by Levi Black
I see it when it happens. The Man in Black stiffens at Hastur’s words, shoulders widening, and he doesn’t move, but he seems to lengthen, stretching and growing darker until all I can see is the whites of his eyes and the gleam of the low light along the edge of his red right hand and I file it away. There is something there I can possibly use.
“He comes with me.”
The Man in Black turns to me sharply and Hastur simply looks amused. “Why would I send him?”
I shrug. “You said he is yours to command. He’s a cannon. I’ve dealt with humans who capture your kind. I might need a cannon.”
Hastur and Nyarlathotep both study me with their heads tilted. “You will attack the moment you are away from my sight,” Hastur says.
“I wouldn’t think of it.”
It was absolutely my plan.
“No need to think of it.” He smiles his nicotine-tinged smile. “I’ve already thought of it.”
It’s too confident. Too cocky.
Oh no.
Light flares to my left, two dozen or more feet away. It’s a torch, coming to life. It’s stuck in the crook of one of the asylum patients’ arm, wedged in where the straitjacket wraps him tight. It’s too close to his face and I can see the skin blistering and turning red as meat on a grill.
He doesn’t seem to notice.
Instead he steps back and another torch held by another lunatic flares to life. I watch as this happens a dozen times in as many seconds until there is a line of torches held too close by mental patients. The air is full of the smell of pitch and burning human hair. When they begin to circle around I see what they are walling in with human flesh and fire.
In the center of a ring of fire held in the arms of lunatics is Daniel on his hospital bed.
46
“YOU SON OF a bitch.”
Hastur smiles.
Shit. Fuck. Shitfuck. I’d had Daniel safe, hidden away for months now. How did they find him?
I push the thought away. Right here, right now. Deal with this. How and why doesn’t matter.
All that matters is Daniel.
My feet move without me directing them, speedwalking along the outlined path toward him. Once I’m by his side I find him as I left him just a few hours ago, except somehow he seems smaller, more vulnerable out here amid the crazies, instead of in a nice, safe hospital. The machines are not there with him; a sheaf of loose cords and wires hangs from under the bedsheet where they were not brought. I touch his chest and he breathes evenly.
My hand moves to his cheek and I find the skin to be soft and some part of me that wasn’t there before (I hope it wasn’t there before. God, please don’t let this have always been a part of me) thinks that if I pushed hard enough I could sink my fingers through his skin and into the meat of his face.
I pull back.
Fuck, what is wrong with me?
Daniel’s face turns, following my fingers as they pull away.
My heart clenches, a fist nestled betwixt the sponge of my lungs.
His bottom lip trembles.
Quivers.
The thin skin is dry and even that movement makes it crack in a series of small red lines.
His mouth parts and from his throat comes the sound of a voice unused for weeks in a throat dry and abraded by a feeding tube. It’s a rasp, a hasp, a choke.
But it’s crystal clear in my ears.
“Charlie.”
Everything turns blurry as my heart convulses and my face goes hot at the sound of my name on his lips.
I want to answer, the desire of it sits in my mouth like curdled milk, clotty and solid behind my teeth, but my throat has closed.
Or it’s plugged from below by my heart being in it.
That’s a metaphor.
Daniel’s eyelids flutter.
“Char-lie.”
I sob, but no sound escapes me; nothing betrays me there to his closed eyes save the anxious rustling of the coat around me.
I touch his arm.
His eyelids crack open, fluttering like pinned butterflies, delicate and spastic, threatening to tear themselves apart. His eyes underneath are all sclerae, white as fish bellies in the night, rolled back like the eyes of a hung man.
A gleam of emerald in the dark across from him snags my eye like a barb.
“Daniel,” I breathe.
He shivers, microspasms running underneath his skin.
Emerald and crimson gleam beyond him, reading black in my peripheral where they meet.
Daniel bucks on the bed.
The Man in Black steps from the darkness as if someone has cut him from it.
And Daniel screams.
47
THE SCREAM IS long and brittle, the end of a howl.
It climbs into my ears and slices its way into my brain.
The Man in Black steps closer as the sound squeezes, pulling thin as Daniel’s lungs empty of oxygen. It dwindles, spiraling into a thread that breaks, and still Daniel stays arched, face going dark with the effort to keep on screaming, jaw knotted, veins cut in bas-relief, tendons corded and vibrating as if they will snap and furl up into their sheathes leaving him with nothing to keep his throat from collapsing inward from the weight of itself.
Panic clings to me, its arms wrapped around my chest and hanging, a monkey on my back, a millstone about my neck. My magick kicks in the white-noise adrenaline rush and jolts down my arm, scorching its way across Daniel’s skin.
He collapses, sucking in air as if he were drowning.
The Man in Black chuckles.
My hand plunges inside the coat.
I pull the Aqedah from the icy depths of the pocket as he flicks his red right hand toward Daniel. A spark of verdant magick kicks off the stone on the ring that sits on his finger, falling like an ember onto Daniel’s lips.
I lunge with the Aqedah, but the Man in Black is too fast, already snaked back beyond my reach. I step to chase him around Daniel’s bed when I hear Daniel’s voice.
It stops me where I stand.
He’s speaking, barely above a whisper.
It’s complete gibberish.
Nonsense words, syllables strung together that sound as if they are from another language altogether, all harsh and guttural, animal sounds, and curse words all tumble from his mouth.
Then the asylum patients who surround us begin speaking the same gibberish.
The exact same.
Word for word, sound for sound, all the grunts and clicks and hisses in unison like some kind of choir of ill children linked by madness.
The Man in Black’s voice crawls over it all.
“This close and the ring that holds his essence gives him a tiny sliver of himself. Imagine what it could do were you to win it from my hand.”
“I’ll cut it from your hand. I’ll take the finger it’s on,” I snarl. “Hell, I’ll hack off the whole fucking limb.”
The shimmering sound of chitin on chitin slithers around me and from somewhere behind me comes the voice of the King in Yellow. “No, you will not. If you do you forfeit the soul of your paramour and I will create him anew as one of my torchbearers.” He steps into my sight, dun-coloured poncho fluttering even though there is no breeze, and I wonder for a moment if it’s alive like the coat.
The coat trills in my skull.
I don’t know if that was a yes or a no and I don’t care.
The King in Yellow’s smile spreads wide, the teeth sharp and feral but the colour of old nicotine-tarnished Sheetrock. “The offer is simple. Go rescue my love and I will return yours. Refuse and I enslave him.”
Off to the side, Nyarlathotep smiles his shark-toothed smile.
Weeks ago, the Man in Black tried to take all of Daniel’s life force out of revenge. I stopped the Man in Black before he could drain it all; that’s why Daniel lay here on the hospital bed.
The coat trills in my head again and this time I do understand.
Yes, you helped.
What the Man in Black took b
efore we stopped him was enough to put Daniel in a coma he’s been in until now, awake but not back. I know that given the chance, the Man in Black will finish the job out of spite.
Or do worse.
I cast around for some option, some way I can get Daniel and get free.
And come up empty.
I’m in some other elder god place, nowhere to run to, nowhere to hide.
Shit and fuck. Shitfuck.
I need an idea.
Anything.
“Do you accept my offer?”
“He still comes with me,” I blurt out, pointing at the Man in Black. “I’m not leaving him out of my sight with Daniel around.”
Hastur considers this. “Very well.”
“Ashtoreth comes with me as well.”
“Why?”
“To help watch him.”
He considers this. “I will allow it.”
“I want that cage off my skinhound. He and Javier are going to stay here and watch over Daniel.” I’m not looking at Javier, but I can see him moving from foot to foot. He’s not going to want to be left behind.
Tough shit.
Hastur looks at the Man in Black. “Skinhound?”
Nyarlathotep shrugs.
“He has no skin,” Hastur says.
“I did not name him as such,” the Man in Black says.
Hastur turns back to me. “He has no skin.”
“It’s just the name for him in my head,” I say.
“You humans name things in such ridiculous ways.”
“You’re one to talk, Ramblin’ John Hastur, Yellow King of the Great Frontier, or whatever you’re titling yourself.”
“I did not name myself.”
“Who did?”
“Excuse me?” Jaundiced eyelids flutter at me like epileptic butterflies pinned to a board, still alive, still feeling pain.
The tension ratchets up in the air between us. “Who named you?”
“I, I…” He looks around. “I do not know. I have always been Hastur of the Yellow Sign.”
“Always?” I press. His lack of surety has my nose open. There is something here. Names mean so much to these beings that him not knowing where his came from might be a sign of weakness. Might be nothing, but I will take any advantage I can get. “Surely even the gods themselves have a beginning. Who first called you that?”
He looks at the Man in Black. “Who first spoke? Do you remember?”
“I was named by my father.”
“Add a hoth?” I ask.
“Azathoth.” The Man in Black’s voice is strained, tight around the words.
“Oh yeah, the crazy one. How is your pops?” I smile; I can’t help it. He doesn’t answer but his red right hand clenches by his side. To Hastur I say, “So, his daddy give you your name too?”
Hastur’s hands flutter over his yellow poncho, rippling the tatters of it like a wayward breeze. His lazy eye keeps sliding back and forth in its socket and his upper lip trembles.
“Some say the Primal Chaos is the progenitor of everything,” the Man in Black offers.
“Shamazatron is the Primal Chaos?”
“The Primal Chaos is one name for my father. Unlike shamazatron, which is not a word in any language.”
“And you’re the Crawling Chaos?”
“Yes.”
“The Primal Chaos and the Crawling Chaos?”
He tilts his head in confirmation.
“Obvious much?” I sneer. It feels good on my mouth to do it.
“Azathoth is the fountain from which this universe poured forth. The first and he shall be the last.” The Man in Black’s voice is tightly drawn again, crossing itself.
He’s really sensitive about his daddy.
I file the information away to use later.
“Enough,” the King in Yellow says. He speaks softly, almost as if he isn’t speaking to us at all. “None of this completes the task. Free my mate and I return the essence of yours.”
“How do I find her? If they hid her from you they will have her hid from me.”
The Man in Black chuckles. “Why, Former-Acolyte, that is the question indeed.”
“Surely you have something of hers. I can do a full bloodhound gang if you have a token of hers, some fetish that belongs to her.”
“I thought you would never ask.”
Jaundiced knuckles rasp as they slip under the ragged poncho and dig around. Muffled under the dry-rotted cloth comes a chiming ring, the same sound made when you run a finger around the rim of a wineglass, a drawn-out, rubberized squeak of flesh around furled and fluted stemware.
Watching him root around inside his torso sets my nerves on edge and that fucking noise drives them to jangling. The coat rustles around my legs and I know the noise is causing it actual pain because it echoes in the vertebrae at the top of my spine like misplaced acupuncture, a psychic loop of aching feedback.
The long, thin arm of the King in Yellow slides farther in until his forearm is completely inside and his biceps is pressed against his side. The shoulder joint separates, stretching and jutting under the poncho as his eyes, even the lazy one, drift to look over my head, fixated on some middle distance of concentration.
He grunts and shudders and his arm snaps between the elbow and shoulder.
It just breaks like a stalk of celery with a crunching pop and the bone inside forms a rough hinge under the skin and it slides ever farther into the depths. If it hurts he doesn’t show it past his initial grunt.
The back of my head goes all hot and prickly.
Is it dimmer in here?
After a long moment when the world around me pulses he straightens and draws his arm out. A shake and the broken bone clicks back together with a grinding noise that makes my jaw ache. He extends it and unfurls his fingers.
Resting on the palm of his bony hand, swaying ever so slightly on the uneven surface, is a jar of smoke.
48
THE JAR PULLS my mind back in memory, back in time to Meemaw Moore and her peach preserves. Every summer we would drive up and visit and she would insist that we take back a case of them. She would spend her time picking the peaches from the trees planted long ago by her husband before he’d passed and then doing whatever alchemy transformed them from ripe fruit to pungent chunks of preserves. Dad would always take them home, always insist that we open them and eat them on toast, but the flavor was sad, as if her sorrow of being left to grow old without his father had tainted the fruit, spoiling it like milk on a warm day. We never finished the first jar of any we took home and they would sit in the pantry, inducing guilt in all of us as we reached past them to choose the simple grape or strawberry jam that came from the supermarket and didn’t taste like fruit as much as a chemical equivalent but was always free of sadness and recrimination. My mother would quietly throw away the rest of them just before we would go visit again, leaving the space there on the shelf to fill again when we returned with more small jars of sour, psychically tinged fruit.
When Meemaw Moore passed on, the last of her preserves stayed in the pantry.
Last time I visited, they were still there, behind the creamed corn and the kidney beans, covered in a light dusting of time, only displaced by the accidental brushing of a knuckle that reached too far to pluck whatever sat in front of them.
The King in Yellow makes a sticky buzz noise in the back of his throat, and I’m back.
It’s a simple mason jar, fat curved glass with a cheap metal lid that screws on, a lid pocked with rust, spotted with the texture of oxidization against the dully smooth tin. The smoke inside it curls and rolls against the glass as if there was something inside the jar, something obscured by the smoke like fog will obscure that stranger walking beside a river on a chill morning, something inside moving and shifting, displacing the smoke with its presence.
Something I can’t see.
Is it invisible?
Is the smoke itself moving, somehow sentient, somehow malevolent?
Hey, lif
e is nothing but weird shit now; that isn’t the leap it would have been a few weeks ago.
“This is the only portion of her we have been able to find.” The King in Yellow holds it out to me.
I don’t want to take it. I know I have to, but the thing fills me with dread that sits in the pit of my stomach.
I reach out, wrap my fingers around the lid, and pull the jar off his palm.
It’s like picking up a cannonball.
The weight of it jerks in my grip and I fumble it. I try to grab it with my other hand too, to catch it. I didn’t expect it to have mass, smoke should be weightless, but this is solid, dense, like a jar of lead. The glass is slick on my fingertips and I get no traction and the damn thing spins out of my hands and crashes to the ground.
The sound of glass on cobblestone is a shrill scream that runs across my tightened jawline.
Glittering shards spray out, peppering the coat that has swooshed across my legs, protecting them. The shards embed in the inky surface of it like shrapnel, jutting out like sharp bits of glitter that could slice flesh as easily as a thought.
Ashtoreth gasps.
Mylendor growls.
The Man in Black chuckles.
The skinhound whines.
Javier crosses himself.
The King in Yellow doesn’t move.
And I bite back the Sorry that tries to leap from my throat.
The smoke roils around on itself and then begins to rise, expanding larger than it should, not dissipating like it should either, sinuously climbing toward my face like a cobra at the end of a flute. I watch the smoke and I know that when it gets high enough it will crawl into my lungs.
It’s just smoke.
It’s just smoke.
It’s just smoke.
The mantra barely keeps the staticky fuzz of anxiety at bay in the back of my skull.
“Free my skinhound,” I command as the smoke crosses my waistline.
The King in Yellow nods at something behind me. When the Man in Black snaps the raw fingers of his red right hand I feel it across the skin of my brow. The cage mask clanks open and the skinhound shakes his head violently, tossing the damned thing away into the gloom that lies past us.
The smoke is at my chest.
I make my words a command, backed by the crackle of the magick in my veins. “You and Javier guard Daniel. Stay with him until I return, and repel anyone or anything that tries to harm him.”