Cthulhu Unbound 3

by Brian M. Sammons (ed. )

  Getzel tried talking sense to him. “Warden…this is weird…but Eddie Sloat keeps predicting who it’s going to be. He names them before they go. He—”

  “I don’t give a high happy shit what Sloat says, you moron,” Sheens told him in no uncertain terms. “Eddie Sloat is a fucking mental case. He belongs in psych, but like every other dysfunctional, disillusioned, demented piece of shit in the system, he gets dumped on my fucking lap. I don’t want to hear another word about that drooling, delusional brain-dead squirt of piss. You hear me?”

  “Yes, sir,” Getzel said, having the feeling that his balls were in the process of being squeezed in a vice.

  “Sloat is crazy. End of story. You think I’m going to buy that fucked-up shit the cons are saying? That Eddie Sloat is some kind of fucking prophet or warlock or whatever in the Christ? Jeeee-suuuus, Captain! Enough already! You get on those monkey-fucks you call correctional officers! I want this goddamn place locked-down! I want every cell turned! I want every man searched! Offer your goddamn rats some cheese and get ‘em talking because somebody has to know something! And if they won’t talk, take every prisoner to medical and give them a personal finger wave! There’s an underground railroad out of this place and I want it closed for business!”

  “Yes, sir. It’s already being done.”

  “So get going, man,” Sheens told him. “Because right now I have to call a certain congressman with the BOP oversight committee who takes extreme pleasure in using my rectum for a hatbox! Go! Go!”

  Over the next twenty-four hours every prisoner was duly searched, every cell shaken down…but nothing came to light. Grissenberg was locked down for seventy-two hours, but no one was saying squat.

  At least, nothing that made any sense.

  6

  In the dream, Coogan fell into a darkness that was smooth like smoked glass. Night rushed out with a blackness that was sullen and consuming, all black funeral crepe and graying shroud and spreading ebon mist. It came out as gaunt shadows that pooled and settled, fattening and bloating on their own excess, overflowing their banks and sinking the universe into a pit of crawling darkness.

  It made no sense, but this is what he saw and came to know:

  He was drawn down a black corridor that echoed with crystalline laughter that shattered around him. The shards were very sharp, he could feel them cut his skin. He was not alone, within and without, there were others pressing in, whispering and humming profane melodies.

  He saw eyes like green gemstones, burning a hot indigo-emerald like steaming reactor cores. He was propelled forward into a yawning abyss of mirrored grayness. More eyes watched him, huge slit cat’s eyes and tiny bubbling toad’s eyes and eyes like yellow diamonds. They followed him in pods and clusters. He found himself in a field of bloated corpse-white growths that came up above his waist. They felt moist and fleshy and vital as they brushed against him, whipping and arcing, coiling over his wrists and crawling up his arms like fleshy vines. They were sticky and damp and he was held fast. He began to thrash. He began to scream. He tore them free in rank, slithering handfuls…then he was stumbling through the viscid garden of threading fungi until he fell panting at the threshold of a city that was like no city he had ever seen before: immense windowless towers of black stone that looked not so much as if they had been built but had grown like mineral crystals, polished and shining, reaching up to a sunless and moonless sky of luminescent elliptical green clouds.

  Behind him, the fungus rustled with secret undercurrents and tides, whispering and hissing. He looked back but once and thought he saw a dozen distorted faces float from the verdant growths like rising bubbles.

  Before him was a single murky oval mouth leading into one of the towers. Inside, it was a shadow-riven cavity that refused moonlight and starlight and anything bright or revealing. A high standing tomb of mystery and dank secret and no light dared reveal its dark glory.

  But he could see, it seemed, with another sense that was relative to sight yet nothing so crude or rudimentary.

  His field of vision was a pulsating pellucid blue phosphorescence. It showed him the room which was spatially deranged, an endless, dizzying space of limitless blackness which reached out into the very heart of the cosmos itself. He was aware of great heights above and plummeting depths below. He moved through the emptiness until he saw twelve cylinders of blue-black metal that gleamed like polished glass.

  It was here he stopped.

  For with that activated, unknown sixth sense, he knew there were living things in the cylinders and not only living, but conscious and sentient, and that each was aware he was looking at them because they were looking at him.

  He pulled himself away with horror and then he was leaving the building, being expelled like a pea from a pod, out into the city itself, lost in the mazelike tangle of its streets. And above those towering buildings, rising like a full moon over a stark, dead necropolis…a face.

  Immense.

  Impossible.

  A grotesque, distorted face that was white graveyard fungi set with huge black doll’s eyes and a yawning oval mouth popping open like a blood blister. It drifted closer to him, ethereal and disembodied, coming to swallow the city. He could feel a damp chill of night-black tomb hollows coming off it, smell its breath which was rotting fish and subterranean sewer stagnation.

  It whispered something to him that was devastating: “You will be saved.”

  7

  Coogan came awake gasping for breath. He could still feel that choking, airless void scratching at his lungs. Pawing sweat from his face with both hands, studying his dampened fingers and the dew glistening upon them, he fell to the floor, shaking, his guts coming up the back of his throat like knotted slime-snakes.

  “You were dreaming, home,” Luis told him, his voice not crusty with sleep, but clear and soft as if he had been watching the whole thing.

  Coogan picked himself up off the floor. “I never dreamed liked that before.”

  “Maybe it was a vision. Maybe you were plugged into something out there. Maybe you should tell me about it.”

  Coogan lit a cigarette and did just that. He told him about the fields of fungi, the city, the building, the canisters, and about that noxious face rising above all.

  “I could feel it right away…something watching me in the city. Staring down from that green sky.”

  “And…?”

  Coogan sighed and laid it all out. “Today, Chi Chi pointed out Eddie Sloat…but I didn’t see Sloat. I saw a guy that’s been dead for years. But he was there. He was looking right at me…then it was…”

  “What?”

  Coogan shook his head, decided to leave the monstrous thing he’d seen out of it.

  Luis thought about it for some time. “Funny how all roads lead back to Eddie Sloat in this place.” He listened to the night, cocking his head as he did from time to time. “You ain’t the only one dreaming of that place, home. Lots of us are. Lot more can’t handle the dreams and they get dragged off to Psych. The rest of us…we just live with it. Those canisters. Tell me about ‘em.”

  “Just a dream,” Coogan said, blowing smoke at the ceiling. “That’s all. Just dreams—”

  “Tell me.”

  “There was something in ‘em, something alive. Something that could see me or feel me or know I was there. I can’t explain it. Don’t ask me to.”

  Luis just sat there silently. Finally, he said, “I’ve seen those canisters. Lots of us have. There’s definitely something in ‘em…only a lot of us don’t wanna know what.”

  Coogan thought it was all fucking crazy and told him so. Sloat sending out dreams to people, making cons disappear in the night. Everyone dreaming the same shit. Fantasy. It was all warped fantasy. Just as bad as Luis and his dreams of something malignant waiting out in the Oort Cloud, creeping a little closer to Earth each night.

  “You saw that hole in the sky, Coog. You denying what your eyes show you?”

  “Shit.”

 
“Then listen.”

  “What?”

  “Close your eyes, my friend,” he said, “and…just…listen. You can hear it out there. Listen.”

  The cigarette smoldering between his lips, Coogan did just that. And was it hyper-charged imagination or was he really hearing something? A sort of droning, a distant breathing of colossal gulfs…the steady hissing static of dead-end space inching closer and closer.

  He crushed out his cigarette and pulled the thin Federal-issue pillow over his head to shut it out. No, I won’t listen, I won’t hear…THAT. I won’t let myself…

  8

  Coogan knew what everyone else knew about Eddie Sloat: a gamey mix of fact and bullshit twined so tight it was hard to say where one began and the other ended. Mostly tabloid stuff. Some kind of cult activity in Vermont. A tent city called Nithonville. A brainwashed sect and a mass suicide on a mountain hilltop in the shadow of some weird Druidic-looking stone circle. Sloat walked away. But the majority—nearly five hundred men, women, and children—minds ripped open on hallucinogens, did not. Depending on who you asked and what you were willing to listen to, they either slit their throats, tore out their own eyes, or were poisoned…sometimes all three. Rumor had it their bodies were discovered in a morbid, gelid state, and more than one story was floating around that, upon post mortem examination, their brains were missing—and this without a single suture mark, scar, puncture, or pinprick.

  One fact was immutable: Eddie Sloat walked away.

  Nobody seemed to have a clue who he was before he formed the cult, recruiting members from every imaginable economic, social, and racial grouping, but afterwards, every newsmagazine, network, and police agency followed his every move.

  Hunted by the FBI, Sloat moved west. Then the child murders. One in Nevada, another in California, and then a third in Utah. The State Police arrested him outside Antimony, Utah. He had the body of his last victim in the trunk. Examination showed no signs of abuse or molestation. In fact, the medical examiner and his people could never adequately determine the cause of death.

  At least publicly.

  Privately, they knew all too well: the child’s brain had been removed. Just like the others. But as to where it was or how it could have been removed from the skull without incision or puncturing of any sort was a mystery.

  And one not shared with the public.

  But as far as law enforcement were concerned, Sloat had strangled the children and Sloat—defending himself—did not argue the point. He had crossed state lines, so it became a Federal matter and that bought him a cage at Grissenberg.

  9

  Out in the field, it was con versus con, and everyone—even the guards—were booking action, even though gambling of any sort was strictly forbidden by the BOP.

  The two teams were lined up: blacks on one side, whites on the other. The former were gangbangers, traffickers, maniacs sitting on federal time; the latter, bikers, Aryan Brothers, intolerant rednecks that just liked to hurt anything with skin darker than their own. They wore no pads, no helmets. They liked it better that way, venting their aggressions.

  Coogan watched as the white quarterback got hit on a screen pass and fumbled. some dreadlocked beast from one of the Jamaican Posses picked the ball up, zigzagging five yards real sweet and easy, then a massive biker took hold of him, beat him down, and smashed his knee into his midsection about four times in rapid succession. The Jamaican went down, laying there, trembling. The game started getting ugly. Lots of pushing and shoving, racial slurs flying around. The hacks charged over there with their sticks, breaking it up.

  Tony Bob, one of the yard hacks, came by, looked Coogan up and down, winked, motioned with his stick at the men in the field. “Hell kind of game is that supposed be?” he said, a vein in his thick neck pulsing. “What the fuck do they call that?”

  “Football, boss,” Coogan told him.

  “Football? I played football two years for Ohio State before my knee locked and you know what? That ain’t football.”

  When he went on his merry way and the cons in the field had been dispersed, Coogan looked over by the chapel.

  Sloat was back.

  And that baby-raping motherfucker was staring right at him.

  He paced back-and-forth in a loose-limbed shuffle. His hair was dark, greasy like an oil spill. It matched the color of his eyes which were black as burnt cork. His face was sunless and pale, almost bloodless, and it made those simmering ebon eyes look as dark and bottomless as abyssal depths.

  “Wait here,” he told Chi Chi and Luis. “I want to get a closer look.”

  “Don’t do it,” Luis warned him. “Please, man, don’t stir things up.”

  But he was going. Something in him demanded it.

  “Watch yourself,” Chi Chi told him. “Hacks be eyeballing us.”

  Coogan crossed the yard, made small talk with a couple old cons over by the bleachers that hadn’t seen the light of day in forty years, all the time keeping his eye on Sloat. He left the cons, walked right past Sloat who was standing all alone in the center of the yard, a knife-slash grin cut into his pallid face, his eyes like dead roads through miasmic swamps.

  Coogan stopped, lit a cigarette, his back to Sloat.

  You really want to do this?

  He could feel the man watching him and something about that brought a chill like a cold breath at his neck. He turned, wrinkling his nose against a sudden foul odor in the air. It was musky and hot like a reptile house and it seemed to be coming from Sloat.

  “Fuck you staring, asshole?” he heard himself ask.

  He stepped closer even though, with that smell boiling hotter by the moment, the idea was repugnant. Sloat just kept grinning and Coogan knew he was going to have to hurt him. It would get him a week in the hole, but it would have to be done because Sloat was staring, grinning like a saw-toothed pumpkin, disrespecting him.

  It would be a simple matter. Coogan was a practiced street fighter, fast, lethal. His upper body strength was awesome from working the iron pile: shoulders broad and sculpted, neck like a tree stump, arms corded thick with muscle. Even then he could feel it coming over him, the need to hurt this fish, to prove his dominance. His legs were already bending into it, thrumming with power like pistons. He’d swing out with his right and if Sloat was any kind of man he’d try to block it and when he did, Coogan would jab him in the side hard enough to snap a rib.

  Closer, that stench rising and making his stomach roll. “I said, fuck are you staring at?”

  If Sloat was afraid, he did not look it. He just stood there, his grin widening until it looked like it would eat his face. He was pale like a clown, but not a funny one, but maybe one that drove around with dead children in the trunk of his car.

  Coogan could hear Chi Chi and Luis coming to intervene, but he knew Sloat would be on the ground long before they did. Because he could not stop it now. He needed to throw this smarmy baby-raper a good beating. Sloat needed to be stomped, squashed flat like some leggy thing that had crawled out from a webby cellar corner.

  Then two things happened.

  The first was that it wasn’t Eddie Sloat standing there, it was Frank McGrath: huge, bristling, death-hunger in his eyes. Then the voice came, hollow and windy from distant gulfs: “Just like Auburn again, eh, Coog? You and me sharing our dirty little secrets.”

  The tattoos on McGrath’s arms—things like spiraling symbols and letters intertwined by serpents and clustered eyes and twining wormlike feelers—seemed to be moving, wavering, swirling together like steam rising from a pot, becoming a slithering tapestry of hallucinatory vermiform life.

  Coogan felt cold sweat wash down his face.

  He heard the high, profane laughter of a child at his left ear.

  And then it was Sloat standing there again, his grin ever-widening, an obscene smile of shattered glass. In a hollow sexless voice that seemed to echo from subterranean depths, he said, “You will be saved.”

  “Fuck…fuck did you say?” Coog
an managed as his mind screeched with black noise and threatened to close like the petals of a flower.

  But then Chi Chi and Luis were pulling him away and he was too weak too fight, leeched dry, numb.

  Sloat just stood there, grinning.

  But now that Coogan was out of the play, a couple scavengers moved in for their piece of the pie. Two black cellies that were known around the block as Rondo and Mondo and were sitting, cumulatively, on thirty years for narcotics trafficking. They came right up to Sloat and that fool could not stop smiling.

  “I figure you pay us a couple bills a week, white boy,” Rondo said, “and we’ll keep you a virgin. How’s that sound?”

  Mondo giggled. He giggled at everything Rondo said.

  Coogan was seeing it, hearing it, knowing how the game was played. Maybe these two wanted Sloat’s love and maybe it was pure extortion, hard to say. But another hard time BLA banger was watching what was going down real closely and that pretty much gave it away. These two would give Sloat a hard time and the other guy would come to his rescue, protect him, and that’s how it would work. He probably paid Rondo and Mondo to do what they were doing.

  But again, Sloat did not look afraid.

  “You hear what the man said, you white bread motherfucker?” Mondo told him with absolute threat behind his words.

  Rondo was going to take it up a notch but he stopped suddenly. His mouth opened, then closed. Beneath his dark skin, he was pale.

  Something had switched here. The aggressor was becoming the victim and you could see it happen just as you could see Sloat feeding on it, pumping himself up with it. His eyes were so huge they seemed to be coming right out of his head like two black glossy eggs. “Will you be saved, my brothers?” he asked them. “Or will you seek communion with the Black Mist?”

  Rondo tried to speak, but his throat was filled with a seeping dark sludge; he tried to look away, but Sloat’s eyes held him spellbound in a cat’s cradle of tomb-dark silences. When he did blink it was with tears of pain for he had been drawn into the black wormholes of Sloat’s eyes and been shown something distorted and unreal and grotesque: