Lovecraft Ezine Mega-Issue 4 Rev1

by Price, Robert M.

  He crossed the rest of the way to stand before her. “As you wish, my queen. I shall leave your castle, but I shall not stay away. I shall return here with a great army. I shall raze this city, take your kingdom, and make its people my own. And then we shall spread across this land like a plague, destroying everything that offends us, anyone who would threaten to steal our great Sea Kingdom from us once more. And you, Whore Queen of this great land, you shall have your death in the Pool of the Old God, after all.”

  He paused, a devilish smile spreading across his face. “But I will offer you this: if you are able to name me, to find someone who still remembers who I am, then I shall go from here and leave your kingdom in peace.”

  He took a step back as his body began to quiver, his muscles undulating beneath the skin. Suddenly his body exploded, showering her and the room with an offensive spray of foul-smelling liquid. And then he was gone.

  Ayanna ran to the crib, scooping out the now-crying infant and cradling him in her arms. She had done a terrible thing, she knew. She had brought the wrath of an evil god down upon their kingdom. But she loved this boy with all her heart, and would not part with him, not for the world. But now war was coming to their land. And she would have to tell her king.

  At first, the king was furious. His face darkened with rage as he screamed about her deception, about the danger she had brought upon their kingdom, about the madness of it all. Her mother—now an important member of the royal court—just stood there, staring at her with her usual angry disbelief. But then it was over. Her husband took her into his arms, and said what was done was done; they need quarrel about it no longer. She was still his queen, and they would find a way to defeat this dark god together.

  But then the evil was upon them.

  They came from the sea. The “Deep Ones,” the people had called them, similar in appearance to their nameless god, yet without so much humanity. Their grey-green skin was slippery and shiny. They had a pronounced hunch to their backs, and seemed to have gills on their necks. Their fingers and bare toes were webbed, and they moved with a predatory quickness that none had ever seen.

  They fell like a black shadow over the city of Koralith, leaving a trail of blood and destruction in their wake. People ran for the safety of the castle walls as the king’s knights battled against the Deep Ones throughout the city, fighting their own fear as much as their unnatural adversaries. But the knights were vastly outnumbered. For every Deep One who fell to a knight’s sword, two more would rise from the sea to take its place. The king’s forces retreated behind the gates, and the Deep Ones closed in to lay siege to the castle.

  “This is impossible!” the king roared. “How many of them are there? It seems an entire city lies at the bottom of that wretched sea!” Weeks had passed since the conflict began, and still their situation continued to worsen. It seemed there was no end to the nightmare.

  “We know not what lies at the bottom of the sea, my lord,” said Councilor Dreka. “An entire city or the gateway to some other dark world entirely.”

  The king stroked his dark beard thoughtfully. “This is true. We know nothing of our enemy at present. We must find a way to know our enemy if we are to defeat them.” He turned to his wife. “What do you know of this ‘dark god,’ my love?”

  Ayanna hesitated, considering the question. What did she know—really know—about him? She furrowed her brow in frustration. “I know nothing,” she said.

  “Surely you must know something,” the king said sharply. “You could not possibly have made a deal with a god you know nothing about?”

  She turned her eyes away, suddenly ashamed. “I’m sorry, my lord. I was afraid. I did not want to die in the Pool of the Old God.”

  He sighed. “I see,” he said, his voice softened. “Then it seems we are unable to defeat him by force. You say that he has offered to leave us if we discover his name, so that is what we must do. Councilor Dreka, we must consult all of the oldest, wisest men in the kingdom, all of the scholars and historians. Surely someone must know the name of the dark god that was once worshiped here.”

  And so men were sent out in search of the name, questioning all the wise ones they could find, but the name was not to be found. It seemed to have been erased from the kingdom entirely, purged from it when King Hazak had taken this land and raised Poseidon in its place.

  With a heavy heart, Ayanna wandered the castle, lamenting the horrors she had brought down upon their kingdom. She soon found herself in the main courtyard again, staring up at that fiendish Pool that seemed be an ever-present sword above her neck. It seemed to be mocking her, telling her that this time there would be no escape. The metal cover was over the well, but she could still hear the awful creatures stirring within, hungry for the taste of flesh.

  She was certain now that the Pool was once used to sacrifice maidens to the very same god that now laid siege to their land, and as she stood there staring at the hellish thing, something from the past popped into her head. She began wandering the courtyard, searching.

  As a child, Ayanna’s mother used to bring her here during criminal executions, sending her out to pick the pockets of those gathered to watch the grisly event. Inevitably, though, she would get bored, and wander off to play with the other children. The courtyard was like a forest, the entire thing their gigantic playground, but there was one place in the courtyard they all feared to go. Tucked away in one of the back corners, long forgotten and hidden away behind years of vegetative growth, was a door. It was covered in strange markings, the grotesque images of hideous, fish-like monsters. The children said it was a doorway to hell itself.

  Ayanna found the door again, and began yanking away the layers of vines and leaves that covered it. She heaved and strained and shoved at the door. It opened in a massive cloud of dust, revealing a steep, spiral staircase that descended into darkness.

  She pulled a torch from the castle wall, and began making her way down into that cold, black pit. The stairs seemed to go on forever. Pieces broke off under her feet, threatening to send her plummeting to her doom. She could hear the skittering and screeching of rats inside the walls. Eventually, the staircase ended, and a brick archway opened upon a cave containing a large underground lake.

  Ayanna entered the cave and walked to the edge of the water, holding out her torch. Rising out of the middle of that foul, black water was an enormous white monolith. It was covered in the same loathsome hieroglyphs—fish, eels and octopus of the normal and nightmarish varieties, as well as the same abhorrent sea-monsters that now plagued their city—as the door at the top of the stairs and the necklaces worn by the dark god himself. It looked like something that was made to be worshiped.

  And carved into the top of the monolith was a name.

  Ayanna smiled. “Can you hear me, Nameless One?” she called out, her voice echoing off the cave walls. “I know you can. I know you are always listening. Well, I have found what you have asked for, what you thought I could never find. And now you are nameless no longer, for I name thee Dagon, Dark God of the Seas.”

  At first there was only silence. And then her answer came in the form of haunting laughter that seemed to be coming from everywhere at once. Her eyes searched every shadow, but found nothing.

  “And so you did, Whore Queen. And I suppose you now expect me to leave your land, taking my warriors with me.”

  “Yes!” she shouted into the darkness. “That was our agreement and you must honor it.”

  “What do you know about honor?” This time the voice came from directly behind her. She spun around to find Dagon standing behind her, a sardonic grin on his hideous grey face. “You’re a whore, a thief, and a liar. You refused to honor your original agreement with me, why should I honor mine with you?”

  “Because…”

  “Because every action has a consequence,” a familiar voice called out. Ayanna turned to see her husband coming down the stairs with several of his knights close behind. Someone must have seen her pass thro
ugh the door in the courtyard and went to find him. “And my wife has fulfilled her part of the bargain.”

  Dagon scoffed at the comment. “I gave your queen great power—the power to turn straw into gold, the power to save your kingdom—and she offers me nothing in return but a name.”

  “There is great power in a name,” the king said. “The power to strike fear into the heart of one’s enemy, the power to slander a man, to steal his identity…the power to become immortal. But that’s what you were after all along, wasn’t it? This was never about a baby or a war—you wanted us to find your name, to be remembered, to live forever in the hearts and minds of the people.”

  A sly smile slid across Dagon’s thick, grey lips. “A god cannot continue to live if forgotten. He must be remembered, worshiped.”

  “You used me!” Ayanna shouted.

  “We used each other, Whore Queen.”

  Anger flashed across the king’s face. “You have what you came for, monster. Now it’s time for you to leave.” He drew his sword, his knights quickly following suit. “For a god to break his word would render him mortal. And then your life would end by my blade.”

  The dark god hissed at him, showing two rows of jagged, shark-like teeth. “You dare draw steel on me, mortal?” His eyes lingered on the blades, assessing them silently, and then he quickly regained his composure. “Very well,” he said. “I will keep my word, and we will leave your kingdom. Now that this land knows my name once more it is only a matter of time before the people begin to worship me, before the well above runs red in my name. As long as even one man knows my name, I can never die.” With a final smirk, his body dissolved into a pool of putrid water, and retreated back into the lake.

  And so the war ended, and the Deep Ones returned to the sea. Ayanna’s power to spin straw into gold was gone, but with the stockpile they had amassed, the kingdom would continue to survive. Ayanna never again saw the dark god, Dagon. But it wasn’t long before she began to hear rumors, whispers of late night rituals, eerie chanting coming from town on the darkest of evenings. The fish began to return to the sea.

  And every so often Ayanna would enter the courtyard at first light to find the cover missing from that horrible Pool of the Old God…and blood in the water.

  David A. Anthony was born and raised in southwest Michigan but now resides in the Pacific Northwest with his wife. Having been a fan of dark fiction all his life, he now writes horror, sci-fi, and fantasy of the darker varieties. He is an avid reader, movie fan, and frequent traveler. His short stories can be found in several anthologies and magazines, and he is currently at work on his first novel. Find out more about him and his work at: davidaanthony.wordpress.com.

  Story illustration by Peter Szmer.

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  Princess And The Bee

  by Gregory L. Norris

  That last autumn, it rained for ten days and nights, and then ten more. After reaching the notorious halfway mark established by the greatest flood in history, as routine deliveries stopped and communication with the world beyond the dense green veldt surrounding the ancient manor was severed, it soon became clear to the residents of the Arkham Orphanage for Lost Young Souls that they were trapped, on their own. Life as life had been was ending. Maybe, the world was already gone, only the Sisters of Mercy and their charges, in their remote imprisonment, were the last to know.

  Rain hammered the woods and soaked the earth. And the things that lurked deep beneath the waterlogged ground awakened and began to tunnel up.

  Princess Darby Dawson slowly approached the forbidden room. The door, an ugly slab painted long ago in industrial green, hung half open, showing snapshots of the miserable former life those on the other side of the threshold had once been condemned to endure: beds in metal frames, a length of window covered in bars on both the outside and in, scuffed floors coated in dust and a wedge of visible pattern etched into the wood. Clawed according to the gouges, thought Darby with a shudder, her first real proof that the situation was spiraling toward wrongness.

  “Go on, Princess,” one of the mean girls taunted.

  “If you dare,” said the other, standing close enough behind her that Darby felt the girl’s breath on her neck in warm, unpleasant whispers.

  Darby choked down the desiccation gathering on her tongue and straightened. “And if I do, you’ll stop? You’ll leave me alone from now on?”

  “Sure,” promised Rona, the meaner of the two.

  Darby sensed it was a lie. A terrible second after breaking focus with the image scratched across the floor, a hard shove to her spine confirmed it. The room came rushing up, swallowing Darby whole. The door slammed shut behind her. The click of a lock turned in counterpoint to the echo. Darby immediately tested the rusted knob but the door refused to budge.

  “Let me out,” Darby demanded.

  Giggles filtered through the door. “We don’t take orders from you,” said Rona.

  “Have fun.” This came from Kirsten.

  Their taunts abruptly ended, leaving Darby in the one room above all other places in the sprawling gray manor the children had been ordered to avoid, its strangulating silence broken only by the continuous elegiac drumming of the rain.

  Darby called out and pounded on the door, which only mocked her. After all, it had denied escape to countless others—adults, if Rona’s discovery earlier in the summer, before the storm, was to be believed. With her heart attempting to throw itself into her throat, Darby turned toward the barred windows, which peered over the dense, unhappy woods at the orphanage’s rear grounds. In a clearing far beyond the timber line, the leader of the mean girls, running away for whatever imaginary life waited on the other side of the river, claimed to have found a circle of scorched earth. Among the remains of burned objects—ledger books and glass medicine bottles—were a key ring and keys, and a metal sign. The sign’s paint was gone, but an afterimage burned into the metal spelled out the missing words.

  Arkham Sanitarium for the Criminally Confused.

  Darby tried the lock again. The door offered no give. It hadn’t been blocked with a chair, oh no. Darby’s mind raced back to the clearing. Rona, who always dreamed of escape, had locked it using those relics of the manor’s dark past. The keys.

  Darby’s eyes wandered across the dusty floor. The pattern scrawled into the wood smothered her anger with an icy note of panic. Her gaze fell into the whirls and symbols, wandered the concentric circles. The oatmeal sitting thick in her stomach from breakfast reappeared on a foul hiccup. Darby’s gorge threatened. Her bladder cramped. A shiver tumbled down her spine. The world wasn’t insane enough already, it needed to grow even darker, deadlier.

  She willed her eyes to blink. Breaking focus took the greatest effort. Darby hurried over to the window, thick tears clotting in her eyes. Somehow, she choked the vomit back down. The weight of the plastic case hanging from a strap of pink beads on one shoulder helped bring her out of the spell. She pulled the lunchbox-turned-shoulder bag against her heart. The wind smacked a branch against the window. Darby shrieked, scurried between two of the nearest beds, and shook as the clouds opened up and rain drilled against the manor’s exterior with fresh rage.

  The afternoon arrived, clocked by the only method available: the deepening gray glow from beyond the barred windows. The very real possibility that day would surrender to night with Darby still trapped inside the ward sank in. Thus far, the Sisters of Mercy hadn’t noticed she was missing, any more than they’d shown much in the way of actual compassion since her arrival to Arkham the previous spring or through the worsening situation in autumn, when rivers rose and valleys transformed into great lakes around their hilltop prison. A full night in the room where the crazy people, the murderers, once lived. The notion threatened to paralyze her.

  Darby opened the lunchbox. Inside was a banana swiped at breakfast, its skin tattooed in an uneven leopard print of brown blemishes, a few pieces of hard candy, a juice box. The barest of rations, but
she wouldn’t starve. Not that she had much of an appetite. She reached behind the meager meal, fumbled aside the hardcover book swiped from the library—a melodramatic novel set in England—for the piece of antique silk wrapped around her late mother’s rosary. Darby rolled the mother-of-pearl beads between her fingers and prayed not only to the Virgin Mary but whoever else up there might be listening. The bars on the inside of the window and those outside conspired to keep the prayer from leaving the room, she mused, defeated and worried that her pleas had instead fallen into the swirls dug into the floor by desperate fingernails.

  Her eyes drifted back to the arcane hieroglyph. She drew in a deep breath, smelled something spoiled beyond the stagnancy already lying thick over the room. She was stuck. She’d have to wait out her imprisonment, hope for mercy from either Rona and her friends or discovery by the merciless Sisters. Until then, the odd pulses rippling out of that floor design and over her skin needed to be contained.

  Darby stood and tugged at the closest of the old mattresses. Working it free from the bed frame took all of her strength. By the time she’d gotten the fourth free and stacked atop a growing pile over the floor pattern, she wished she could control her sweat glands.

  The Sisters of Mercy weren’t very big on doling out kindnesses, and the mean kids had labeled her a princess as the world was ending and the dark water surged ever closer to the gates of Arkham Orphanage. A princess forced to do hard labor, Darby thought with a humorless chuckle. Still, as the first of dusk’s fingers wandered in through the windows, she allowed herself a degree of pride. Six of the room’s eight mattresses, one hefted haphazard over another, had nearly hidden the sinister diagram. A seventh would complete the job, leaving an eighth for sleep should fate not intervene with freedom from this terrible place.

  She made a game of it, all the work stoking her hunger. She’d eat her treats, and they would be the most delicious in the history of any meal savored by King Henry the XIII or the President or a Hollywood movie star. And when she finally got liberated, not only would that miserable little witch Rona catch Hell-and-brimstone from the Merciless Sisters for the rotten deed she’d done, but Darby would return from the abandoned wing with a story to tell.