage and encroaching insanity, cackled. The laughter doubled him over. His stomach let loose.

  “Steel yourself,” said Laszlo. “I suspect there are far more horrible things to come.”

  Hurst spit the remaining vomit from his mouth, smeared a hand across his lips, wiping it on his jeans. “I’m all right now,” he said, trying to catch his breath. Hands on his knees, he looked up the stairs. “That is where we learn what this is all about? And stop it?”

  “Maybe,” said Laszlo. “Or worst things. Things none of us would ever wish to know.”

  “Or it is all one-and-the-same,” Asche said. “But we will never find out if we remain down here ruminating about it.”

  Hurst blew an amused snort. Laszlo offered the American soldier a hand, pulled him to standing position. “I’ll take the lead,” Laszlo said, as he began marching up the stairs. Hurst nodded and followed him. Mr. Rib and Mr. Spleen sniffed around the puddle of Hurst’s stomach.

  “Come on, you two,” said Asche as he started up the stairs.

  Mr. Spleen uttered a pig-like squeal. “But it has been so long since we ate.”

  Mr. Rib turned up his snout at the puddle. “The Night Mayor is right. It is all bile anyway. Stinks of fear.”

  At the top of the stairs, one of Laszlo’s aforementioned iron doors hung open, blood and other, less identifiable fluids of even less desirable colors smeared across it. Beyond the door lay a room turned charnel house. Large industrial bulbs hung from the ceiling, giving this place of horrors an unsettling antiseptic, banal feel. Bodies were strewn about the fl
oor. Some, wearing Soviet NKVD uniforms or lab coats, were ripped open from belly to throat. The rifles of the soldiers lay beside them. Others, in the rags of prisoners or patient gowns, were twisted into shapes no longer resembling anything human, bloated, limbs distended to ropes, mouths agape and sprouting needle-like teeth. Astronomical charts, detailed schematics of the inner Earth, and photographs of ancient stelae with writing that Asche, Laszlo, Hurst or the ghouls recognized lined the walls. All were splattered with the same gore that stained the door.

  “They are not like the other dead,” said Asche, examining one of the abominations. “Something else is going on here.”

  Laszlo stepped around the corpses, his tuning forks moving from door to door, watchful for any threats. “None of these… abominations… are victims of the Nazis. Look at the letters on their clothing. Cyrillic.”

  Hurst sighed, knelt down beside the corpse Asche was examining. “Judging from the condition of the soldiers, I don’t think they fired a single shot. Someone else killed these monsters.” He reached to touch the corpse’s forehead, the skull ruined by a gunshot.

  “Are you sure you want to do that?” asked Asche.

  “If we want to know what happened here, I do…”

  Mr. Hurst! NO! Chaya screamed in the Deadman Detective’s head.

  “What? Why?” Hurst asked the air.

  “Who are you talking to?” asked Asche, but Hurst waved him away.

  Because he’s a monster. You’ll hear nothing but madness and the howling between worlds.

  “Okay, okay…” Hurst slid over to the body in a lab coat. “He’s still human.”

  He is a bigger monster.

  “The human ones always are,” said Hurst and he put his hand to the corpse’s head. “Tell me what you know.”

  Electricity shook through Hurst, welded him to the dead body. It arched, the jaw unhinged with a shriek from the deepest abyss. The same shriek forced its way out of Hurst. One voice spoke through both the Deadman Detective and the corpse.

  “Admiral Dönitz expedition, 1942. The white thing that dances and howls in the hollow places beneath the earth. It smelled death on the surface. Its tendrils burrowed up. Pieces of it live through the bodies. Mengele. January 27, 1945. The program resurrected. A weapon against the West! The final defeat of the Imperialists! The bodies have changed! The bodies have changed! It’s getting closer, stronger. Rising up! The bodies reflect the white thing! We can’t control it! It’s inside all of us!”

  The corpse’s hands grabbed Hurst’s arm. “All of us!”

  Hurst fell back, screamed: “Off! Get it off!” The joints in the corpse’s shoulders, elbows and knees popped, the limbs became fluid.

  “I do not have a clear shot!” shouted Lazslo.

  The ghouls were instantly upon the corpse. Their talons ripped away arms and legs. The ribs blossomed from the corpse’s sides, making it a facsimile of an insect. It continued to come after Hurst, the sharp bone-legs cutting into him. Asche took a rifle from a dead soldier. One shot to the monstrosity’s head felled it. Hurst scrambled from beneath the creature, grabbed a rifle and filled the monster with bullets until the clip was empty.

  “For men trying to sneak around a camp controlled by the Soviets, you do so in a very loud fashion,” said a voice with an American accent from a doorway. Hurst, Asche, Laszlo and the ghouls looked up to find a nondescript man, with plain features, wearing a plain black suit and plain black fedora. He held a pistol at his side. Hurst and Asche raised their rifles. Laszlo’s cannons glowed.

  “More Americans? This is my country’s problem,” said Asche.

  The nondescript man smiled. “The Germans still think Poland belongs to them. I think the Russians may find a place of disagreement on that issue.”

  “You killed everyone here?” Laszlo asked.

  The man nodded.

  “Who are you?” demanded Hurst.

  The man stepped forward, unconcerned with the weapons pointed at him. “Operator No. 13 of the Office of Strategic Services, Mister Hurst.”

  Hurst closed his eyes and shook his head. “Speak some sense. The OSS was shuttered after the war. And how do you know my name?”

  “If the OSS does not exist, I suppose that means I don’t exist,” said Operator No. 13. “And that means this conversation never happened.”

  “How do you know my name?” Hurst demanded, pressing the end of his rifle into the spy’s chest.

  Operator No. 13 sighed. “Your weapon is out of ammo, Mr. Hurst.” He pushed down the rifle and continued. “I have been sent here to retrieve you. As I don’t see Misters Angell, Johnson, Wilson and McCormack, I assume they are no longer among the living.”

  “Retrieve me?” asked Hurst. “What are you talking about?”

  A grim shadow fell over Operator No. 13’s face. “You are on an unauthorized action into Soviet controlled territory. That is an act of war in a time of tenuous peace. I am here to retrieve you and control any witnesses.”

  “Unauthorized?” shouted Hurst. “I am here under orders of General Van Buren of MIS…”

  Operator No. 13 cut him off. “…MIS has been dissolved and General Van Buren placed in permanent retirement for unauthorized actions against the orders of the President of the United States.”

  “Are you going to place me under permanent retirement?” asked Hurst.

  “No.” The spy shook his head. “As I said, I am here to retrieve you. Your unique abilities make you a valuable asset.”

  Laszlo’s tuning forks hummed. Small hairs raised on the arms of everyone. “You are not taking him.”

  Operator No. 13 turned to the lightning man. “And judging from the weaponry and number on your breast plate, you must be Mr. Scheiber. I am not your enemy. I am your best hope.”

  “You have until my tuning forks have charged to explain.”

  Operator No. 13 smiled. “You are right to be skeptical. The governments of both the Soviet Union and the United States are looking to acquire your special skills. I can offer you a life in the United States. I am sure you know the only thing the Soviets will offer.”

  “And us?” asked Asche, his weapon still raised. “I do not wish to be brought under ‘control’.”

  The ghouls gibbered in agreement.

  “If you kill me, Mr. Asche, another Operator No. 13 will take my place soon enough. And you will regret your actions. But I have no wish to see any of that happen. Safe passage out of Poland, for your silence about what you saw here.”

  “Something terrible is happening!” shouted Asche. “We cannot just forget it, let it keep growing.”

  “I do not care,” said Operator No. 13. “You have your choice. Make your decision before the Soviets send someone to investigate what happened here.”

  BOOM! The room shook, not from an explosion but from something strong striking the steel walls of the compound.

  “The Soviet Army?” asked Hurst.

  “Worse,” answered the spy. Another strike shook the room. The men and ghouls struggled to stay on their feet.

  “What could possibly be worse?” Hurst replied. The wall bulged as it was struck again.

  “When we split the atom, the United States built a bomb,” Operator No. 13 said. “But when the Russians split the atom, they built a man.”

  A single fist punched through the wall. It grabbed the edge of the hole and ripped away the steel wall as if it were paper. A man stepped through, the embodiment of human perfection, blazing blue eyes, short-cropped blond hair, the face of a model and the physique that can only be found in ancient Roman or Greek sculptures. Clad in the dark red uniform of a Soviet soldier, a bright yellow hammer and sickle was emblazed upon his chest. A cape, the same color of his uniform, flowed behind him.

  The ghouls flashed their tusks and claws. Asche and Hurst raised their rifles. Electricity arced around Laszlo’s cannons. Operator No. 13 dropped his gun.

  “Lower your weapons,” he said. “They are useless against the Supreme Soviet.�
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  Chapter 5. The Battle Below

  by Robert M. Price

  But no one was much inclined to take that piece of advice. Instead, they attacked the newcomer all at once. The ghouls reached the strapping Russian first, and he made short work of them. Their main asset was physical strength, but here the Supreme Soviet grossly outclassed them.

  Mr. Rib tried to bite down on the man’s steely arm but succeeded only in splintering his great tusks. With his other arm, the Soviet grabbed the ghoul’s corded throat and, effortlessly snapped the jackal-man’s neck with a loud report that filled the confined space with ringing echoes.

  Mr. Spleen looked to be momentarily torn between gazing at the broken corpse with a hungry eye and recalculating a mode of attack. His hesitation would have made no difference, though, as his foe moved with instantaneous skill and force, forming a rigid claw, like a grappling hook made of flesh, which he thrust into Mr. Spleen’s vitals, ripping the reeking, smoking intestines free with a single yank.

  Hurst and Scheiber gagged at the stench of the unwholesome nourishment now gushing from those organs. Operator 13 seemed unaffected as he drew a machine pistol and fired. The spew of bullets merely ricocheted off the tower of invulnerable muscle, two or three rounds striking the man who had fired them, the others somehow missing Hurst. Others pinged off Scheiber’s armor, while Asche’s structure easily absorbed those that struck him.

  The malevolently grinning juggernaut’s uniform was now soaked with blood, though it matched closely the original hue of the fabric. The Soviet colossus loomed before the survivors who paused in bewilderment. Operator 13 lay on the ground, bleeding heavily, his consciousness draining from him almost as quickly. Then the crimson giant and the ashen avenger charged at one another, upraised fists plunging. Asche’s form had increased in density, but even so, the futile impact of his blow caused fist and forearm to spatter into dusty mist, while the irresistible force of the Communist’s punch had the same effect on Asche’s disintegrating midsection. It seemed his mighty antagonist had found the linchpin of Asche’s physical integrity, for now the rest of the Night Mayor’s form followed suit, dissipating into the tunnel shaft like a smoke bomb.