Space Eldritch
Page 4
The characters and the roots were Latin. Was the word English?
“Stop!” he croaked. “I’ve come to help!”
It was a gamble; he knew nothing about the person whose body he inhabited.
But the hand eased off, and then the vessel reached over to steady their shared body by touching the wall.
Randolph relaxed his control over the vessel’s muscles, clinging tightly with his will to the thread of energy that bound them together. He saw more of the chamber now. It was vast, it curved out of Randolph’s sight in two directions, and it was full of steel and glass tubes. Tubes the size of coffins. A red-black cloud of globules slowly spread out into the room from the space Randolph and the vessel occupied together.
“Who are you?” the vessel asked. It was accented strangely, but it was English. “Are you some kind of... what are you?”
Randolph took over the talking by a brute exertion of his will. “Randolph Choate. I’m a man. I’m a Virginian, I teach at a university in Massachusetts. I’m here to stop the monster.”
“Jim?”
“Niarlat.”
Randolph waited through a prolonged silence. He began to wonder if his spell had damaged the vessel’s cognition.
“Jim said that name when he... killed people. Niarlat.”
“Is Jim an immensely large creatures with tentacles for a head?” The conversation was draining on Randolph. He wanted to get it over with, find the dark god and confuse its path. “What powers does Jim serve?”
“Jim is a spaceship captain. He’s human. As far as I know he serves the North American Confederacy. But there’s a monster outside. I... I can’t really describe it.”
Randolph considered. He didn’t know what outside meant in this context, but he didn’t want to take the time to find out. The void, he assumed. And he knew the image of the ceremonial bark on which his body lay in the basement of the Burroughs manor was a sort of spaceship, if by spaceship the vessel meant the sort of thing that emerged from the fevered imaginations of Jules Verne and H.G. Wells.
“What’s your name?”
“Gabe. Lieutenant Gabriel Goldman.”
“Take me to the monster, Lieutenant.”
“Uh... that’s not possible. Anyway, it’s a bad idea, and it would take too long. We’d have to suit up, and that’d take an hour. The monster’s outside the ship.”
Randolph considered. “Then take me to Jim.”
“Jim’s dangerous.”
“So am I, Lieutenant.” Randolph took control of one arm long enough to reach out and grab the spinning tablet. “So am I.”
***
Sa-Niarlat knew the way, and those who would follow him did not. It didn’t matter; the way was a straight corridor, with no turns or exits but the door at the end, and the lambs could not get lost.
He had come down this corridor the first time on hands and knees as a young man. He remembered now with a thrill the black terror of that moment, believing still that he was an acolyte of Sebek, though an acolyte who understood that Sebek was a hungry god who sold his blessings to man for blood. He remembered being seized at the doorway, held, threatened, and then cut—but only enough to make a personal offering to the god. Lying on the runnels, feeling the blood drip from his neck, he’d thought himself doomed. Instead, he’d been dragged to his feet and taken aboard the god’s bark, to learn the first oaths of the prow, the mast, and the helm.
He kicked aside his sandals in the darkness, hearing them thud softly against the stone wall of the chamber. With his feet bare, he could tell where he was by the patterns of the channels carved into the floor. He positioned himself beside the entrance into the Dark Chamber, knife in his hand.
He lit no torch. No man had lit a torch in the Dark Chamber, the mooring quay of the god’s astral bark, since the first stones of its ceiling had been laid, millennia earlier.
He breathed deep the thick and clotted air. Traces of durhang, and the rich loam of blood.
Sa-Niarlat heard the shuffling scrape of hands and knees patting on sandy stone. He knew from the volume exactly how far away the first lamb was. He knew from the runnels under his toes exactly where to stand, and where to thrust his hand in the darkness, and where to slash with the knife.
He held back the lamb’s head to open the throat wound as wide as he could, and thrilled to the feeling of hot blood over his bare feet. He heard with tremulous joy the soft splash of the same blood spilling into the pool in which the bark rested.
Before the second lamb could overtake the first, he dragged the exsanguinating body itself to the lip and threw it into the pool.
“Ia Niarlat,” he whispered throatily, his body gripped with lust.
None of the lambs struggled. He had not struggled, when he had been the lamb, but then his sacrifice had been one of consecration and devotion, requiring his whole soul but only a little blood. These lambs served a different purposes. These lambs sacrificed in order that the god’s bark would float.
***
“Why is everything pink?” the vessel Lieutenant Gabriel Goldman asked.
Stop wasting my energy with useless queries. “Because my grip on my sanity is tenuous at best. Apparently the eyesight is the first thing to go.”
Gabe chuckled. “You’re crazy? I’m the one talking to a voice in my head.”
“Touché, Lieutenant.”
“Call me Gabe. Since we’re sharing the same body and all. Seems too personal to stand on rank, doesn’t it?”
“As you say, Gabe.”
“We should be armed. There’s twenty-five hundred people sleeping on this ship, including my wife, dammit. I’m their only defense against a crazy guy with a rock.”
“We are armed.”
“I forgot, I’m a crazy guy with a rock, too. What are you going to do, Choate—what am I going to do—throw it at him?”
“I’m going to read it.”
Randolph didn’t know whether he’d be able to read anything. The passage spun and bucked in his visual field. Through the glass panels of the tubes nearest the vessel, he saw pale, ghoulish faces, faces that might have been human. He was afraid to look closer.
“This is all so totally wrong.”
“Please.” Randolph relaxed, focusing just enough to stay attached to Gabe. “You are a man of earth, yes?”
“I’m a North American.”
“That... thing... outside your spaceship is going to North America if we don’t stop it. To a small town in Massachusetts, as it happens. It will kill your twenty-five hundred sleepers first, with as little remorse as if it had swatted a fly. I need to see the thing to stop it, or at least its summoner. Maybe, in his presence, I can cast... I can do what I must.”
“Summoner?”
“Jim, I think.” It was just a guess, but it was the best Randolph had. “Please.”
“Okay,” Gabe agreed. “But he’s armed, and I’m not, and I’m pretty close to vomiting.”
Randolph felt sick, too. His vision swam completely away from him for long seconds.
The vessel Gabe maneuvered himself into the shaft and looked along it. Randolph relaxed; the spinning and the shifting of colors continued, but when he let Gabe be in control it was better. Gabe was comfortable in this unreal environment, and with a flick of his wrists, sent their shared body sliding along the tunnel.
Another man’s face appeared at the shaft opening. With him came a swarm of blood droplets, and an obsidian knife glinted in his hand. Randolph almost shouted a warning, but he realized that Gabe must see the other man, too, and he conserved his energy.
Still, Gabe slid towards the end, and the other man seemed to be gathering his body to pounce, raising the knife—
closer—
Randolph tried to seize control, but the vessel Gabe shut him out with an effort that made them both gasp—
the raised knife—
the slash—
at the last second, Gabe grabbed a ladder rung at the lip of the shaft and caught himself.
The other man, who must be Jim, attacked the empty space where he expected Gabe to be, and missed. In the weightless void, the energy of his blow turned his motion into a forward leap, his face slamming into the floor and his body rebounding and spinning away from the shaft.
Gabe snapped his wrist and slid smoothly out of the tunnel. The chamber they entered was shaped like a gumdrop or a mushroom cap. A cloud of garbage drifted about in the air.
Jim crashed into the wall. He lost his grip on the obsidian flake, which whizzed away from him into the junk. He grabbed a ridge in the wall paneling and stopped his motion.
Gabe reached out and snatched the knife from the air. Randolph felt heartened, though he knew that this defeated Jim was only a mortal servitor, a cultist, or maybe even a vessel like Gabe.
“Come easy, Jim,” Gabe said. “I’ll give you a sedative.”
Jim nodded slowly, then let himself drift away from the wall. He reached out a hand submissively to Gabe.
Gabe tucked the tablet under his arm and grabbed Jim’s hand.
Excruciating shock torture spasms electricity blood’s on fire—
engulfed in the sudden onslaught of pain, Randolph struggled not to lose consciousness.
***
Choate spasmed. White foam spewed from the professor’s lipless old mouth and his knees slammed repeatedly into his own chest.
Jack dug into his pants pocket, then shoved his wallet into the professor’s mouth. Choate was already on his side, so he wasn’t going to drown in his own... foam.
“Easy.” Jack patted Randolph Choate on the shoulder.
CRASH!
Behind him, Jack heard the door give way.
He turned and opened fire. Rat-tat-tat-tat-tat, the tommy gun chewed into the foremost members of the rampaging mob.
Funny, Jack thought. They didn’t really look like ginnies. They wore suits and frocks, and except for the bloody and totally messed-up state of them, they might have been the kind of people who’d get invited to Burroughs Manor for dinner.
Until Jack mowed them down. Then they looked like oversized rag dolls, banging into the walls and dropping to the ground. Their blood ran across the floor in straight lines, like it was pouring into tiny irrigation canals. Which, Jack realized, it was.
Jack walked slowly forward and dropped every one of the creeps in the basement with him and then the first few in the hall. As the tommy gun ran dry he hurled the kerosene lantern into the hall for good measure.
The crazies ran away. Not so crazy that they liked being on fire, at least, Jack thought with some satisfaction.
“How do you like that?” he yelled after them. “Screw with the troll, you get the horns! I mean bull!” Jack faltered. “Screw with the bull, I said. I meant. Ah, hell.”
He picked up the door and grunted with the effort it cost him to shove it back into place, kicking aside the body of a man in a priest’s collar. It only occurred to him as he snapped the door upright that he had thrown away the light, and would be plunged into total darkness.
Only he wasn’t.
The thing the professor was lying on—the picture that looked like a boat—glowed a smoky green. And above the professor, also glowing in dull green, the ceiling of the basement was spangled with dots that might have been stars.
***
He gripped the stone fiercely, wondering what it was and dimly remembering that it was something important. His face burned, and the skin of his hands.
The god, the god was coming.
What god?
He looked into his left hand and saw that he held a severed woman’s head. He thought the sight should shock him, but it didn’t. He pulled the head to him by the hair and looked into its eyes as it bobbed around, floating with him in space. Just a thing. Just a head. Just a blood head thing blood.
Blood flowed through the air around him. His arm burned, and looking down at it, he saw that the flesh of his forearm was slashed open. He looked up, and the lights shut off completely.
In the darkness, he screamed.
***
The first Brother of the Dark Chamber announced his approach with a hymn. Now that the slaughter of the lambs was done, the blood pounded less in Sa-Niarlat’s ears and he could again hear the sounds of the Theban army above.
“We are doomed,” he said joyously to the Brother, “but it is the god who dooms us.” He crossed the plank bridge to the god’s bark and stepped unerringly to his position at the helm.
The deck beneath his feet rocked slightly and the rudder felt like gnarled and carved bone in his hands. The hymn grew in intensity as more Brothers entered the room, and spread in physical space as they arrayed themselves out around the edges of the pool, chanting together.
Niarlat, live
Niarlat, watch
Niarlat, come
Arise thou Niarlat from thy rest
Overhead, dim lights swirled into being. They were stars, and Sa-Niarlat instantly recognized the constellations.
The stars were in the same alien pattern as the stars in the ceiling of the Inner Court. You could not see such constellations in the skies above Huut-Niarlat.
Sa-Niarlat joined the hymn.
Niarlat, live
The stars seemed to rise into the distance above his head, to become true astral bodies, cold and unimaginably remote. Sa-Niarlat’s heart again roared like thunder in his own hearing, joy exulted his frame.
Niarlat, watch
The boat under his feet began to glow. Sa-Niarlat had chanted this hymn in this spot a hundred times before. He had smelled the blood of sacrificed lambs and the hot sand upon which it spilled, seen the stars above show their light. The boat had always remained inert. His eyes drank in the details; the leather sail, the railing around the deck of long bones and skulls, the lichen-encrusted twisting mast, like an olive tree or the split tentacles of the god himself.
Satisfaction.
Niarlat, come
Blood, thick in his nostrils. His own death was imminent, but it had always been inevitable. He had been marked as a sacrifice to his god many long years ago, and the knife at his lamb-like throat had only been stayed for a time, to permit him to complete greater service. This was his moment. He would feed the god not only his own soul, but the soul of every Theban at the gates and every Sebek worshipper who fell to a Theban sword. The blood would summon the god, open the door for him. The impatient and foolish Thebans were creating a mass sacrifice to their enemy on a scale that the god’s own priests, in hiding for centuries, had not been able to achieve.
Was it enough blood? Sa-Niarlat’s god was a thirsty god. Then Sa-Niarlat’s heart skipped a beat as the deck of the bark rose into the air.
Arise thou Niarlat from thy rest
***
James ripped his hand away from Gabe and bit his own lip.
He’d been yelling something, but they were words he couldn’t make out or control.
This is madness, he thought. The white-jumpsuit boys in the Academy and the NACSS claimed that Nullspace was safe, but there were always whispered stories that suggested otherwise. Crewmen who murdered mates in their sleep. Cannibal ships. Captains who willingly flew their own ships into stars.
Space-sickness, they said. Cabin fever. Fables.
Or an overdose. His hands trembled, and he couldn’t remember from one moment to the next where he was or what he had done. Wasn’t that what a junkie experienced? He’d been injected twice with the Hypnostasis emergence cocktail, hadn’t he? Hadn’t he? Was he the galaxy’s first emergence cocktail junkie?
Maybe. An emerger. He shuddered and laughed. They’d study his case in the Academy.
But maybe not.
James felt another person inside him. Sometimes his body did things, and it wasn’t him giving the orders. But that was a crock, he knew; he was dodging responsibility for... for something. Had he killed people? No, the other person inside him had.
But the other person could only be James himself.
James la
ughed, trying to exorcise his unsettled, whirling sense that everything was shattered. Instead, he heard his own cackle and cringed.
Had he always had a split personality? he wondered. He didn’t think he’d experienced missing memories before this fateful trip, but he didn’t know how much he could trust his own mind. Maybe he’d forgotten his prior forgetting.
He cackled again.
Something inside James grabbed him and impelled him forward awkwardly. His arms flailed, and though it seemed a directionless movement at first, it ended with the obsidian flake in his hand. Images of burning white sand flashed through James’s mind, and men on chariots with spears and shields.
A ship. A ship that flew.
Murders.
“Blood and sand,” he gasped, and then spat out an incomprehensible stream of gibberish.
He bounced off a bulkhead, and the Other inside him relaxed his grip. James swooned and nearly fainted at the sudden absence, but steadied himself by inhaling big gulps of air.
He tried to throw away the stone, and found that the one part of him the Other still held tightly was James’s weapon hand.
“Sagan,” he muttered.
Gabe anchored himself to the captain’s seat and stared at James.
“I’m sorry,” James told his first mate. His entire body shook with the effort. “I need... relieve me of command.”
Gabe shouted a series of nonsense syllables back at him, and the Other seized James’s jaw and shouted back.
Darkness filled the bridge, though the emergency lights seemed to be burning as bright as ever. James felt his body wracked with pain like a thousand hot needles stabbing him. Gabe writhed, let go of the captain’s chair, and drifted.
His arm, the arm James had touched, withered and aged before James’s eyes.
The Other kicked his feet against the bulkhead and made James lurch forward. He spun slowly head over heels forward, stone knife slashing. I have to stop the Other, James thought. Even if he is me. I can’t let him—me—kill Gabe.