Shotguns v. Cthulhu

by Larry DiTillio

  I was just adjusting the handle when I heard someone behind me.

  “You’re supposed to be in bed.”

  Cassandra.

  I used the pump as leverage to stand. “You know I won’t sleep right if I think something isn’t working as well as it should.”

  “Did you even ask if you could fix it?” she asked, taking a closer look at my handiwork. She patted the top of the pump in approval.

  “Well, no,” I admitted. “But chances are I’m the best shot they’re gonna get for a long time at fixing this. It’s sure remote out here.”

  “You need to get back to bed.”

  I held my arms out by my sides. “I’m right as rain.” But I was trembling so fiercely I warrant I wasn’t terribly convincing.

  Cassandra tossed her braid over her shoulder and looked away from me, out across the cluster of ramshackle buildings that made up the village and into the swamp and trees surrounding it. “We can’t.”

  “What d’you mean?” I asked. “You said we had to get to Savannah, to Aunt Sibyl. That’s why we left Arizona in the first place.”

  “I mean, we can’t get out. Unless you want to go through the swamp.”

  “Surely there’s a road.”

  “No road. They’re surrounded here during the flood season. They’re people who want quiet and removal from everything out there.”

  “And now the swamp is strangling them out,” I said.

  “Yes.”

  “And you want us to help them.”

  “They saved your life, Lydia. If they hadn’t…” Cassandra’s voice got tight, but she cleared her throat and spoke stronger. “They say we’re the only ones ever to have come out of there alive. And this has been happening for months, now. People go in, never come back. The whole village of Marlow is starving to death.”

  I sighed. “I’m not in any condition to be fighting right now.”

  “I don’t need your gun, Lydia. I need your brain. I’ve got something to show you, and after you’ve seen it I don’t think you’ll be able to say no.”

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “Right now you need to get back to bed. Even in the dark I can tell you’re white as a ghost.”

  I had to agree with her.

  When I woke again, it was evening, and the old man was fussing over something at the hearth. It smelled like meat, but it had that almost floral hint to it that spoke of game rather than anything particularly domesticated.

  “Here. Eat.” He handed me a clay bowl full with frothy brown soup. Or stew. It was hard to tell.

  While I took an experimental bite—it was bitter but not intolerable—he left through the front door and I was left to wonder again after these strange people and their even stranger problems.

  For a moment I thought someone was peeking in the window, but when I went to look it was most certainly vacant.

  Not two minutes later, Cassandra came back in.

  “How’re you feeling?” she asked.

  “Still sore,” I said. I smoothed my hand down my bare leg. The skin was mottled and dark, scabbed and scarred where the vine had broken against me.

  “You up for a walk?” she asked. “It’s not far.”

  She brought me to a half-collapsing barn some distance from the nearest pen. There was no livestock to be seen or heard, and what I could see of the ground showed signs of abandonment. No prints, and the grass was growing back.

  The barn doors swung open on rusty hinges and I noticed light at the far end. I was reminded immediately of my shop back home, where I spent the majority of my time fixing things, and felt heart-sick over it.

  Across the way a young man and a woman—the one I had seen upon waking—stood, hovering over a lumpy mass on the ground. It was covered in white muslin, but there were dark stains on it.

  I staggered as I got closer, my leg buckling under unexpected pain.

  “You sure you’re well enough?” Cassandra asked.

  “I think so,” I said, stopping to rub my leg. The scar tissue was swelling, hot to the touch. My eyes welled with tears against the pain, but with a few deep breaths it seemed to lessen.

  “Good to see you up,” said the woman. She was dressed in ochre and red, her hair tied up and bundled in a heap behind her head. “You probably don’t remember me, but I’m Mrs. Jess. I helped you a bit when you were sick. Made you some broth.”

  I remembered the broth, spiced with a concoction of herbs I could barely recognize.

  The young man turned to look toward me. No, that wasn’t right. He turned to look at Cassandra. And he smiled, then pretended not to.

  “That’s Clell,” Cassandra said, gesturing to him. She was bored with him, I could tell. “His father was one of the first to be lost.”

  “Y’all are the first to have escaped alive,” Clell said. He had a shock of brown hair, and front teeth that were too large for his small mouth. But he had kind eyes, if a little dull.

  I felt my skin crawl, and my wound throb. The skin on my neck prickled, and I glanced to the door to see if someone was standing there.

  “Lydia?” Cassandra asked.

  I cleared my throat. “Before we get to this gruesome business, shouldn’t you inform me on just exactly what’s happening here?”

  Mrs. Jess clicked her tongue and folded her hands in front of her chest. “Started with a thunderstorm, worst we’ve ever had. Winds loud enough to be a damned hurricane. When it blew over, our goats were gone. Every last one.”

  “We could hear bleating in the swamp, weeks later,” Clell said, “but even when we called, they wouldn’t come.”

  “I’ll be,” I said. I was far less impressed than they thought I should be, I could tell that much. They exchanged glances. “And this thing here?” I pointed to the heap.

  “I was hoping, Lydia, that you could take a look at it and see if you could make more sense of it than the rest of us,” Cassandra said.

  I would have laughed, but Cassandra had clearly given them the impression that they should put their hope in me. That was a burden I did not want to bear.

  The thing under the muslin smelled like singed hair and sewage, and I was not looking forward to seeing what lay under the cover, that was certain.

  Clell and Mrs. Jess moved away, and I reached over and pulled.

  There was some resistance, since much of the cloth was stuck with something black and tacky. But slowly the creature was revealed. A goat, but nearly the size of a small horse. Its entire body was anomalous, its head having swelled far past normal proportions, and its eyes receding entirely into its skull.

  And strangest of all, its feet didn’t end in hooves. They ended in vines. Which I wouldn’t have noticed so quickly except for the fact that they began entwining around my ankles.

  I startled back, kicking off the vines, cussing colorfully but glad the vines were nowhere near as strong as those I’d encountered earlier.

  “I thought you said this thing was dead!” I said.

  Clell looked like he was going to faint, and Mrs. Jess just shook her head.

  “It’s dead. Felt for the heart myself. I’m the resident livery owner. I should know,” Mrs. Jess said.

  “Well, only way I can figure this out is to cut into it. Anyone have a scalpel?” I asked.

  Thus began the dissection.

  As I cut into it, the blood ran dark greenish black, and I was thankful for the pair of thick gloves I wore. The volume of blood was far more than expected and, in addition to the proliferation of veins, which I will touch upon again in a few moments, I found a network of thin, delicate webs wound throughout the body. I could only surmise that these were the nerves.

  In general, the veins on the beast were hardened, the walls twice as thick as they ought to be. And they had rearranged, somehow. Instead of all flowing from the heart, the arteries traveled down into the legs and then, after some transition, became more like tubers and flowed into the vines still reaching out for me.

  The thin nerves
collected into thicker clusters in the legs and tail, and then branched out toward the central cavity of the beast. It was there, after some rather unpleasant rooting around, that I discovered the heart.

  Except it was not a heart. It was a brain.

  It was larger than a goat brain ought to be, about the size of half a loaf of bread. But it was not a complete brain, not at all. It was greatly mutated.

  “What’s the matter?” asked Clell.

  “You mean other than the fact that this exists at all?” Cassandra said.

  I held up the beast’s brain. “All that’s here is a rudimentary brain stem, and the part of the brain that is in control of vision.”

  “Where’s its heart?” Cassandra asked.

  “I’m going to try and find out,” I said. “Seems to me there’s a chance they might have swapped places.”

  Cassandra’s shot pierced just north of the thing’s heart-brain, but she’d also shot it in the head. Chances were the bone fragments had ruined most of what was in there.

  I was getting more and more exhausted by the moment, but there was nothing to be done of it. My leg throbbed, and I had the sense that we were being watched. Maybe it was just curious villagers; maybe I was just too tired. But I kept looking behind me at the wide-open barn doors expectantly.

  “Here we are,” I said, peeling away the tacky shards of bone. “Bring the lantern down. I need a better look.”

  The gloves were thick, impeding my sense of touch, but I didn’t need to root around for long to know I wasn’t coming up with anything. I pulled back, only to find my glove stuck with more of the weblike nerves. The head was entirely empty.

  “I always said goats were the dumbest creatures on earth,” I said, “but this one takes the cake.”

  “Nothing?” asked Mrs. Jess.

  “Just more of this stuff,” I said, finally standing up and walking away from the creature. I had no idea what time it was, but by the time I reached the barn doors I noticed a pale blue glow on the horizon.

  They were talking behind me, and I was trying to think. To consider everything I’d seen. I thought of all the weird and heinous creatures I’d come into contact before, but none of them had been this puzzling. They were biological, for the most part, or at least once were. They adhered to certain rules. While their interiors might not have mapped out precisely to the sorts of animals found in our day-to-day lives, they still had hearts, and blood, and brains, more or less in the correct placement. And they never grew vines instead of hooves.

  “I need to rest,” I said, turning around. They were all staring at me. Hopeful. “I’m tuckered out.”

  “Did it tell you anything?” asked Clell.

  “It told me nothing more than what you saw. That it’s an abomination of a proportion even I can’t make sense of,” I said. He cast his eyes down when I could not give him the answers he was searching for.

  I slept. I dreamt. In my dreams, I was being watched. But I could never see the face of who watched me so close. I could hear her whisper, feel her breath on the back of my neck, but every time I turned to see her, she was gone.

  I awoke to the sound of the water pump.

  “Lydia?”

  Cassandra’s voice interrupted the sweet rhythm of machinery. She was at the hearth, stirring some soup. It smelled spicy, smoky.

  “We’re going to have to go back there,” Cassandra said. “And I’d hate to think we don’t have an advantage now.”

  “I’ve never seen something like that before,” I pointed out.

  “But isn’t that how it always works? I figure we’ve seen so much strange, something eventually was bound to top it.”

  The pump worked outside, sighing and sucking, and it struck me as clear as a bolt of lightning.

  “The pump…” I said, standing and going to the window.

  “It’s not broken again, if that’s what you mean,” Cassandra said. She was definitely cross with me; but then again, she always got cross when I didn’t think fast enough to suit her.

  “No, no. The goats. What if the goats work like a pump?”

  “… like a pump…” Cassandra’s eyes almost went cross, and she was clearly concerned for the state of my sanity.

  But the idea had hatched.

  “The goats. Their veins, they’re like pipes. I think they’re animated with pressure, water pressure, that vile venom stuff that got all over my leg. And they’re controlled with the webs. They don’t have enough of a brain to do it themselves but...”

  “But?”

  “My guess is that there’s one of them, smarter that the rest. A center of thought and intelligence. Judging by the brain I examined, it’d be something with a far more complex mind, something able to control two dozen goats at a go.”

  Cassandra was silent, pacing. “Bigger, maybe?”

  “Maybe… why, did you see something out there?”

  “I thought I did. But it was hard to say, Lydia. I was concentrating on getting you out alive.”

  “If we’re to get rid of this thing, we’ve got to get the center. Kill the brain.”

  “And how the hell do you propose that we do that?” she asked.

  “With fire. And blades,” I said. “Not so different than how we usually do things. Except more tactful this time.”

  She smiled. “You’ve got a plan?”

  “I do.” I closed my eyes, considering. “There’s a stream heading into the swamp, isn’t there?”

  Cassandra nodded.

  “Good,” I said. “Should do perfect. But first I need to build a boat.”

  It didn’t take a technical genius to recognize that so long as the vines had traction, they’d do us in. So I was going to have to fashion something that would clear the way for us through the swamp. It would have to be a boat to ensure proper mobility.

  First, I knew I wanted to lure them. From everything I heard, the beasts preferred a good bit of fresh blood. So I made simple clockwork blood grenades we could throw into the water to tempt the murderous goats. We’d bring the fight to us, if we could.

  My initial design for the boat was to have two rudders, equipped with repurposed scythe blades, rising just under the surface of the water to cut away any of the errant vines in our way. But cutting a path deep into the swamp was only part of the equation; I doubted that simply clearing vines would be enough to give us leverage against our foes, so I devised two separate mechanisms for the side of the boat, sticking out to the starboard and port sides.

  My thinking was this: if we were able to pinpoint a moving vine, we’d catch it—somewhat like catching an eel in the water—and hook it to the mechanism, which was a rudimentary winding gear. They could accommodate at least thirty feet of rope in my tests, and I figured that would be long enough to try and get one of those goats in range of Cassandra and some of my altered weapons.

  The boat took the most time to get right. It had to be wide and low, and since we were relying on mechanized rudders, there wasn’t any room for paddles. It took some work, and some scrounging, but at last I was able to combine a steam-powered motor with a basic pump system, allowing for both water and steam propulsion. It would be steady enough and, with the right hands, variable.

  As for weaponry, I had chemistry. It’s amazing what one can do with lime and fire, eggshells and vinegar. Before long I had quicklime and acetone, which I would put to good use.

  The villagers watched me go about my work with wonder. And while I was tired, it was easy to forget. I ate more and gathered what strength I could.

  In the space of six days I had everything in order, though I was tuckered beyond belief. Still, once the boat was finished, the majority of the town—about twenty individuals all told—came out to the barn to have a look.

  It was agreed that Clell and Mrs. Jess would come with us, considering they had the experience with firearms and both were willing to go.

  The crowd dispersed once the decisions were made, and I went about checking the vessel for the last
time. Time was wasting; Cassandra and I had other places to be, at last other places I’d hoped we’d get to.

  It was Reeves who came to me last.

  “M’dear,” she said. “You holding up?”

  “Much as I can,” I replied.

  “The leg?”

  “It hurts,” I said, reaching down and massaging the muscle beneath the scar. Sometimes it felt as raw as the day I’d been wounded.

  “It’s a gift,” Reeves said. “That wound. They’ll respect you, out there.”

  “Somehow I don’t think they respect,” I said, as kindly as I could manage. Her rheumy eyes searched mine and she looked pained.

  “They are only part of it,” Reeves said. “You know that. You feel it, too.”

  I didn’t answer. Didn’t want to answer. I’m too practical a person to heed the warnings of an old woman far past lucidity. So I gave her a nod, and thought about that feeling I hadn’t been able to shake since I got hurt. The watching. The knowing. The sense that these beasts were but part of a far greater view, of which even my mind could never comprehend.

  “Well, thank you. You didn’t have to do none of this,” she continued, starting to walk away.

  “You saved my life,” I said.

  And she shrugged in a way that said I had no idea what I was talking about.

  We pushed off on a narrow tributary that soon opened up to a southward-flowing rise. It was mid-morning by the time we left, and Cassandra was back to her quiet self. It took some work to get Clell accustomed to the steering mechanism on the boat, but once the boiler was good and hot we had no problem at all. He was a natural on a boat, his balance far better than my own.

  All was quiet but for the lapping of water and the hissing of the engine as we made our way deeper. The year had record rains, and the going was relatively easy at first.

  I didn’t think the goats would be out until it got dark.

  “Look,” Mrs. Jess said. “Up over there.”

  I followed the angle of her finger to a pair of horse skulls nailed up to a tree. They were old, by the look of them, bleached in the sun and crumbling with age.