The Weird Company

by Rawlik, Pete

  We made our way to the shadowy part of the factory floor. The shoggoths took no notice of us, and indeed had never bothered to check on their companions who had been assigned to deal with us. This lack of follow-up could be attributed to either a complete sense of confidence in their fellow, or a kind of out-of-sight-out-of-mind mentality. We had been seen, and dealt with, and were no longer a threat until we were seen again. Either way, it was a flaw in their nature that we were going to take advantage of.

  Unfortunately, fighting shoggoths isn’t like fighting people. You can’t sneak up on a shoggoth and hit a vital spot to prevent them from raising the alarm, and then move on to the next target. Killing a shoggoth, as I had learned, is messy business; now four of us were going to attempt to kill five of the creatures, and I wasn’t entirely sure that it was possible. Hartwell, who had some experience in such matters, had laid out a plan to maximize our advantages, and the impact of our assault. The core portion of the plan of attack was for Elwood to draw the attention of the monsters and once more lead them to a particular place, in this case a corner, and then step outside to safety. The others would attack from behind, cornering them and preventing them from attacking us on multiple fronts. It was a good plan, at least I thought so.

  Elwood took off at a run, moving across the factory floor as fast as he could, dodging through piles of materials and catching the attention of every shoggoth as he recited the Star Spangled Banner at the top of his lungs. Every few steps he would move outside, disappear for a second and then reappear just a few steps ahead. It was like watching a film which was jumping or missing scenes. I cracked a smile as he began adding a series of gymnastic moves to his course: jumping at a pile of material that he couldn’t possibly clear, vanishing and then reappearing on the other side, and rolling into a kind of weird tumble. It may have looked like fun but it was deadly serious, and when he cart-wheeled into the in-between my eyes caught a flash of something else in the crack, something large, with flashing teeth. When he emerged he was cut, not badly, but something had hurt him. Suddenly he wasn’t playing anymore, and as the shoggoths fell in line behind him he used his talent less and less, and for shorter distances as well. For their part the shoggoths were resorting to the standard practice of shooting tentacles at the poor man, which given their lack of communication and coordination, became something of a comedic exercise as their limbs collided with each other, and they rolled one over the other in a kind of horrific scrum. But as Elwood approached the designated corner, he vanished once more and as we tracked his trajectory we waited for him to appear, but he did not. We waited with bated breath searching the corner for him to appear, but instead the shoggoths flooded in and piled up like a derailed freight train.

  Asenath raised her hand to give the order to attack, when the most horrific and pitiful of screams broke out. Elwood had appeared, and while he was in the corner, he was a good twenty feet up the wall, and covered with blue slime and blood. At first I thought he was hanging on to a break in the wall, but then I realized there was nothing for him to hang on to, and what was keeping him in place was the fact that he had rematerialized where he shouldn’t have, and his hand was literally imbedded inside the wall. He shuddered and then went limp, and I assumed that he was in horrific agony, either from the pain of being partly encased in the wall, or from the wounds he had suffered as a result of what was most likely an attacking hound.

  The image stunned all of us, including Hartwell, and our hesitation allowed the shoggoths to react before we did. Unbound by any normal physiology, the monstrous amoeboid things slowly began creeping up the wall toward our injured ally. The image of the slimy things creeping up the wall motivated Asenath and she ordered Hartwell and me to attack.

  We rushed forward from where we were hiding, and while Hartwell and Asenath began spraying the gathered shoggoths with the blood of the Progenitors I used my preternatural strength to claw my way up the wall to where Elwood hung limp.

  I pulled at the body of our injured colleague. Our attack had drawn the attention of most of the shoggoths, but one still seemed to be intent on attacking Elwood. It streamed up the wall in great globs of slime, avoiding our attack and mounting multiple fronts as it spread out across the wall. I did my best to vanquish these attacks, but it was a losing proposition, and faced with the possibility of either Elwood or myself falling to the enemy, I did the only thing that could be done. With a swift and precise strike from one of my great claws I sliced through Elwood’s arm like a hot knife through soft butter. Elwood screamed once and then again went limp as I slung him over my shoulder and carried him to safety. I looked for blood, but there was none. The interior of the stump was devoid of flesh and bone, there was within only a kind of inky blackness that howled and smoked. Indeed from the wall where Elwood’s hand was imbedded the short stump was giving off thin wisps of smoke-like ash.

  Hartwell and Asenath were carefully using the spray guns, hitting individual targets with short controlled bursts of the stuff that sent their targets into convulsions. These shoggoths were smarter than the ones we had fought before. They created thin shields of material that could be sloughed off after it had been exposed to the doctor’s formula. They also kept dividing into more and more autonomous units, drawing our attention in more directions. We had destroyed, or incapacitated about half the total mass of shoggoths, but where there had once been five large creatures, there were now twenty or so smaller ones, and they had taken on a wide variety of horrific forms. In succession I watched Asenath kill things that looked like giant scorpions, tentacled slugs, and even a kind of horned beetle. The fact that there were no reptilian, avian, or mammalian creatures in the shoggoth repertoire did not go unnoticed, but at the time I had no inclination to ponder the meaning of such an observation.

  Hartwell and Asenath were holding their own, but their progress was slim, and with each passing moment I knew we were at risk of one of the monsters breaking through and overpowering us. Depositing Elwood in a relatively safe spot, I joined the fray, my claws cutting through the shoggoth-things and leaving a trail of parts struggling to reconnect themselves from their disrupted tissues. Gore flew about us we waded into them, and Hartwell and Asenath fell in behind me to clean up and dispatch the more mobile pieces. Working together it took only moments for us to reduce the shoggoths to little more than jellied muck quivering in the corner of the factory floor.

  Elwood was still unconscious, the wounds he had suffered from the marauding hound were bloody, but only superficial. Hartwell assured us that he would recover, albeit with the loss of his left hand. As for what had happened internally, Hartwell could not say. It was as if he was no longer made of matter, but rather filled with some weird kind of dark energy. We did our best to make him comfortable and then sat down to rest and plan our next move. Based on what we could see, we had just eliminated only about half of the shoggoths that had been present in the factory room. The others, we reasoned, must not be far, and while we had fared well with this batch, the others were more intelligent, and therefore more dangerous. Ys and Carter were still out there, but their ability to find assistance was unknown. We had to make this room defensible, and more importantly, we had to destroy the squid-like craft that had nearly been completed.

  Something large screeched and charged us; Asenath stepped into its path and with her hands performed a strange serious of motions that carved a weird semi-luminescent shape in the air. The creature slammed into it like it was made of bricks and bounced back through the room before crashing to the ground amongst the piles of raw materials. This caught the attention of the other things in the room, including the blue-skinned supervisor. It turned to look in our direction and let loose another of those strange atonal howls. In response three of the shoggoth machines stopped what they were doing and then systematically transformed into similar blue-skinned creatures.

  The other two creatures, including the one Asenath had tossed across the room, began marching toward us. As they grew closer the
y seemed to almost fall apart. With each step, small bits fell off and hit the floor, scattering like an army of rats or ants, which these small creatures bore some semblance to. In a just a few steps the giant monsters were gone, and we were faced with a wave of small creatures that were slowly but surely encircling us. Asenath moved her hands once more and enveloped us in a sphere of strange purple light. It seemed to have some impact on the creatures and while they continued to surround us, they came no closer than Asenath’s barrier.

  “Well we are going nowhere fast,” Hartwell spat.

  Asenath opened her mouth to speak but whatever she would have said was drowned out by the roar of the ship powering up. The far wall was suddenly crumbling, falling apart and revealing the grey streaked sky and the weirdly black peaks of the city that stretched unnaturally into it. The four blue-skinned shoggoths had climbed into the ship, and vanished as the hatch closed down on top of them. Hartwell made a desperate move, but the shoggoth rats countered whatever direction he shifted, and none of us could see a way around them.

  Hartwell checked his tank and nodded. “I have enough to take them out, or at least slow them down.”

  “We’re out of time!” yelled Asenath. “Do it!”

  Asenath dropped the shield, Hartwell sprayed and I bounded over the shoggoth horde as they popped and squirmed in agony. As I ran I grabbed a length of rod and with all my strength threw it at the ship. It was a futile effort. My makeshift spear arced through the air and impacted against the skin of the ship, and then rolled to the floor. The squid-like vessel slid forward and gathered speed. It reached the broken exterior wall and launched into the waiting beyond. It dropped a bit as it lost the support of the floor, but it caught the wind, as if it was somehow aerodynamic, and then soared away.

  I rushed to the edge and the others weren’t far behind me. I looked at Carter, but he shook his head. “They’re too far, and I don’t have enough power.”

  Asenath fell to her knees and stared at the ship as it flew further and further away. “Then we’ve failed, and the world is doomed.”

  “I think you may be right Kamog, but not the way you think.” It was Mister Ys that had suddenly mocked Asenath, I hadn’t seen him come into the room. “I think that Carter has found your ally, and they will gladly deal with our shoggoth problem. Unfortunately, I think, how would Hartwell phrase it? ‘The cure might be worse than the disease.’”

  CHAPTER 23

  From the Account of Robert Martin Olmstead

  “The Ulthareon”

  The air within the room was suddenly electric. A wind was howling, it had come up from nowhere, and had built into a maelstrom in a matter of moments. The storm had picked up the lighter bits of debris and created with it a miasma of danger that culminated into a sudden explosion of light and heat. The howling became a whining drone that seemed to focus on a single point that became a shimmering glow. The air wavered and then melted away, leaving a hole in reality through which something, many things, were coming through.

  It was Carter, I swear to you for a moment I saw Randolph Carter step through that gate. He was tall and lean, aged but not old, and he was holding something black and shiny that squirmed in his hands. It was Randolph Carter as he had been, a dreamer, a mystic, but a man, like any other. Then he was gone, and in his place stood Zkauba, but not the sad, divided thing that we had come to know over the last few days. There was still the air of something alien and something human, but now that seemed to be something to revel in rather than to suffer.

  He strode out of the abyss like a great Indian god. The armor, Zkauba’s armor, covered him from head to toe, and it was truly magnificent. It had the look of a kind of ceramic, bone white and glistening. There were jewels along all the surfaces, including the head which sported seven crystalline adornments. He stood on two legs and in four great arms he carried a variety of weapons, including two swords, and something that looked like a cattle prod. As he stepped through the last remaining shoggoths swarmed toward him. With a flick of his wrist those swords roared to life, their teeth spun and a weird energy sparked from them and sent arcs of blue light traveling down their lengths. Whatever that strange electricity was, the shoggoth flesh reacted poorly to it. The severed parts thrashed about uncontrollably and then seemed to bloat before collapsing in on themselves and dissolving into inanimate sludge.

  His path took him toward Asenath, and for a moment I saw those blades raise up and take a position to strike the lithe figure that was our leader, but then they paused, and that great helmet tilted in an odd manner. “Zkauba is going through a whole litany of ethical considerations in our head,” Carter informed us, “but he doesn’t seem too concerned about the issue, because after all, the shoggoth did try to eat you. That you ate it instead may be ironic, but not amoral.” He paused and then added, “Ate may be the wrong word in this context.”

  The gate swelled up once more and a wave of fur cascaded out of it. Cats. Cats of all species and sizes and colors poured through that weird doorway. Dozens of them, and they flowed like a tide around the feet of the armored Warlock of Yaddith like an army of subservient followers. The forward members spit and hissed at the few pieces of shoggoth that still remained, and this, as odd as it seems, was enough to vanquish what was left of the quivering foe. Then the army of felines scattered, they wandered across the room, some to look out the window, and some to the door where they meandered out of our sight. Others found Elwood and seemed intrigued by what had become of the boy and in particular his missing arm.

  I moved to greet our companions, but my movement was halted by a sudden wall of cats that made it plain that I was not to approach any further. It was then that I realized that the army of cats might be more of a threat to us than a form of salvation. I shuddered at the stereotype oft used in commercial advertisements of cats preferring to feast on fish, and stepped back away from the furry soldiers. Asenath stepped back as well, and soon the two of us were holding hands searching for comfort from each other as the furry sentinels took control of the room.

  Something else came through the gate; there were three of them, strange colored things that were not green, or blue, red or yellow, but rather all of these colors and none of them, for it seemed that the creatures were constantly changing hue, their very skin was unstable. When they moved, it was clear that they were cats, but they were a completely alien species, and of unearthly construction, as if a cubist painting of tigers had been brought to life. They stalked out of the gate and then leapt across the floor and took off through the gaping hole in the wall.

  The hole in the wall shimmered and then was suddenly replaced with the image of the ship soaring through the Antarctic sky. The craft cleared the mountain range and had already begun to cross the plains, heading north toward the sea. It cut through the sky like a bullet heading toward the heart of the world. It seemed beyond the reach of anything natural or human. It seemed unstoppable, but I suppose that all things seem unstoppable until the inevitable occurs.

  The three cats of unusual color appeared behind the ship, moving faster than I would have thought possible for something alive. That they were gaining on the ship seemed obvious, and the thing that was their target began swinging about in the sky trying to dodge the attacks of the trio. It reminded me of the tales that the aviators of the Great War had told of the Red Baron Manfred von Richthofen and how he would fly like a falcon through the sky at his enemies. The shoggoth ship may have been larger and more powerful, but the flying cats were faster and more agile, and they outnumbered their prey three to one.

  One of the creatures latched on to the ship and found a way to hold on, ripping chunks of the ship off with its crystalline teeth. Another hit the rear of the craft and cut into it, boring a thick hole into the engine and sending the ship sputtering out of control. It spun through the air, leaving a black trail of smoke behind it. As it fell the force of gravity accelerated its decent, and I could see a wave of heat form in front of the bow. While I couldn’t see the
occupants I knew they were trying to regain control, for the tip jerked up as it approached the ground. The ship was nearly skating across the ice which appeared to be liquefying as it passed over. The ship hit a pile of ice and bounced awkwardly, sending it rolling across the surface sending up great sprays of ice and snow that rained back down in great gouts. As it came to rest the remaining heat turned the ice soft and the ship was swallowed up into the grey slush. Even with the semi-solid water we could see the hatch of the ship fly off and the shoggoths abandon the ship. They swam through the freezing water, desperate to reach the surface, but the ice had already reformed, and with no way to gain traction they had no leverage to crack open the icy shield that had formed above them. In seconds the creatures ceased to move and became little more than frozen blemishes within the glacier.

  As the ice solidified the image ceased and we were left staring at each other, confused and relieved. Mister Ys seemed pleased with himself. “The threat is eliminated, buried under feet of ice, as if it had been there for millions of years. And it will stay there until the axis of the world shifts and the entire continent thaws. Hopefully by then, man will be more prepared to deal with what we’ve just locked away.”

  Just then the gateway burst back to life and hummed evilly as five great masses moved from the Dreamlands into the real world. They came into the room moving like predators, their cylindrical bodies horizontal to the ground, rotating clockwise with each step. Each of their five eyes were spread wide, and their wings pulsed like the crests of great lizards. As they cleared the gate they changed their orientation and rose up on their powerful lower tentacles. They strutted forward gracefully, like alien dancers. Mister Ys moved to greet them, and assumed a submissive stance. He said to us, “This is the cohort known as Ulthar, the Lord of all Felines, the Cat City. You should be on your knees.”