Swords v. Cthulhu

by Jesse Bullington

  A figure in red-lacquered armor stepped over Inochinomi. Squatted low. Hair wild. Smiled with her uncle’s broad smile.

  “Inochan,” the woman said. “You’re with me now. Good morning!”

  “Mother,” Inochinomi said. Like a curse. Takeda Yonomi.

  Her mother held the other end of the rope that bound her. She yanked Inochinomi up to a sitting position. Mother bent over daughter, face close. The unholy monotone continued, a slow heartbeat.

  “You left us,” Inochinomi said.

  “I swore I’d come back for you. Mother keeps her promises!”

  “You came back to kill me.”

  “To kill you?” Her mother’s brow furrowed. “Never! Dear Inochinomi, daughter of my womb and breast, how could you even think such a thing?”

  “You killed everyone! Sent assassins after me, and that giant hell-beast!”

  “Assassins? Beast? Oh! You mean my sons!” She laughed.

  “Your sons?” Inochinomi felt the blood drain from her face.

  “Inochan, meet your half brothers,” her mother said with obvious pride. She gestured behind her. “You can’t see Little Brother, of course. He’s stuck halfway between worlds, but that will change. Soon!”

  Inochinomi recoiled. Tried to slow her panicked breathing, to calm her racing heart.

  Her mother leaned forward and grasped the back of Inochinomi’s head with subtle strength. Their foreheads nearly touched. Mother’s pupils half-hid muddy irises. Her armor had the bite of stale sweat.

  “Inochan, Inochan,” she said, wide eyes filling with tears. “How I love you.” Her grip on her daughter’s hair tightened painfully.

  “Inochinomi, Daughter,” she whispered. “You’re getting married today! And not to a mere man, but to a great kami, one older, more powerful than Amida and Amaterasu!”

  Repulsion, fear, anger exploded within Inochinomi. She aimed the crown of her head into her mother’s nose and launched herself forward. They fell from the veranda to the courtyard. Her mother, still gripping Inochinomi’s hair, twisted in mid-air so that Inochinomi took the fall, landing on her back. The closest demon shifted its position, continued its drone.

  Yonomi landed with one foot on each side of Inochinomi. Her mother leaned over her, blood dripping from her nose onto Inochinomi’s face.

  “Oh, that’s my daughter!” She laughed again. “My lover will be so delighted!” In spite of Inochinomi’s panicked struggle, Yonomi grabbed her daughter with inhuman strength.

  “My darling little child,” her mother said. She carried Inochinomi back into the worship hall, a mother carrying a child throwing a tantrum. “It’s all right. You don’t know anything yet. I didn’t understand, and I summoned him, offered my body to him.”

  Yonomi shuddered, sighed. “Such pleasure,” she breathed. “Such pain. Unfortunately, I’m done now, Inochan. I started too late… But you! You’re still young. You could raise an army. He —” she motioned her head toward the altar “— requires consorts to seed the world with his children. Maybe someday he’ll come all the way through himself. But until then, you could unite and rule Nippon under the Takeda banner!”

  Yonomi dropped Inochinomi on the floor before the golden statue of Amida. Her mother threw the rope over a ceiling beam. Pulled on the rope, raising Inochinomi painfully by her wrists. Tied the other end to a support column. Inochinomi stood before the altar, stretched toward heaven, like an offering.

  “The children grow fast,” her mother said. “Little Brother grew up fastest of all! Don’t worry, we’ll find other consorts to help you. You’ll birth a swarm in no time.”

  Her uncle’s worship hall had transformed into a temple of nightmares. The dying sunlight poured blood-red into the room. On the floor, a series of calligraphic circles. Old Hànzì from China. Sanskrit from further ago still. Strange symbols with animal heads. Staring at them brought vertigo. The statue of Amida wore Yonomi’s brother’s blood. Blackened cheek. Splatter across its chest, like a sash. Disturbing scripts appeared to crawl across its face and hands and feet. No longer serene. Tortured.

  She turned away from the horror. Her hideous half brothers prayed behind her in the courtyard. Her weapons lay heartbreakingly close, on the veranda. Her mother meditated within a smaller circle. Knelt over burning incense. Cupped the smoke with her hands. Drew it toward her face. Inochinomi inhaled a thread of the bitter smoke. Her head spun, and the room seemed to expand and contract at the same time.

  The largest circle contained only Inochinomi and the bloody Buddha. Animal terror hovered on the edges of Inochinomi’s mind.

  Breathe. A strand of smoke snaked past her face. Hold. When it moved away, she breathed again. She all but hung from the ceiling. But her feet were free. She could step, hop.

  Her mother began to chant, eyes closed, face ecstatic. Liquid, hissing syllables rose above the bass pulse from the courtyard. Together they summoned and seduced. Inochinomi’s heart beat faster. Blood in her head and groin throbbed. She spun to face the statue.

  Under its carved wooden robes, Amida’s skin began to ripple. The torso expanded and contracted. Yonomi’s voice crescendoed.

  The not-Buddha opened its eyes. The Void stared out at her.

  Inochinomi stared back. She could not look away.

  “Namu Amida Butsu,” she said. A eulogy.

  There was no past, no future. There was only this moment, a rope, and her enemies.

  She turned, took two short steps, and launched herself into the air above her mother. Seizing the rope above her bindings, she swung back around. At the end of the rope’s arc, she hooked the statue’s head with her feet. Pulled herself closer. Gripped the idol powerfully with her thighs. If she could, she would smother it. Crush it to dust.

  She heaved it off the altar. The hollow statue lifted with surprising ease. But when she started her backward swing, its weight yanked her down. Rope bit into her wrists. Wrenched her shoulders.

  She dragged the defiled idol into her mother. It scraped within that smaller circle. The statue fell forward into Yonomi’s entranced embrace. Her mother lay back. Wrapped her legs around it. Arching into it. Inochinomi looked away.

  Suddenly, bright flashes lit the darkened hall like multicolored lightning. Explosive pops and cracks in the courtyard. The battle cries of peasants. Acrid gunpowder smell.

  Voices. “I understand. Cut her down and untie her.” Mizuko issued commands. A middle-aged peasant man cut her rope with a sickle. Worked at her knot. Leapt into the courtyard, yelling, waving his sickle.

  “Samurai, my people are dying,” Mizuko said. “If I bring the great demon fully into this world, can you kill him?”

  No apology. No gratitude. Only this battle. Inochinomi rubbed her wrists.

  “I think so,” Inochinomi said. She retrieved her weapons. Stood on the veranda, between what remained of Yonomi and the battle. “But what about my mother? She stopped chanting, but —”

  “No time!” Mizuko shouted. She clasped bone and claw between flat palms. Beads of blood dripped along the rosary. In the courtyard, invisible tentacles tore a farmer in half. The man who had helped cut Inochinomi down lay crushed, chest flattened under an invisible foot.

  Inochinomi cleared her mind.

  Mizuko began her incantation. The air shimmered. The louder she chanted, the more the hell-beast solidified. It turned to face them.

  From that giant abomination sprouted a hideous version of her uncle’s face. Her mother’s face. Her own face. It bellowed. Charged them. Stampeded peasant defenders and one of its masked, devilish brothers. The earth shook.

  There was only her breath. Her enemy. Her arrow. Time stopped.

  Inochinomi let the arrow fly. It flew into that tunnel of a mouth. The beast stumbled to a stop. A shriek.

  “Mother,” it gurgled. “Father!” Barely words.

  A second shot to its left eye. She dropped her bow. Leapt in with her naginata.

  “Yog Sothoth,” it shrieked. “Help!”

/>   She butchered the beast. Took her time.

  Mizuko called for her. Inochinomi climbed back up the temple steps.

  The idol was gone. Her mother wrapped her arms and legs around a statue-shaped nothingness. Deeper and darker than the blackness between the stars.

  It called to Inochinomi. Seductive. She took a step forward.

  Then Mizuko’s cold hand grasped hers. Firm. Inochinomi closed her eyes, returned the grip.

  More fireworks exploded from somewhere behind them. Their world flickered as the Void collapsed in on itself. Her mother lay still. Her face frozen. In extreme pleasure. And pain.

  “She had no more life to give,” Mizuko said. She nudged the frozen corpse with her foot. “Just her own.”

  Inochinomi turned her back on her mother’s corpse. Still held Mizuko’s hand. Rainbow sparks poured into the courtyard.

  Dan no Uchi burned. It had been an ugly village, but it died beautifully.

  For Inochinomi, there was only this moment.

  St. Baboloki’s Hymn for Lost Girls

  L. Lark

  The flowers come first, and then the monster.

  This is the first thing Naledi is taught, even before her mother’s name. Four days after her birth, Naledi is carried to the mission church beyond the grove of marula trees. Young monkeys watch from low branches, cheeks stuffed with fruit. The church has battered white walls and a stained-glass window above the pulpit. A bare nail juts from the place where a crucifix once hung.

  Ona, Naledi’s mother, drips rainwater onto Naledi’s eyes and tongue through a root, singing the hymns of St. Baboloki and the high god Midomi. She uses a cactus barb to prick Naledi’s finger and smear a dollop of blood onto the white altar cloth. It spreads through the fibers in the shape of a moth.

  Ona wraps her palm around Naledi’s small foot.

  “I hope you never see the flowers,” she says, while Naledi’s laughter bounces against the rafters.

  Naledi grows too quickly for her skin. By the time she is thirteen, she can easily pluck hairs from the heads of the men of her village, but her body feels tight and too warm. Even her hair seems to grow in every direction, reaching like the limbs of a skeleton tree. Naledi’s size makes her feel formidable, even when migrating giants appear on the low plains. Once, she swung her knobkerrie at a bull elephant positioned between her and the well.

  Naledi does not remember her father. Her mother claims she has none.

  “I swallowed the seed of an ebony tree and you grew inside me. I carved your club from its branches. You and the knobkerrie were born together,” Ona says, showing Naledi how to polish the wood with palm oil. Ona teaches her how to fish and weave a basket and interpret the warning huffs of baboons, but Naledi speaks to the insects all on her own.

  “Little darling,” Naledi says to a bee, running her index finger over its honey-yellow tuft. Static bounces between them. “Why do you sing so loudly today?”

  Naledi is tending to the nets gathering tilapia in the river. The water is thick and filled with plumes of dust, but spiked dorsal fins carve through the current. Bees zigzag between the tall grasses.

  “We can finally smell the flowers,” the bee says, and flies from Naledi’s palm.

  The desert has spread to the edge of their village. Naledi can see a sharp designation in the ground where the water dries out, green and gold, like a world divided. Naledi does not venture into the desert. Its sky is low and colorless, and the insects are too quiet. There are centipedes beneath the rocks, but they only whisper soon soon soon.

  In the orange fog of June, Ona wanders into the dunes and does not return. Naledi waits with her toes cresting the hard line of sand, but her mother does not reappear. Ona’s husband joins Naledi at the village edge, humming the song of St. Anthony, patron of lost things. After four days, Naledi realizes she will be alone forever.

  Naledi flees into the forest. Overhead, monkeys toss fruit pits through drying leaves. She has heard the hymns of St. Baboloki sung by white missionaries, smashing mosquitoes against their arms, but Naledi has never spoken their words herself. She finds a quiet space beneath the ebony tree, and uses the knots in its trunk to guide her prayers like rosary beads.

  “Don’t cry, don’t cry,” a butterfly sings above Naledi’s head. “Your mother will be spared.”

  The following day, the flowers come.

  The flowers are hardly the width of Naledi’s palm. She is learning how to pluck the feathers from a guinea fowl when they arrive. The midday sun has reappeared between low swaths of clouds, and the insects are warming themselves on exposed rockbed.

  “What’s that?” Naledi asks, pointing to the red blossom atop her aunt’s thatched roof. Thaney is twenty. She does not have a husband, and seems to mistrust the men who bring her salted meat in leaf wraps. Once, Ona attempted to explain Thaney’s curse, but Naledi had been distracted by flies singing a conquest ballad over Ona’s beer jugs.

  Thaney has cropped hair and three fingers on her left hand. Ripped away by a hyena, she claims, but Naledi watches Thaney sloppily sever the head of a bird and thinks otherwise. At times Thaney’s shadow appears as that of an enormous dog.

  “You’ve been practicing with your knobkerrie?” Thaney asks, without looking to see what Naledi is indicating. This is normal. Naledi thinks that her gift of speech with insects does not extend to human beings. Words seem to fall from her mouth garbled.

  “No,” Naledi says, because it is the truth. She has no idea what Thaney hears instead.

  “That’s good, Nal. Finish with this bird and have some figs by the river.”

  Naledi does, and takes the knobkerrie with her. It is a slender rod topped by a knob of ebony. Naledi has only ever used it to slaughter her aunt’s birds, but the right strike can fracture a man’s skull.

  “Why do you hide your face?” a butterfly asks, landing on a reed by Naledi’s side. Its antennae stretch toward Naledi, as she presses her feet into mud. Flower bulbs are pushing through the soil, but Naledi cannot see the scarlet of their petals yet. Her heart feels like a knob of rotting fruit.

  “My mother is gone.”

  “We told you, she is safe. The Adze will be with us soon.”

  “What is the Adze?” Naledi asks, but the butterfly is captured by a draft and flung into the scrublands.

  “Wait,” Naledi calls, but nothing responds. She can smell men returning from the plains with slaughtered springbok on their backs. It is a day like any other day, but her mother is missing, and the earth feels like it is bubbling with pressure, like a vein.

  Naledi uses the end of her club to carve an X into the mud. Around her lines, the new plants quiver, but none sink back into the earth.

  From the distance, Thaney calls Naledi’s name over the wind. By the time Naledi arrives home, flowers are blooming across their village like a flood.

  Thaney sacrifices one of the birds that evening and spreads its blood over the door of their home. Naledi goes hungry, picking at strands of cooked pumpkin. A fly sticks to pulverized vegetable matter on their tabletop, but is too panicked to respond to Naledi’s questions.

  “Stop buzzing, girl. I know your mother warned you not to speak to things that can’t answer back. You should be praying.”

  “I did pray. When I pray, nothing talks back,” Naledi says, and Thaney stares as if Naledi has spoken a foreign language.

  Naledi’s mother warned her of no such thing. Naledi’s mother had been able to tell the week’s weather by the flight pattern of pied crows over the field. Her mother had once transformed into a flock of sparrows to avoid an angry buffalo rooting through their garden.

  “What is the Adze?” Naledi asks, scraping a tendril of pumpkin from beneath her thumbnail.

  “Did you hear that word from one of the men? I’ve told you not to follow them into the bush anymore. It’s old hunters’ talk. There were other gods, before the saints came. To speak their names now is blasphemy. Eat your food,” Thaney says, although they have no mor
e food.

  In the village it is always hot. When Naledi wakes the next morning, her sweat leaves an outline of her body in the sheets. She had been dreaming of a single point of light weaving between trees. Outside, crocodiles belch up the day’s first meal. The breeze smells of stomach acid.

  Naledi leaves the latrine to discover flowers are sprouting from cracks in the earth. Petals drop from tree branches. Blossoms are stacked atop other plants like a conquering army. The neighbors are standing in the path leading to their home, knee-deep in red. Their goats seem unfazed.

  Thaney emerges from the house, carrying Naledi’s knobkerrie. She is wearing a white dress that ignites in the sun.

  “Have you prayed today, Nal?” Thaney says, swinging her eyes back and forth, like a hunter who has heard a snap in the darkness. She holds the knobkerrie toward Naledi, and Naledi’s hand reaches out unbidden. “Go to the church where your mother baptized you. Spill some blood for Baboloki.”

  Naledi stumbles onto the trail that connects their home to the mission church. The path is obscured by flowers so bright they seem to exude heat. The people of the village line Naledi’s trail, hands flattened across their brows, squinting into the vast plane of opened blossoms.

  The chapel is, for the most part, unused, and blockaded by a sheet of climbing vines. Once, a reliquary containing St. Baboloki’s molars had been tucked into the niche above the altar. The crucifix and the relics are gone now, and Naledi does not know if the ground remains sacred with the source of its power missing.

  Naledi pushes in the door with her shoulder, remembering that curses are always transferred through the palm. Inside, a man is seated in the northeastern pew, curved forward piously. He wears a pith helmet like the white men on the coast, but his skin is dark like the sky after lightning.

  He does not unfold when Naledi takes a step into the building. The chute of light from the open door halves the interior of the chapel. She moves sideways into the darkness.