Cthulhu Unbound 3

by Brian M. Sammons (ed. )

  For all its powerful bulk and surprising speed, the gyaa-yothn was trapped. The gored mule, shrieking horribly and kicking out its last on the man-monster’s horn, writhed and strained in its harness. The mule’s teammates dug in their hooves and backed away, and a gruesome tug-of-war ensued.

  Hull reloaded his revolver and rushed to disable the rampant man-beast, but three more warriors of K’n-Yan materialized around him and, with yipping coyote cries of demented glee, dove on him with their whining knives.

  Hull dodged two slashing saw-blades and stepped inside the arc of the third to slam his bowie knife into the mad attacker’s ribs.

  The broad blade skewered the warrior’s heart, but Hull swung the twitching body into the path of his other enemies to deflect their stabbing swords. Through the kicking legs of his first victim, Hull shot the kneecap off another warrior, then blew his brains out as he toppled wailing to the ground.

  His last attacker lunged at Hull’s back and laid open his shoulder with a whining knife. Hull gasped as the blade’s spinning chain bit deep into his flesh.

  The wounded bounty hunter stumbled but spun on one knee to defend himself. The warrior jumped back and held the blood-streaked blade up to catch the blue false moonlight, howling to the starless sky as if he’d defeated Hull, and vanished in a tornado of cackling blue mist.

  Hull freed his knife as the dead warrior disintegrated around it, and leapt onto the man-monster’s back. The bucking beast tried to throw him off, but Inigo Hull had mastered wild horses before most children learn to walk. He straddled the bounding monster’s broad back—shaped by centuries of breeding so no saddle was needed—just as it flung the dead mule off its horn and tried to roll over and crush him. Hull drove the massive blade up to the hilt in the monster’s spine, just behind its armored skull, and jumped clear.

  Every muscle in the mammoth body convulsed, until the creature almost seemed to recall its lost humanity, and tried to stand on its hind legs. Only then, with a mournful whine like a half-remembered prayer, did it finally die.

  Hull found Stickney lying facedown on the flagstones with a curious retinue of elaborately scarred women of Tsath probing him with their needle-tipped fingers. They hissed and made the sign of Yig at Hull, then begged him to shoot them.

  He found his other knife lying in the street with trailing wisps of electric blue mist clinging to it. The ghostly spectators bowed and murdered themselves with needles and knives and syringes filled with acid, and unraveled in scarves of icy blue mist, or just dissolved into the shadows, recharged by the sight of violence and inspired to commit some bold new atrocity. Long after they had faded away, their sneering, breathless laughter stirred the stifling air of the undead city.

  The injured and unconscious Indian agent would only slow Hull down, but to leave him here would be crueler than to have left him with the soldiers. And in his own blinkered way, Stickney had tried to be kind to the people in his care. He might yet be of use.

  He tossed Stickney’s battered body over the next mule in the train and kicked it forward. He still felt eyes upon him, but the fickle, slithering focus of the city itself had already tired of him, and turned elsewhere.

  Presently, he heard the gurgle of rushing water, and turned down a worn staircase that ended at a pier overlooking a wide black river. Many of the pavilions and palaces above the river had collapsed into the oily current, and the looming idols at the head of each pier were corroded, faceless sphinxes. But still he felt something watching him.

  A galley with a crew of twenty hooded y’m-bhi at the oars waited at the end of the pier. Hull dragged his mules onto the ship and cut the mooring lines.

  The current was swift, and the galley had slipped out into the middle of the wide river before Hull smelled strange blood on the air, and realized they weren’t alone.

  “Well hell,” gloated Tobin Roherty. He held a cocked pistol to Stickney’s head, and a riot gun aimed at Hull’s heart. “Ain’t you goddamned redskins jus’ full of surprises.”

  * * *

  June 24, 1876

  Natchez, Mississippi

  The next time he saw the stranger, Hull thought he was ready.

  It was after he and his two partners, Dandy Del Sur and Tom the Prophet, had tracked down the last cursed gold ingot from the Conquistador’s Greedy Grave, and they were a week deep in celebrating. Hull had all but forgotten the stranger’s face, which was just how the blue-eyed Indian wanted it.

  But those piercing eyes cut through the crowded, smoky wharfside saloon and knocked Inigo Hull back on his heels and sent him tumbling back across eight years to that Wyoming mudhole. Blazing out of a sun-hammered gator-trapper’s face, those unforgettable eyes had not yet spotted Hull, but worked their evil medicine on a hapless Dutchman who sucked at a clay pipe as he perused the map the old Indian was selling.

  Hull sent his partner Dandy over to outbid the other worthy, who tugged his muttonchops and ran up the price like a medicine show barker’s dupe. By the time Dandy yielded to the Dutchman, Hull had a bowie knife under the stranger’s hairless chin, but the blue-eyed Indian only smiled wide enough for Hull to see his stolen teeth.

  Dandy clubbed the stranger unconscious with his grayback cavalry saber. Nobody lifted a finger as Hull and Dandy blanketed the stranger in chains and dragged him to the jail. The sheriff let them stow their meat in a cell for a nominal handling charge while Hull wired Wichita. After he outdid the Devil with his promises and his deceits, they booked a stateroom on the next boat up the Mississippi.

  His two partners each pitched their own fits: Dandy voted to send the Indian’s head to Kansas in the post, and get back to whoring. Tom was hot to go west again, for reasons he would not make clear. They agreed that the treasure map was a fake, and not worth a shit. Hull dared not tell them his reasons for wanting to follow the map, or for insisting on taking their prisoner upriver instead of overland, any more than he would tell them what he had heard back from the Marshal’s office in Kansas.

  Hull had been riding with Tom the Prophet and Dandy Del Sur for almost two years, and toted up nearly twenty thousand dollars in bounties from the Dakota Territories to Chihuahua City. They worked well together, because neither of them hated redskins or had any sore sympathies over the Late Unpleasantness, and none nosed in the other’s side business.

  Tom the Prophet was a legendary tracker and gunslinger long before Hull was born. Even though his leathery hands shook like rattlers’ tails, he could still shoot faster and straighter than any man alive.

  Tom scarcely ever said a word on the trail, but he talked plenty in his cups. Hull knew that his real name was Elam Stroud. He rode down Mormon backsliders with Brigham Young’s enforcers, the Angels of the Lord, until he began to hear his own angel. Hull figured this should have made him another Mormon holy man, but his angel was black, and told him things that drove the Elders to exile him from Utah. He killed seventeen people there, including his own family, on the angel’s orders. He had since sent another two hundred and ninety two souls to somewhere that was neither Heaven nor Hell. The angel still spoke to him when a quarry or an ambush was close, or when some strange deed of its own needed doing. Afterward, in the lowest rut of a marathon drunk, Tom the Prophet talked back to his angel and all those he’d killed, whose souls he seemed to think burned somewhere deep inside him.

  Dandy Del Sur seldom stopped talking about himself, but Hull knew nothing true about him, except that he had no real name.

  Hull sent them off to the saloon to get loaded, and took the hood off the stranger’s head.

  Their captive smiled at Hull, showing those three big white teeth, plugged in among his yellowed ones etched with tiny geometric shapes that Hull knew must be the sacred writing of his tribe.

  “What’s your real name?”

  “I am called Malakai, but I have also been Honest John and Prairie Puck and Reverend Walkaway, and I forget the rest. It is the gift of true wisdom, to forget oneself. Why do you wear your hair so short
? Do you really hope to pass for a white man?”

  “Your tribe. What are they called, and where do they live?”

  Delighted with this game, Malakai chuckled. “There’s no one offering a bounty for our scalps, Hull. Not like your dear friends, the Comanche. You still grieve for them, though they threw you out. I only tried to show you what they truly were, you know: how fearful, how fragile and backward. Ah, but I am not answering your question, am I?

  “We came down from the stars with Great Tulu, before the land was divided from the sea. Bodiless, immortal, we mated with the animals called men, and ruled the outer world from Hyperborea to the steppes of Kadath for as long as it pleased us. We are the Empire of Night; the Aggrieved Ones, the Ancient Enemy, the Seven Cities of K’n-Yan. We are everywhere beneath you.”

  Tom the Prophet barged into the stateroom, roaring drunk and growling that the damned boat had nothing strong enough. Hull knew better than to order him out, so he ignored him and pressed on. “How long have you been killing travelers?”

  “A foolish Spaniard called Zamacona opened the way when he came blundering into our homeland, searching for cities of gold and innocents to slaughter. But long before white men came, we were waiting.”

  Hull tried to remind himself he was not the one tied to a chair. He drained a shot of whiskey and tried to wipe the smile off the Indian’s face. “You want war with the white man? Are you really so insane?”

  “Since I am at your mercy, I will not lie to you. My people have wasted themselves in dreams, and lost the will to give glory to the gods who sleep below. These greedy pale children rape the earth and spill blood so freely, that their young nation is an altar, piled with sacrifices.

  “But we are not savages, Inigo Hull. War is beneath us, and the white men are so very, very useful. We breed them with livestock, dissect them to divine the future, reawaken them to work or slaughter each other for our entertainment, and feed them to the gods of the gulf. But nothing is wasted…like with your buffalo.”

  “Be silent, warlock!” Tom the Prophet hurled an empty whiskey bottle at Malakai, but shattered a mirror above him instead. “The Angel has told me what you’re about, and I have been charged to make you pay.”

  The blue-eyed Indian turned in his chains to grin at the Prophet. “A pity you’re not welcome in Utah, Elam Stroud. There’s a lovely valley I know, where the sweet water falls from such a height, that the air is alive with atomized water. We have a door behind those falls. Your Mormon children are so trusting, they can be plucked from the pasture there like ripe fruit, and so sweet, one can’t help but devour them long before one could ever get them home…”

  The Prophet launched a wild punch at Malakai, but Hull caught him and threw him back into his chair. The drunken gunslinger consoled himself by rifling through the Indian’s black beaded medicine bag. “Why’s this damned thing so heavy? Where’s your firewater, you God-blasted heathen cannibal?”

  Dandy Del Sur swept into the room, drunk as a lord, but wearing it regally. “Señor Inigo,” he slurred, “Dondy has heard stories of this blue-eyed Indian from many men who gave Dondy all their money at faro table. They say he was hanged in Nacogdoches, two years ago. His body turn to smoke and blow away. Another say this Indian was shot and burned in California, twenty years ago, but his ghost still haunt bottomless gold mine where many men go missing. And another man who still is holding some of Dondy’s money and his new woman, he tell Dondy he saw this blue-eyed Indian lynched in Idaho Falls, just last summer. This bigmouth, he collect our bounty, already.”

  “It was not the same man. This one killed a girl on an Army post in Wyoming, and murdered hundreds on the Oregon Trail. Alive, he will be made to talk, lead the Army to his people.”

  Dandy Del Sur knew better than to call Hull a liar. “Dondy would rather apologize, than argue.” Dandy bowed deeply until the brim of his sombrero almost touched the floor. “Dondy is most humbly sorry.”

  Then he shot Malakai in the chest. The tiny silver snuffbox-pistol was a single-shooter, but it blew Malakai’s heart out his back and pitched him backwards onto the deck.

  “No more argument, eh.” Dandy left the cabin.

  Tom the Prophet sat staring at Malakai’s body. In his hand, quite forgotten, he held an onyx flask with an ornate silver cap carved in the shape of a snake’s head.

  Hull rushed over to check Malakai. The Indian’s grin brimmed with blood. “Lord,” he choked, “what fools these mortals be…” A single shrill whistle that seemed to skirl up beyond human hearing came from his lips, and he died.

  “Amen,” said Tom the Prophet, and popping the lid off the flask, took a deep swig from it.

  Almost immediately, he regretted it. Tom’s eyes bugged out and he clutched his throat as if he meant to stop whatever he’d drank from getting to his gullet.

  Curls of blue vapor streamed out his nose and around his slack mouth. Hull knocked the flask from his hand, but Tom the Prophet shook like a man in a bad spell and dropped like a mailbag.

  Hull poured his partner into a bed, but Tom bounced right back up and vomited far more fluid than he’d drunk tonight. Crawling after Hull with a hideously vacant grin, he sicked up a bottomless, steaming stew of melted gut rope. When he finally dropped dead on the last clean patch of floor in the stateroom, the poor bastard had more than halfway turned himself inside-out.

  The corpse of Elam Stroud lay petrified at Hull’s feet for a long, pregnant moment, before something stirred inside it.

  Hull jumped back and drew his Colt. From the open mouth of the flask, a steady stream of that insidious blue vapor dribbled out and snaked across the floor, drawn by some uncanny magnetism to flow into Tom the Prophet’s gaping mouth.

  Hull whirled and put two bullets into a stealthy creeping movement at the far end of the stateroom. He hit only the wall.

  Malakai’s body was gone. His chair lay upended on the floor, bloodied rags wreathed in empty chains. The same queer blue vapor oozed off the floor where his body had lain. It drifted away on the breeze out the open porthole.

  Turning back to Tom the Prophet, Hull was stunned by the swift and sickening putrefaction of his corpse. Tom’s gin-blossomed face was almost translucent, and as dry as a mummy’s parchment flesh. As Hull reached out to drag the body from the room, the contorted, lipless mouth yawned wide until the whole head split like a cocoon, and something wet and red erupted from it.

  A newborn man sat up out of the unmade bed of Tom’s corpse and gave that same piercing whistle that was Malakai’s death rattle. Hull shot three times and hit it once before the beaded bag on the floor came to life and filled the room with living, liquid darkness.

  A shadow squirted up to the ceiling, then lashed out to snuff the gas jets on the walls, then the lantern, plunging the room into deepest shadow. Hull’s last bullet passed right through it. He turned to see the newborn man crawl out of Tom’s husk and roll away behind the settee before Hull could reload and shoot him.

  Suddenly, Hull was engulfed by a stygian blackness as solid as a wave of mud. A palpable, crushing shadow, it flung him effortlessly into the far wall. He collapsed on the floor like an empty suit of clothes.

  Before Hull could catch his breath or draw a knife, it pounced on him again, its touch like cold entrails pinning him to the floor with the weight of a dead steer.

  Naked and dripping, a resurrected Malakai crawled up close to Hull. “You should grow your hair longer.” He took Hull’s knife out of his belt. It came whistling out of the dark and hacked off both of Hull’s ears and disappeared again before he’d had a chance to hear the dreadful hiss of their removal.

  “Be proud of what you are.” Grimacing, Malakai stood and stretched his new body. He lifted an old black cloak out of Tom the Prophet’s baggage, and draped it over his shoulders.

  Hull wept with pain and rage. He fought to breathe under the crushing bulk, struggled to rise to his feet the moment it had lifted itself.

  “You know what you are,” Malak
ai asked, “don’t you?”

  Hull hurled himself in the direction of the mocking voice, but he crashed through the open door and almost stumbled over the railing. Malakai was gone.

  The Mississippi sparkled in the moonlight, bright as blue daylight after his ordeal in the stateroom.

  Back near the paddlewheel, Dandy Del Sur leaned against the rail. Hull raced up to him, grabbing the rail to keep from falling more than once.

  “Did you see him?”

  Dandy Del Sur only shook his head a little, once.

  “Dandy, I am the sorry one—”

  Dandy Del Sur nodded his head once, and it fell off his shoulders and into the river.

  * * *

  March 15, 1900

  River of Yoth

  Even in a lost city of nightmares miles underground, Tobin Roherty was a man who always knew how to enjoy himself.

  As his lackeys hogtied Inigo Hull, he loaded and lit up a meerschaum pipe, his alert left eye twinkling like Christmas, while the slanted right eye, cowled under its folds of scar tissue, glared hatefully at something only he could see.

  Two of Cawthorne’s runaway buck privates, Bledsoe and Parker, stood ready to shoot Hull if he cut loose. Bledsoe’s unshaven, blue-jawed face was utterly blank with the shock of all he’d seen, while Parker, bug-eyed and bald as an egg, giggled and looked about him with giddy anticipation. Nobody bothered with Stickney after they searched him, even when the meek Indian agent started to come round. “Judas priest,” Bledsoe scoffed. “He ain’t even heeled!”

  “I guess you know I don’t give two shits about your Comanche cousins,” Roherty allowed, “but I don’t aim to go home empty-handed, either.”

  Hull slowly nodded his head. “You’ve heard the legends.”

  “Oh, we’ve all heard them, ain’t we? The Indians told the Spaniards tall tales of golden cities to push them on over the next hill, and they ran themselves ragged trying to find them. Quivira, El Dorado, the Seven Cities of Cibola… I always knew they weren’t just legends. Indians all know the truth, but they’re afraid to tell, with a fear thousands of years older than them, of something they don’t even understand. But that fear don’t come to much, when you’ve got their guts in your hands.”