by Harvey Click
“So your filthy damned Philosopher knew this was going to happen,” Dexter said. “The son of a bitch planned to put us in this mess. I guess you did too.”
Grimes didn’t answer. Dexter looked around for his flashlight, but it apparently had been swallowed. The faint light came from the glowing walls. He tried to sit up but had no strength, and the mattress of ectoplasm felt comfortable. He shut his eyes and dreamed that he was burrowing through an eternity of dirt.
“I’m about done in,” he said.
“Zyx is sapping our strength,” Grimes said, his voice weak and far away. “His sentience is sinking into mine. I could sleep as long as I’ve lived, and I daresay that’s no cat-nap. We must try to resist.”
Dexter tried to burrow up out of the dream-dirt, but hell was a deep place. He lifted eyelids heavy as rocks. He tried to stand but couldn’t budge.
“I had dreams about this place when I was a little kid,” he said. “I remember them very clearly now. I guess Mr. Grinchin was showing me my glorious future.”
“Mr. Grinchin?” Grimes asked.
“Yeah. He’s a wizard I used to dream about.”
“Ghrensken is one of the Philosopher’s secret names,” Grimes said. “It took me many decades of hard work to learn that particular name, and now you tell me that he revealed it to you when you were just a child.”
“Well, wasn’t I the lucky one?” Dexter said. His eyelids sank shut. “What do we do now?” he asked.
“I suppose we’ll die,” Grimes said. “We’ve failed at our little task, and even Mr. Grinchin can’t help us now.”
Death sounded sweet, like a lovely old song playing in Dexter’s head.
“We can’t die yet,” he said. “Mary needs us.” It was an effort to remember her name.
“Then rouse yourself, Dr. Radcliff. All those years of training . . .”
Dexter forced his eyes open and saw a huge white snake with red eyes slithering down the chimney above Grimes’ head.
“Watch out,” he called weakly.
Grimes opened his eyes but didn’t move. A long dark tongue slid out and tasted the bonnet of netting tied on his head. The thing hissed and darted back up the chimney.
“Zyx is trying to decide what to do with us,” Grimes said. “He needs to get this poison out of his system, and there’s only one logical solution. I daresay what he—”
Before he could finish his sentence, the floor sucked them both down. Dexter slid through suffocating darkness and suddenly was somersaulting through chilly night air. He landed feet-first in the cold lake and thrashed his way to the surface.
The dreamy lethargy was gone. He was wide awake now and pumped with adrenaline and fear. He was close to the tower—but it wasn’t exactly a tower.
Grimes burst to the surface beside him with his glasses shoved against his forehead.
“It excreted us,” he gasped. “The only logical solution.”
He adjusted his glasses and saw what Dexter was staring at.
The head of the monster wasn’t fully formed yet; undigested stones were still embedded like dark moles in the glistening white face. Beneath the head writhed a massive serpentine body plated with thick scales, and two rows of long tentacles waved in the foggy air like the legs of a centipede. The lake churned furiously around it.
“Leviathan,” Grimes said. “Look, you can see its teeth forming.”
Dexter saw jagged stones melting into fangs. Two round rocks glowed above them like red lanterns.
“Mary’s in there,” he said.
“We can’t help her,” Grimes yelled. He was trying to swim away, but the current kept pulling him back.
“Look there,” Dexter said.
A rowboat was bobbing in the mist halfway between them and the shore. There seemed to be two people in it.
“Must be a couple of Letha’s goons,” Grimes said. “Better steer clear of them, they’re probably armed. My netting has washed off, do you still have yours?”
Dexter checked. The bonnet was gone, but the tunic was still there inside his robe.
He shouted Mary’s name and thought he heard her answer from the rowboat, but then the monster opened its mouth and roared like a hundred tubas. It twisted its scaly body and peered down at them.
“I think Mary’s in that boat,” he yelled.
“Shut up and swim!” Grimes yelled as they fought the waves trying to pull them toward the tower.
An enormous tentacle dropped out of the fog above his head. Two eyes and a mouth opened in its bulbous tip.
“Look out!” Dexter yelled.
A black tongue wrapped itself around Grimes and lifted him into the tentacle’s fanged maw.
Lips shut and seemed to smile. Dexter saw the shape of Grimes’ body sliding through the snaky appendage up toward the belly of the towering monster.
***
A tentacle lashed up from the lake. Ryver shot it with his revolver, and it slid back into the water.
“It don’t like them bullets ‘cause they’re made out of something called cabiric alloy,” he said. “The Philosopher told Professor Krickbaum how to make it.”
He stuck the gun in his belt and rowed out of the thing’s reach. He had to do that every few minutes because the current kept sucking them back.
“Now ain’t that something, Pocahontas, you and me working for the same man.”
Pocahontas didn’t say anything. She sat hog-tied with rope on the wet bottom of the boat, and he wondered again why she was wearing such a strange old dress.
“We’re all working for the Man,” Ryver said. “Which one it is don’t make much difference. One of ‘em starts gunning for you, then you team up with another. That’s what I did.”
He bit off a piece of plug and stared at the serpent that used to be a tower. It wasn’t finished yet, stones still stuck in its ugly face like pimples. It twisted and tottered, trying to pull itself free from the bottom of the lake or maybe just getting rid of the kinks in its back. Two rows of long tentacles writhed like pissed-off rattlesnakes on its spiked underbelly.
“Spent my whole damn life working for that thing,” he said. “Come payday, it sent a bunch of punks to kill me. Well, they’re plenty dead now.” He opened the loading gate of his Peacemaker and ejected the spent cartridge. “You don’t talk much, do ya, Pocahontas? I like that about you.”
The thing let out a trumpet shriek followed by a rumble of thunder. It leaned forward and stared at them with fiery eyes that pierced the fog. Then it did something strange. It bit off the end of one of its tentacles and chewed on it a while. It spit the cud into another tentacle and played with it like a wad of clay. Then it reached down and placed the clay gently in the water.
“Cypher was working for the Man too, a man called Zyx,” Ryver said. “Reckon today Cypher got his pay.”
He was talking more than he liked, but whenever he shut up he could feel Zyx trying to read his thoughts and find out why he was floating around in the lake like a damn fool. Best way to confuse him was to keep talking.
“Professor Krickbaum’s back there in that little hilljack town called Pallas,” he said. “He’s working for the same man you and me work for, trying to keep the natives quiet. They’re all sitting in their tarpaper shacks thinking Athena is talking to them on their TV sets.” He spit in the lake. “Tell ya something, one thing I’m good and fed up with is all these Goddamn gods and godlets.”
Pocahontas still didn’t say anything. She was looking back at the inflated rubber boat tied behind the rowboat, probably wondering what it was for.
“Got me a .50-caliber Godzilla killer mounted on the back of my truck with a bucketful of cabiric-alloy bullets,” he said. “It’s parked right there at the shore, fog turns just right you can see it. Philosopher gimme a few good men, and they’re waiting back there to use it when the time comes.”
It was a lie, but he wanted Zyx to believe it. Nobody on earth had enough cabiric-alloy to cast a bucketful of .50-caliber bullets, and
the only cabiric cartridges left were the six .45s in his revolver and seven more in his rifle. Those few good men that the Philosopher gave him weren’t so good after all, and now they were all good and dead. Just about everything that could go wrong already had, and the night wasn’t over.
“All we gotta do is wait till the Philosopher says it’s time,” he said. “He knows what’s going on inside that thing ‘cause Michael Grimes is in there and so’s your boyfriend. They’re both working for the Man too, but I sure as hell wouldn’t want their job. They’re stuck inside that lizard gullet wearing a little bit of poison so the Philosopher can watch what’s going on through their eyes and help me kill it. It’s all part of the plan.”
Someone out there near the tower yelled, “Mary!” and she yelled, “Dexter!” before Ryver could clamp his hand over her mouth.
“Shut up,” he said. “Here, I’ll help you.” He shoved a big wet rag in her mouth while the tower trumpeted like a mad elephant. “Your boyfriend comes swimming up, I’m gonna have to kill him. The Philosopher don’t want no complications.”
He sat with his gun and machete and watched for her boyfriend. Pretty soon he thrust up for air fifty feet away and dipped back in. Pocahontas saw him too and flopped around on the bottom of the boat, trying to knock Ryver overboard.
He turned his gun on her and said, “Settle down there. I don’t need you all that bad.”
He chewed and watched. Hell of a long time to stay down if you were swimming and out of breath. The boat suddenly tilted, and a naked man reached up and tried to pull him into the lake.
Almost a man, but not quite.
It had a white fish-face and a round sucker-mouth filled with sharp teeth. Ryver chopped off the snake-fingered hand with his machete, and it fell into the boat and started crawling up the Indian’s leg like an octopus while the rest of the body slithered swiftly aboard.
Ryver put a .45 slug of magic metal between its black fish-eyes, and it fell backwards into the bow. He shot it a couple more times to be sure, then knelt down to examine it.
It was just human enough to give him the willies, bald head with holes where the ears ought to be and two more holes where the nose should be, hairless white torso with no nipples or navel and nothing but a thin stream of pus squirting out where the pecker should be.
Christsake, Ryver thought. So that was what the tower had been doing when it bit off the end of its tentacle. It was molding a man-thing out of its own flesh.
The round sucker-mouth puckered shut like an asshole, but the boneless arms and legs still hadn’t figured out they were dead. They kept squirming around in the bow like huge earthworms.
He kicked it overboard and reached up the Indian’s dress to pull the octopus-hand out of her crotch. He slung it away and sat down, sick to his stomach.
“Hell of a thing,” he said.
He spit into the lake and looked back at the serpent. The rocks in its face were melting like lava, and it seemed to be working the kinks out of its back. Soon it would break loose from the lake bed.
“Okay, Pocahontas, it’s time to go to work,” he said. “Philosopher said when its face is done getting ugly, then it’s ready to go for a swim. Reckon it can’t get too much uglier.”
He stashed his revolver in the bow next to his rifle and got out the orange life jacket. She kicked and jerked as he strapped it around her, and for a little woman tied up she did pretty well. He pulled the rubber boat up close and lifted her into it.
“See what it’s like working for the Man?” he said. “If he gives you a day off to go fishing, you end up being the bait.”
He tried to chuckle and coughed instead; the cold fog was getting into his lungs. He sat down and watched the lifeboat bob up and down, but he kept seeing the fish-man in his mind, Cypher-man, Zyx-man, worm-man, hairless, cockless and ball-less, even less like a man than those New Society worm-boys. This was the kind of trash he’d been working for his whole life. What a waste.
Goddamn cold out here. He pulled his coat tighter, but it was too damp to help. The boat drifted into a patch of fog so thick he couldn’t see anything, but he felt the monster’s eyes looking right through it. Zyx was trying to plant words in his brain, and they weren’t anything he wanted to listen to.
“I know you, Jeremiah Ring, and you know me,” it said. “You looked for me your whole life. I’m what you’ve always loved, and you love me now.”
“Bullshit,” Ryver said.
Too damn quiet in this fog, nothing to drown out that voice like a hammer pounding nails into his skull. He turned up his collar and shivered.
“You pursued me in the desert and the wilderness, in mine shafts and caves,” the voice said. “You looked for me in blazing gun muzzles and bleeding bullet holes and the eyes of dying men. You sought me in the flames of a thousand campfires. Well, here I am, Jeremiah Ring. Are you afraid to look at me now?”
Two red coals boiled the fog away. Ryver felt them trying to read his mind, but he knew how to block his thoughts. The eyes could talk all they wanted, but they weren’t going to hear his secrets.
“I devoured Cypher,” Zyx said. “What are you beside him, Jeremiah Ring? You’re a morsel beside a feast. But I hunger for each scrap of sour meat wrapped around your rotten bones, and soon I shall have my supper.”
Blazing red eyes bored into his brain like augers, but Ryver didn’t let them find anything there worth finding.
“I know things you’ve forgotten, Jeremiah Ring, and things you’ve tried to forget. I know the sounds of women screaming and children crying and the name of every man you killed.”
Ryver felt his past moving through him like a bad dream where he felt every bullet and blade and wire tearing through the flesh of every person he’d ever killed. He pulled the rubber boat alongside his and stared down at Bitter Ember.
“I show you the future, Jeremiah Ring. I call it the New Society. It’s a world you’ve helped me build.”
Ryver saw a world filled with worm-white people. They lived in houses and apartments like normal people, but they weren’t. They held jobs and served on school boards and won elections, but at night when no one was looking they squirmed into holes in the ground like night crawlers and did things you didn’t want to see.
“The future is yours, Jeremiah Ring. You’re one tongue of the great fire that comes to wash the world.”
The tower leaned down and breathed a sheet of flame over the water. Ryver saw ruin and carnage, not just five crosses behind his charred childhood home but billions of seared corpses and countless cities of incinerated homes. But the worm people had burrowed into the dirt and were safe. They were waiting to emerge after the fires had cleansed the earth.
He watched Bitter Ember bobbing up and down in the lifeboat like a baby in its cradle. He remembered hiding up a hillside and watching her father cut her out of her mother’s belly, and he could have killed the baby and her father then but he didn’t because he remembered when his sister Sarah was born. He remembered a time years later in the moonlight in San Antonio when Bitter took out the nerve behind his eye, and he could have killed her then but she was the second-most beautiful child he’d ever seen so he let her live.
He leaned over the side of his boat and tried to remember how people talked to each other, but he’d never done much of that.
“All the things I could tell you,” he said. “I had a sister once named Sarah. She had long blonde hair, you shoulda seen it. The bastards burnt her up like a piece of kindling. Christsake, it’s been a long time.”
But he could see by her face that the Indian didn’t care. Some bastard had killed her family too and burned her home.
“Forget the girl, Jeremiah Ring,” the voice said. “I’m the one you love. You sought me in a thousand campfires, so join me now as a dried-up twig joins the great inferno called the beginning and the end of time. This is what you want.”
Ryver sent a thick brown stream of tobacco juice into the water. Goddamn snake could talk all it
wanted, there was work to be done. It was going to break free any minute now, jerking around in the stinking lake like a fat white prick in a cheap whorehouse. Time to cut Pocahontas loose and row to shore.
As he raised his machete to hack the rope, something reached out of the water and pulled him overboard.
***
Mary watched Ryver wrestle with something in the lake for a long time before she could see that the something was Dexter, and then she wished it were anyone or anything else because Ryver’s enemies never lived long. But Dexter had a dagger, and he used it fast and often. Blood swirled in the water, and at last Ryver sank beneath a dark red stain.
Dexter clambered aboard the rowboat, coughing and panting. He hauled in Mary’s rubber boat and cut the rope that bound her. He was trying to untangle it when she saw Ryver’s face peering up over the far side of the rowboat. She couldn’t yell with the rag stuffed in her mouth, but she warned Dexter with her eyes, and he spun around and ducked the animate wire streaking toward him. Then he moved so fast that she couldn’t see what he was doing, but Ryver howled and fell back into the lake.
Dexter picked up something from the bottom of the boat and hurled it into the fog. It was Ryver’s hand, still clutching his wire.
Mary got free of the rope and pulled off the life jacket. It was too heavy to save anyone from drowning, probably weighted with lead to make sure she’d sink if she fell overboard. She grabbed Dexter’s hand, and he helped her into the rowboat.
“Thank God, you’re alive,” she said. “Where’s Grimes?”
“He’s dead. You okay?”
“I’ll live,” she said. “What about you?”
“I’m okay,” Dexter said. He sat down and started rowing. “What was Ryver doing here?”
“I guess he was planning to shoot that thing while it chased me around for dinner,” she said. “He said he’s got some men waiting on shore with a big gun.”
Dexter glanced at the tower and said, “It better be damn big.”