Cthulhu Unbound 3

by Brian M. Sammons (ed. )

  Coogan was seeing him not through eyes as such, but some other sense that was vivid, yet oddly dreamlike… McGrath looked distorted, obscene, a fourth-dimensional alien interpretation. Purely subjective: a pale white blubbery thing, churning with liquids and fats and filled with gases. A repellent and perfectly monstrous thing.

  Though Coogan—or his host—was repulsed, there were necessary things to be done and the delicate triple-pronged crab pincers were doing them with incredible dexterity…rods of light slitting open the cranium, the membrane bisected, the pulsing clot of convoluted tissue that still lived, the severing of millions of nerves.

  Then the brain, divorced from its skull, living…still living.

  Placed in a canister. One of the canisters he had dreamed about.

  Taken from McGrath.

  To be put somewhere else.

  Coogan drew away from it all. With a hollow and distant scream, he moved away from the things that were dissecting McGrath. He fled through the anti-world, gaining momentum, terror breaking loose inside him, and then velocity, space and time crumbling around him, unraveling and fragmenting.

  And somewhere, from distant black gulfs, a buzzing voice: “You have breached, Coogan. Prepare to breech again…”

  20

  Buster Cray could not sleep.

  He had been named by Eddie Sloat. It was his turn.

  All day long he’d felt it coming for him, creeping in closer, and now he feared it was standing just behind him.

  Holding his mother’s crucifix to his chest, he said, “Please Mary, please Jesus, now and at the hour of my death…”

  Enveloped in a sour, yellow stink of fear, he was trembling, beads of sweat the size of chickpeas popping on his brow. As he shook his head slowly from side to side, his eyes did not blink. His face was drawn so tight it looked like the skull beneath was trying to get out.

  Behind him, there was a hissing noise.

  Something was happening, something was taking shape around him. It was like the atmosphere of his cell was being gutted.

  Buster just stood there, eyes wet and wide. They’re coming. Just like in my dreams, they’re coming through the light.

  In the corner, right at the very spot where the walls met and the angles died, a seam of blackness appeared. It sheared open like a crack, widening, and a pale blue light came shining through, spreading out and making the entire room glow with luminous pulsations of matter.

  Not just light, but a lambent phosphorescence that was palpable…he could feel the energized particles that made it up crawling over his skin like a million spidery legs.

  And he was trapped. Trapped in a steel cage.

  He turned this way and that, eyes huge and glassy and staring, ropes of drool flying from his mouth. And then he screamed. A sharp, cutting, absolutely agonized sound that echoed through the cellblock like an air raid siren. He threw himself against the bars of his cell and beat his face against them until his black skin opened with blossoms of blood the color of dewy red, red roses.

  “GET ME OUT! GET ME OUT OF HERE!” he cried between clenched teeth as tears rolled and spittle flew and his fists shook on the bars. “GET ME THE FUCK OUT OF HERE—”

  And then he saw the figures in the light—crooked, hunched-over shapes like grotesque hobgoblins. There were five or six of them hopping out of the misty blue field in his direction. They made a high-pitched whistling noise like mating katydids in a summer field. As Buster’s mind ran like warm sap, he saw something like gargoyle wings spreading out and wavering alien limbs reaching out towards him.

  But that was all he saw before he was taken.

  21

  Down in solitary the voices were speaking from Sloat’s cell again and, God help him, but Philly could not seem to stop from listening.

  “…they all are knowing now…sensing it…feeling it…seeing it in their visions…near, very near…all those mindless little worms, oh yes, they cannot shut out the majesty of that which comes…it owns them, every one of them!” Sloat began to breathe very fast. There was a stealthy insectile scuttling as something moved across the floor followed by a flapping sound as of sheets on a line or…spreading wings. “The time is ripe and we shall make it so…I have heard voices calling from the green gulfs where the black spheres roll…”

  Then that buzzing voice which Philly didn’t think a human being could imitate. It was wavering, rising and falling, like a radio signal coming from a great distance:

  “…Iä Iä Cthulhu Fhtagn…as in past days so again…the tall apes no longer hold sway…exterminated by the wrath of…and He, oh sacred and favored lord, shall rise from the sunken city…and as the Black Goat rules the forest so shall the Million Malignant Minds be sated…even now they approach…the Eye of Wormwood… Iä…as in elder lost times…the ancient star-spawn will wake in their tombs beneath the frozen cold wastes…fill the skies…it will be the time of the swarming as in old…give praise to that which squats in darkness…let what waits at the center of primal chaos hear our many voices…”

  Philly was scared white because as much as he told himself that Eddie Sloat was a bug case and what he was hearing was merely the raving of a diseased mind, he did not believe it. For something inside him had its back up and was bristling with terror. Philly knew that out there somewhere in the night-black cosmos there was something waiting in chaotic splendor and it was coming for the human race.

  22

  Lying awake, Coogan heard it quite distinctly:

  Click, click, click.

  It came again and it was closer. His flesh began to creep. The spit dried up in his mouth. He wanted to call out to Luis, but he did not dare announce his presence to what was coming up the corridor out there. Noise seemed to be canceled out in the prison, an immense dead silence had fallen. There was only the sound of some tormented con praying in the night and that clicking.

  It was coming.

  The only lights on were the security lights and they cast a dim, almost eerie glow over the faces of the cells. Click, click, click. Coogan could smell something like dry moldering straw. He knew it was the same stink Luis had smelled in his house when the Mi-Go visited him. Squeezing his eyes shut, beyond simple fear, he waited it out.

  The smell got stronger.

  An inexplicable chill breezed through the bars.

  He opened his eyes but a crack and saw a grotesque, distorted shadow pass over him as something hopped past his cell. And then it was gone and the smell faded to memory. But somehow he knew it was not over, for this is what Luis had called the taint: the ability to see those from outside, to recognize them when others could not.

  He could hear the sound of footsteps now.

  Just the hack making his rounds. Nothing more. Coogan listened as those soft-soled shoes got closer, then paused before his cell. In the dimness he could see the guard…but he could also see someone else standing just behind him…filmy, shadowy, hunched-over like a troll in a storybook. That figure seemed to gain solidity, become more substantial…filling out, fleshing out, like it was being pumped full of helium. Some nightmare cartoon boogeyman filling with stolen, gaseous life…face bulbous and distorted like that of a flyblown corpse, black crystalline eyes sucked down into oblong holes, lips red and bloated like worms mating in a soup of bile.

  And the evil, mocking grin.

  It was Franky McGrath.

  As Coogan laid there, paralyzed with fear, the hack was gone. McGrath came right up to the bars and his face was crawling like moist, oozing pulp. He clutched the bars and his fingers were boneless and crawling. They coiled like greasy white flatworms.

  As Coogan cried out with glacial terror, McGrath became a soft, warm plastic thing that melted to a sliding jelly, dozens of sinewy slate-gray ropes bursting from the flaccid central mass of luminous yellow eyes and squirming entrails. They wound around the bars, making them groan as they were gripped with impossible strength. McGrath was squeezing his way through, several tentacles with pulsing bubblegum-pink suck
ers on their undersides slipped between the bars, twitching and jumping like power cables, sweeping the floor for something to grab, something to latch on—

  Coogan could hear men crying out.

  A hack shouting.

  Luis was praying.

  Footsteps coming.

  “It’s coming, Coog, it’s coming for all of you,” McGrath’s eerie sibilant voice was saying. “You want me to open the door? Show you how to manipulate fourth-dimensional space? Show you what’s on the other side? I did it for Jimmy Pegs not three months ago. Poor stupid wop, he went just like the others: a little trip into the well of darkness. Sun never rises on Yuggoth, Coog. Poor Jimmy Pegs writhing on that soundless alien plain, methane rupturing his lungs, water boiling out of his eyes until they blew out of their sockets like runny eggs…but by then the lack of atmospheric pressure…ha! He blew up like a fucking balloon. It only took two minutes, tops. But they were a fucking long, ugly two minutes, Coog.

  “And Sean Bolland? I didn’t fuck around at all. I sent that prick right into the Oort Cloud so he could meet the Million Malignant Minds. They took him apart at the subatomic level, scattered his matter like rice, but not before he looked upon them and had every last warm drop of terror leeched from him, his brain pulped and juiced and squeezed dry as a peach pit…

  “Prepare yourself, Coog…it’s coming now…the time of the breaching…”

  The tentacles retreated and McGrath dissolved into a running flux of black jelly that retreated into the shadows.

  “What the fuck is going on here?” a hack said, scanning the cells with his flashlight. “Which one of you pissing shit heads screamed?”

  But no one was saying.

  23

  As the prison slept, Luis Cardone had a dream that he was not sure was a dream at all. Again, he was seeing the great Oort Cloud at the very edge of the Solar System: a misty sphere that spread in all directions and on to infinity, it seemed. Subjectively, he saw it as a black hole that had swallowed the blazing, irradiated mass of a neutron star but hadn’t been able to entirely digest it, only hold it burning in its throat like flickering witch-light. Objectively, he knew the Cloud was a slowly rotating chaotic maelstrom of planetary fragments, ice, interstellar gases, and radioactive dust storms, a cold-hot furnace of comets flaring occasionally with jets of super-hot plasma and radiant bursts of ionizing matter. All of it being slowly compressed in a web of conflicting, pulsating magnetic fields that were squeezing it like a subatomic fist. The nearer he got to it, caught in the corkscrewing pull of its gravitational field, the more it threw out blue-white geysers of agitated atoms and hot gas like tentacles trying to snare him. He looked into the Cloud, seeing deeper into its anatomy than ever before, right into the cometary nucleus itself, the shifting luminosity peeling away to reveal a core beyond that was spiraling and unbelievably black, an ultra-cold freezer of absolute zero that was not dead, but alive with something obscene, unnamable, and unbelievably malignant.

  Something that was watching him, a cosmic eye of absolute malevolence.

  And hate.

  Then he was pulled away from it, it seemed, funneled into a cycling vortex of white matter with blinding velocity that he knew was near the speed of light if not beyond it. Then he was free, falling, falling like a stone through space, spinning until he thought his guts would spray out of his mouth…and then he opened his eyes.

  Coogan was pressing him down into the bunk with one hand and Luis thrashed, his head whipping from side to side. He thought for one crazy, surreal nightmare moment that it wasn’t his cellmate but an immense crystallized spider lowering down upon him.

  “Take it easy,” Coogan told him. “Jesus Christ, you’re screaming in your sleep.”

  Luis relaxed, breathing rapidly in a lake of sweat. He could not stop shaking.

  There was a sudden flare of light as Coogan lit a cigarette, his face crawling with shadows. “Hell was it about?”

  Luis caught his breath, held it, licked his lips. “The Oort Cloud,” he said. “It’s here…I think it’s here…”

  24

  Up on the gun tower as the skin on his lower belly moved with a slow shivering crawl, Captain Genzel stared up at the blackness hanging above FCI Grissenberg. It was an immense abyssal darkness beyond anything he had ever seen before. The sort of ebon, pathless darkness that he imagined must exist beyond the rim of the known universe.

  It was a clear night, but there were no stars in the sky.

  In fact, there was no sky. The blackness was the sky.

  Mason, an old hand at the prison, came up to him. “What do you make of it, Cap?”

  “I…I don’t know. Never seen anything like it before. Some kind of weird storm front?”

  Mason shrugged. “Radio says clear and calm for the next three days. That ain’t no storm.”

  “Then what the hell is it?”

  “I don’t know, Cap,” he said, his voice nearly a whisper. “But it’s been growing in the sky for weeks. And you know what? I was in town last night and you can’t see it from there. The only place you can see it is here.”

  Getzel kept staring up at it, something inside him drying up.

  25

  About the time Coogan managed to close his eyes and approach something like sleep, there was a huge hollow booming that shook the entire prison and made it feel like something had grabbed it and moved it ten feet.

  Coogan was thrown from his bunk as was Luis and hundreds of other cons.

  Up and down the cell blocks men were crying out and things shattered as they hit the floor. There was a weird, sharp stink like ozone and another that smelled like fused-out wiring.

  And then silence.

  A heavy, brooding, deathly silence that lasted for maybe ten seconds and the only sound was an unearthly low howling that sounded something like a distant fog horn echoing through subterranean pipes. It rose and fell in cycles, but never faded away entirely.

  Every light in the prison went out.

  The back-up generators did not kick in.

  And every man lying dazed on the floor or pulling himself to his feet, head spinning with dizziness, all had the same sensation: that the very air, the atmosphere of the prison, had been turned inside out as if time and space and the laws of physics had been dislocated and rendered meaningless.

  Then men started screaming.

  They beat things against the bars of their cells.

  There was shouting and anguished cries.

  And on C-Block, a single voice rose up above it all with a shrieking hysteria: “Help me! Jesus Christ somebody help me! Get me out of here!” the voice cried. “There’s something in here! It got Joey K! It’s coming out of the fucking walls—”

  It was at this climactic moment that every cell door in the prison slid open, releasing convicts into the darkness and what waited in it.

  26

  Solitary.

  Trapped in the darkness, Philly saw a pulsating blue phosphorescence lick around the edges of the steel door to Sloat’s cell. It spilled beneath it, spreading in a glowing pool like moonlight.

  Then the door blew open and something threw a shadow against the wall like branches moving in the wind. He turned and there was nothing. Crawling away from the blue light on his hands and knees, he heard a sound like a dry rustling just behind him…a clicking noise like chitinous digits rubbing together. He waited there, shivering, heart pounding. He started crawling again, seized by a frantic fear that would not release him.

  The noises did not stop.

  They were actively seeking him out.

  And he knew with a childlike terror that whatever was behind him wanted him to see. It was daring him to look upon it.

  There was a sudden strong stink like blood and meat and something worse…like dry, rotting hay. A cold shadow fell over him and he buried his face in his hands and began to sob as he had as a little boy when the branch of an ancient oak would scratch at his window in the night.

  He looked, knowi
ng he had to.

  What he saw in the blue light was not as big as a man, maybe five feet tall…it looked kind of like a hunched-over crustacean, plated in orange-pink segments that were separated by raised ridges. It had two sets of jointed limbs that ended in something like crab pincers…except they were triple pronged like two fingers and an opposable thumb.

  It motioned to him with them.

  Philly screamed.

  The creature was unmoved. It stood there on another set of limbs that were thicker, balancing itself on the tips of the pincers. It had wings…several sets of them that it folded up with a leathery, squeaking kind of sound. It had a tail, too, that seemed to be just an extension of the body. It tapered to a point with sharp spines coming out of the bony ridges.

  A wavering, high buzzing voice said: “You have been saved, little one. Come unto me…”

  Philly just sat there, shaking his head from side to side.

  He did not realize he had pissed his pants.

  Or that his bowels had let go.

  Or that he was mumbling and drooling.

  He was only aware of the horror standing before him.

  It had names, many of them, and they appeared in Philly’s head: Outer One, the Fungi from Yuggoth, the Mi-Go. None of this made sense to him, but his reeling brain was glad to have something to call it for the human mind requires compartmentalization of all things.

  The Mi-Go.

  It had a head that was shaped like a bony octagon covered in thin, shiny flesh. It had no eyes, no mouth…just deep oblong chambers set into its face. There was nothing but darkness in them like the hollows of a skull. There were antennae coming from the head…except they were jointed like the legs of a spider. They were flashing different colors and tapping together.