Black Goat Blues

by Levi Black

  61

  HE’S GOING AFTER Daniel.

  His wink tells me that.

  I throw my magick into my scream and wish myself after him as violently as I can.

  And nothing happens.

  My magick simply surges inside my chest and roils there, unable to connect with the torc that’s …

  My fingers touch my throat.

  The torc is gone.

  A sound makes me turn.

  Ashtoreth stands there, free and crying, oily tears slickening her cheeks. “I’m sorry, Charlie…”

  In her hand is my torc.

  What the hell?

  “How are you free?”

  “Charlie…”

  The Man in Black freed himself. Now here is Ashtoreth, free and holding the thing I need to go after him.

  “Answer my fucking question, Ashtoreth.”

  Her head drops to her chest. “Nyarlathotep freed me once he broke the spell that shackled him. It took time, even for him. They know what they are doing here…”

  My next words spit so hard they make my mouth hurt.

  “What did you do?”

  “He made me…”

  Her betrayal hits me like a hammer. Every inch of my skin goes cold with it and my magick turns to ashes in my mouth. There is a circle around my vision, a haze on the edges, and the whole world is on the other side of it. I realize I am holding the shotgun still and it is so heavy I let it fall to only one hand, the barrel clattering against the ground. It drags against my arm as I walk slowly around the guttering fire pit. Ashtoreth reaches toward me as I draw near, but I turn my shoulder to her, my face away, and move past, dragging the gun as I go.

  When I reach the glass box on the table, my fingers move on their own and fumble the pin from the latch.

  The coat surges out, flinging the lid back, and slithers over me, wrapping itself around me.

  My head fills with its song as it flutters and rustles over me, covering me in warmth.

  It’s okay. It’s all right. We’re back.

  I lift the lapel and push the gun under it. The coat takes it eagerly, storing it away inside itself like it used to do with Oathbreaker.

  “Charlie…”

  I ignore her and turn away. I can’t with her, not yet. I have something I have to do. I would have run after the Man in Black, but now that I’ve been stopped I realize I have to clean this up.

  Shub Niggurath blinks up at me from under her horned brow. Her eyes are shaped like the goat she is named after, but the iris and the pupil are strangely human. I don’t focus on anything but her eye, ignoring the black fur, the leaking teats, the gaping wound, the gore and ichor and sickly-sweet stench of her, just the eye, peering into her and seeing who and what she is.

  Mother.

  Like that we are connected, not deeply, but still sharing … something.

  Warmth leaks from the gash that yawns in her chest, the wound open and empty. She is dying. She won’t bear another offspring in this form on this plane, but she is still an engine of creation, a goddess, and even a wound as great as the one she suffers will take her a long time to die from. And she is suffering from it; I can feel the pain of it through our connection, pulsing between the meat and the skin of me. She hurts. She has been hurting, trapped here for a long, long time, at the hands of Ephraim. Knowledge passes between us and I know that before Ephraim it was his father and before that it was his grandfather who held her captive and took her young and made them so much meat for lowly humans to consume.

  She wants nothing more than to be free from this bondage.

  My hand slides into the pocket of the coat and my Mark crackles as it finds the handle of the Aqedah.

  Gently, I lift the chin of the Black Goat of the Woods with a Thousand Young, raising it until I can no longer look her in the eye.

  With one swift, sure motion I slit her throat.

  I turn away as the life of the form she has now bubbles out onto her chest.

  Ashtoreth.

  I turn and study her as I walk toward her. Her shoulders droop and she is weeping.

  The coat babbles in my mind and a vision of some version of Ashtoreth slides into place.

  Her, draped in crimson and purple cloth that forms to her, hugging every lush curve of that form, hair like a raven’s wing, face cruelly beautiful, lips swollen from biting and stained with the blood of saints and martyrs. A word blazes out from her forehead as if tattooed there, but I cannot read it. She sits astride a beast, bareback, her thighs pressed to its spine, and it is a magnificent beast, sleek with power and covered in slick fur that blends with her scarlet robes. Its massive shoulders sprout with more than a half-dozen heads that look like a nightmare mix of lion and wolf with mouths full of shark teeth and serpent fangs. Each head has at least one horn, curled and wicked sharp. Blood runs down them to disappear into the fur of the Beast. Ashtoreth sways on its back, lifting a cup and drinking, and laughing as she rides.

  Ashtoreth. Shub Niggurath.

  The Whore of Babylon and the Beast of the Apocalypse.

  I shiver, dissipating the vision.

  Her mouth opens as I stop in front of her and I shake my head before she can speak. I reach out and take back the torc, the metal cold to the touch. She doesn’t even try to stop me. It hums as I lift it to my head; stretching itself large enough to slip over my face. It is heavy on my collarbones. I let it go and it shrinks itself back to my throat, tightening just slightly for a moment, then settling back to the place I have become so used to it being.

  I look at her. “I was your friend.”

  “I know, I know, I know.” Her hair swings around her face as she babbles.

  “Why?”

  “I didn’t want to, Charlie; you have to believe me.”

  Something inside me breaks.

  The edge of the Aqedah is pressed against her throat. The coat follows my mental command and wraps around her, drawing us tight. “Why. Did. You. Do. It?”

  “I had no choice; the Son of Azathoth threatened me with—”

  I shove her away from me and scream.

  The coat unfurls and she stumbles back and falls on her ass. She looks up at me in shock.

  I want to gut her, to use the Aqedah and cut her lying face off.

  I scream again.

  Ashtoreth sits and weeps. Her face drops to her hands.

  “No!”

  She looks up at me sharply.

  “Don’t you dare look away from me!”

  “Charlie … I…”

  “Shut up. Shut the fuck up.”

  She does.

  “I never betrayed you. I never left you. I stood up to Hastur and Mylendor and Nyarlathotep for you. I defended you from them.”

  “You would give me over to them for your Daniel.” The accusation comes out with an attitude.

  “I didn’t.”

  “You would have.”

  “I’d have given them myself for Daniel. Not you. Never you.”

  “You say that, but I know—”

  I’m on her, in her face. “You don’t know shit, not a goddamned thing.” Some of my spit hits her in the eye, making her blink rapidly. “I’ve been at the hands of people who want to use me, to do me harm, to destroy me like I’m some fucking toy they can break for their fun. I would never leave you at the hands of people like them. NEVER.” She reels back at the fury I am not even trying to curb, but I press in and keep us close and sink every ounce of menace and threat I can into my next words. “Fix the collar.”

  Her face turns away from my wrath and I see the pulse of her fear fluttering in her throat and I want to sink my teeth in it and pull it free. Let her bleed out at my feet. Her hand slowly rises, indigo magick crackling off her fingertips, and this close I smell the blackberry and sex scent of it wafting from her goddessflesh.

  I want to bite those fingers off.

  Teeth crunching through cartilage, wet pop of the joint as it separates, and the gush of salty lymphatic fluid and blood into
that hollow under my tongue.

  Off.

  The fingers dart in, under my chin, and brush the metal ring around my neck. I feel the magick spark and the metal goes hot, buzzing against my skin, and my head swims with everywhere; all the potential for every place I could wish myself to expands my mind and rocks me back on my heels.

  Her words filter through the spin of myriadism.

  “Charlie, I’m sorry. I want to—”

  I hold my hand up, cutting her off. I force my mind back in order, pulling the edges to make them straight, as straight as they can be. I breathe, in through my nose, out through my mouth, and center myself. I search, the collar growing heavy as I do, pushing my magick out, looking, seeking, searching.

  I find it.

  I draw a breath to make a wish and the coat slaps my face with its collar as it trills in my head.

  And I know what it wants me to know.

  It’s still making gibberish and I don’t have an English translation, but I understand. It’s saying we need some fuel.

  I hold on to the location of the Man in Black and turn to the goddess of betrayal.

  She reaches up as I move to her, hands lifted in supplication. “I’ll make it up to you, Charlie. Anything I can do I will.”

  The Mark on my hand begins to crackle as I place it on her head.

  Her hair rises like she’s touching a Tesla coil.

  The connection between us buzzes, humming along my skin, my whole arm going numb to the armpit. She makes a noise as I slide my magick into her goddess essence like a stiletto knife.

  The moment I touch her … divinity?… power rushes out of her like a ruptured bladder, sweeping into me, and I drink, glory to goddess do I drink her down. The micromuscles in my body all convulse, contracting around the major ones as all of me suckles at all of Ashtoreth, the goddess of love.

  I don’t take it all.

  But only because I can’t hold it.

  Time stretches around me, elastic in the moment, one second of this exchange feeling like days spent in the heart of a nuclear reactor.

  I pull my Mark off her in less time than it takes you to read this sentence.

  She slumps, going boneless and limp as she kneels, crumpling to the floor.

  She is not dead; she will recover from this; she is a goddess after all, even if she has fallen.

  I feel like I could split the earth in two with the sheer force of my will.

  I stand and look down at Ashtoreth, a red pinprick of place locked inside my mind. My super-charged magick wants to surge toward it, to pour into the collar and leap me there, but I hold it in check through sheer force of will, keeping my thoughts corralled in a straight line.

  She looks up at me. She is dimmer. Diminished.

  I say the only thing I can, the words firing down that straight line like bullets from the barrel of a pistol.

  “Fucking die for all I care, Ashtoreth. We are through.”

  These are the last words I say to her before I wish myself away.

  62

  MY FEET HIT the cobblestones and I can immediately feel the difference from earlier.

  Everything feels … spongier?

  Like it’s made of sponge.

  Carcosa has gone all squishy and porous.

  And it’s even darker, the not black of earlier now a pure ink.

  The coat flares around me and I feel its anxiety against my skin.

  The teleportation sucked up a lot of the magick I yanked out of Ashtoreth, but I still feel strong and ready, not sick and weak like I normally would. Before I move I do two things, kick my magick out to find the Man in Black and shake my hand to make the Mark on my palm flare so I can see.

  Ashtoreth’s energy has mixed with my magick and the colour of the light I cast is a pale violet. It flares out from my palm and lights up the cobblestones under my feet.

  And reveals a trail of corpses.

  The moment I see them I can smell them, a throat-closing bouquet of raw iron hemoglobin and the green stench of torn gut. There are tangles of legs under sections of white canvas stained with blood going rust coloured.

  These were the followers of Hastur, the King in Yellow, the lunatics.

  Slaughtered, no attempt made to hide them or to mask what has been done. The bodies look like they’d been hit by a train, all of them twisted together, some torn apart.

  The Man in Black.

  I begin moving, running as fast as I can with my hand held high to light the way, trying to not trip over the corpses under my feet.

  63

  I FIND THEM: Daniel, Javier, the skinhound, Mylendor, the Man in Black, and the King in Yellow—all in the same place.

  Javier stands over Daniel holding one of the torches above them. He’s got a hand on Daniel’s chest, holding him on the bed. Daniel jerks around, struggling to get up. If he wasn’t weak from being in a coma Javier wouldn’t have stood a chance at holding him in place.

  The skinhound stands in front of them, head down and hackles raised, a sound like a buzz saw grinding its way through a cinder block coming from his chest.

  Mylendor crouches beside the skinhound, both hands gone that black basalt and her face a feral mask of eyes and teeth. Her lips are pulled back to her ears, mouth open to tear flesh.

  In the middle of the cobblestones, ringed about with straitjacketed corpses, the Man in Black and the King in Yellow fight.

  The King in Yellow has expanded, stretched long and crooked, his wings fully out from under his robe. The segmented wings dart around his twisting body, their hard surfaces singing against each other as they block the blows from the Man in Black.

  The Man in Black dances.

  He is all violent poetry and savage grace as he capers around Hastur with Oathbreaker in his red right hand. The blackened blade licks out, slicing into the rainbow-sheened wings of Hastur and twisting with a flick of the Man in Black’s wrist when it sinks deep. The motion causes that wing to snap and shred with a distorted screech like a broken guitar. He spins and twists, going up on his toes and arching his back and occasionally leaning in a way that human anatomy doesn’t work like.

  The King in Yellow is being whittled down, bit by bit.

  He won’t last much longer.

  The Man in Black will win. I know this like I know my name is Charlotte Tristan Moore.

  Like I know that we all die one day.

  It strikes me like a fist. I’ve been played. This has all been a set up.

  Hastur didn’t control the Man in Black. The Man in Black controlled him. I’ve been bamboozled, hornswaggled, duped.

  What the fuck else should I expect from a trickster god?

  And now I know exactly what he has been doing this whole time.

  He has two soul gems. He needs a third to free Azathoth from his prison, and when he kills the King in Yellow he will have it.

  Unless …

  I move toward the left, hand dropping into the pocket of the coat, fingers closing on the handle of the Aqedah.

  “Charlie!”

  I jump and wave for Javier to shut the fuck up.

  “Ah, Thorn in My Pride!” The Man in Black smiles even as he lops off another three feet of Hastur’s wing. “I see on your dumb human face that you now know what has happened right under your watchful gaze.”

  His arm moves, too quick for me to truly follow with my eyes, and the flat of Oathbreaker’s blade slaps across the King in Yellow’s face. I feel the noise of it in my chest more than hear it with my ears and Hastur drops to his knees.

  The Man in Black slides behind him, black-bladed sword raised for a deathblow, and a smile of pure joy on his shark-toothed mouth.

  “Wait!” My left hand flies up in a “Stop!” motion. “I have what you need; don’t kill him.”

  Nyarlathotep cocks his head.

  I reach in with my left hand and fish around in the left pocket of the coat. My hand swirls inside it, my fingers going numb with the cold. Nothing. I snap my fingers inside the dept
hs of the coat, in the void that it holds, and the tips of them hurt they are so cold.

  The coat babbles in my head.

  Now.

  The coat hisses at my command, but it shifts on my body, obeying, giving me what I want. Finally, it’s there, the hard surface of it feeling slick under my numb, near frostbitten fingers.

  I pull out the soul gem of Cthulhu and hold it up.

  It’s bigger than an ostrich egg, a shining crystal that pulses with energy, roiling from teal to putrid yellow to hot magenta. I don’t study it, keeping my eyes on the chaos god in front of me. I don’t want to see the tiny reflection of Cthulhu look at me with those big eyes, judging me for what I am doing.

  I close my mind to the tiny voice of the old one that tries to reach me, to stop me.

  “And here I thought I was the tricky one,” the Man in Black says. “All this time and you had my brother’s fetish hidden in my old slave.” He shakes his head. “Tsk, tsk, tsk.”

  I step closer. “No need to kill Hastur. Take this one instead. You win.”

  His eyes narrow. “You surrender?”

  “Charlie, what are you doing? Don’t give el Diablo that thing!” Javier cries out. I glance over. He’s holding Daniel now with both arms around his chest as Daniel struggles even more.

  Is he trying to get to me or to the Man in Black?

  “I know what I’m doing, Javi. Just hold him there.”

  The skinhound trots forward and I shake my head. He understands and moves back to beside Mylendor.

  “Save Hastur and I am your servant,” Mylendor calls to me. “Save my lover.”

  The Man in Black arches one satanic eyebrow. “My, my, such the offers to you, Charlotte Tristan Moore. Who knew you were so charismatic?”

  “All I want is that ring.”

  “Of course you do,” he says. “You are nothing if not tenacious. I would like an answer to something first.”

  “What?”

  “If you trade that fetish for this bauble”—he raises his red right hand and the emerald ring flares in the low light, sparking as if it has electricity in it—“then I will travel to the stronghold where my father dwells and free him, giving him this world as a feast of celebration.”

  “That isn’t a question.”

  “That was the preface.” He smiles, tilting his head. “This is the inquiry: When this inevitable happenstance occurs your entire world will be destroyed; why not leave your paramour oblivious until then?”