The man’s eyes were just holes in his face; ragged holes, as if his eyes and the flesh around them had been ripped away. There was nothing visible within the wounds apart from darkness, which was probably for the best. A war wound perhaps, or agricultural accident? Casca had seen worse, although such people tended to shun public places. Either way the sight was disturbing, but the man didn’t seem to be affected by it. In fact, he was looking directing towards Casca with his head held up. Surely, if he couldn’t see then he would favour his ears, listening for people walking past?
The man’s attitude was so arrogant, so domineering, despite his bizarre yellow tunic, that Casca just shook his head and walked on. Let someone else help the man.
He was still obsessing about the chance meeting when he was hailed.
“Casca – what’s all the noise in aid of?”
He turned, startled. On the other side of the wide street he saw Marcus Junius Brutus standing with his brother-in-law, Gaius Cassius Longinus. Brutus was a stocky, soldierly man with dark hair and a pensive face while Cassius was leaner and blond, and generally looked like he was watching the world and judging everything he saw negatively. Casca was surprised to see them together: the rumour was that Brutus’s recent appointment as Praetor Urbanis had severely offended Cassius, who had been given the lesser title of Praetor Peregrinus. As far as Casca was concerned they should have considered themselves fortunate. Both men had allied themselves with Pompey against Caesar in the civil war, and both had been forgiven by the magnanimous and politically astute victor. Forgiven for a while, at least.
It was Brutus who had called. As Casca crossed the street to them he replied: “I was at the forum, watching our esteemed Dictator refuse the crown three times before apparently fainting.”
“They offered him the crown?” Cassius said, astounded.
“What were they thinking?
“They were thinking that the populace has enthusiastically thrown itself behind Caesar, and so the Senate must do likewise lest they appear out of step,” Casca explained. He glanced from one man to the other. They were both looking tired and frustrated.
“A soothsayer stopped Caesar on his way to the forum,” Brutus said. “We saw it.”
Cassius nodded. “The soothsayer warned Caesar against some event that will happen on the Ides of March. He was remarkably unforthcoming on what this event actually was, however, and Caesar was unperturbed.”
“I’m not surprised,” Casca said, with a trace more bitterness in his voice than was, perhaps, safe. “Everything seems to be going Caesar’s way at the moment. What next, above Emperor? Being raised to Godhood?”
Cassius and Brutus swapped glances, then looked around to see if anyone else was close enough to overhear what was being said. Once, Casca would have laughed at the amateur nature of the dramatics, but the way that things were in Rome he felt like doing the same. Caesar had agents and friends everywhere.
“You realise that there’s no stopping him?” Brutus said quietly. “Once he gets absolute power he’ll implement such a purge as the world has never seen. Every office will be filled with someone he trusts, and every marketplace will be stacked up with the bodies of those he doesn’t.”
“And we know what he thinks of us,” Cassius added. “We’ll be amongst the first to go.”
“Such talk is dangerous, you know?” Casca warned softly.
“Then let us talk in private.” Brutus extended a hand. “Join us for dinner at my house. Let us speak openly there. Even the slaves will be sent away.”
Casca only hesitated for a moment before reaching out and taking Brutus’s wrist. Brutus’s hand similarly squeezed Casca’s wrist. “I will,” he said, “and let us talk of simple things, like where in the Republic we can move to so as to live out our lives in peace and harmony.”
“Or,” Cassius said, “what steps have to be taken to ensure that we can stay here in peace and harmony, even though those steps themselves may be neither peaceful nor harmonious.”
Casca left the two men there, and walked on. His mind was abuzz with speculation. He thought he had just been invited to join a conspiracy, but he wasn’t entirely sure. Joining such an undertaking – if there was one – was risky, but he knew that he, too, was on Caesar’s list of people who needed to be disposed of when he took complete power. Anyone who had supported Pompey was on that list, as were Pompey’s entire family, any soldier who had ever served under him and anyone who had known him at school. Casca had to pick a side, lest one was picked for him.
Later, after he had rested and completed some business negotiations, and the sun had dropped behind Esquilline Hill he decided to walk to Brutus’s residence. He could have got his servants to carry him in a litter, or perhaps order them to tie a mule to a carruca and pull him there, but he loved the city at night: the sounds of the iron-bound wheels of the carriages and carts clattering against the cobbles and the smells of the flowers drifting down from the seven hills, the incense burning in the smaller temples and the feasts being cooked in the various residences. How much longer he would be able to stand on a street corner in the darkness, close his eyes and just appreciate the city was another matter – perhaps one that would be sorted out that night.
The city was quiet, apart from the sound of occasional raised voices from some gathering of friends and the occasional hoot of an owl. It was for that reason that Casca found himself listening to a regular tapping sound, like a stick hitting the stones of the road. By the time he consciously registered it the sound had been audible for some time. He looked around, expecting to see someone walking along with the aid of a stick, a blind man or a cripple perhaps, but the street was empty. In fact, now he came to concentrate more on it, the sound wasn’t really like the tapping of a stick on stone. It was more regular, like a hammer on iron, but surely no blacksmith ever hit an anvil so precisely or for so long?
The sound faded as he walked, and Casca put the puzzle on a mental shelf, along with other things to which he had no answer, such as with the man with the yellow toga, and how Caesar could be so arrogant as to dismantle the Republic for his own personal ambition.
It was while he was cutting through a lower-class area of mixed businesses, temples and residences that he saw a man walking ahead of him. He was alone, with a hood pulled up over his head, but the way he held himself, the way he carried his head and the set of his shoulders were immediately recognisable.
It was Julius Caesar. There was no doubt.
Casca looked around, not quite believing it. Surely the fact that he had been thinking about Caesar had caused his mind to spontaneously generate some phantom? How could Caesar be here? Why would Caesar be here? No soldiers to guard him, no slaves to clear the path ahead of him, no sycophants to tell him how noble and powerful he was; nobody. Caesar was alone. And with the hood over his head it was obvious that he didn’t want to be recognised.
But it was definitely, unmistakably him.
Casca was intrigued. What in Jupiter’s name could Caesar be doing out so late at night, and so alone?
The figure up ahead suddenly darted down a narrow alley. When he got to the corner, Casca gazed down its shadowed length. He looked around, checking that he was still alone. If he investigated it was likely he would arrive late at Brutus’s residence for dinner, but given what they were going to be talking about he felt that he ought to investigate. Perhaps Caesar was visiting some mistress whose identity would cause a convenient scandal if revealed. So he followed.
At its end the alley opened out into a small square that Casca had never been in before. A few twisted trees emerged from holes in the pavement around it, and oddly they all seemed to be leaning away from the centre, as if trying to escape it, rather than all being bent the same way by the winds that sometimes swept through the city. In the centre of the square was a temple of grey, weathered marble, raised up on a wide platform of five steps. It was one of the many hundreds of temples scattered around Rome dedicated to one or another of the
many gods in the Roman pantheon – a fair number of which had been appropriated from other religions and bought under Roman control. The steps were cracked, and grass was growing out of the gaps between the slabs that formed them. Abandoned, perhaps – its worshippers a small cult or a foreign minority who had gradually died off?
The temple itself looked… wrong. The pillars all appeared straight when Casca looked at them, and the roof was set firmly and properly on top of them, but whichever part of it he concentrated on, his eyes tried to tell him that the other features were somehow twisted, or joined each other at odd angles. It was as if he was trying to make sense of the architecture while drunk, although he hadn’t had any wine since the afternoon, and that had been weak. He might have ascribed the askew look of the place to the results of a long-ago earthquake, or some subsidence in the ground beneath it, but when he looked at it straight there was nothing wrong. It was just when he looked away, or past it, that it was disturbing. It made him feel queasy, and not just in his stomach. Queasy in his head.
Caesar glanced around, and Casca moved back into the shadow of the alley’s walls. Seeing nobody, he climbed the steps and entered the temple.
Nerving himself, Casca crossed the open space and climbed those same steps.
He glanced upwards, to see if there was any carving running along the pediment on top of the temple that might tell him which god or gods it was dedicated to, but the way the columns appeared to curve together towards a roof that seemed to belly out towards him made him suddenly dizzy, and he looked away quickly. There were words there, however, and he braced himself to look again.
Iä Hastur cf’ayak’vulgtmm, vugtlagln vulgtmm, the words read.
It was a language he had never come across before. His lips moved, trying to form the sounds, but his mouth suddenly went dry and bile rose at the back of his throat, burning the sensitive skin there.
Tearing his gaze away from the letters, which seems to twist as he looked at them, he moved to the corner of the temple and looked upwards again at the newly revealed side.
Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthugha n’g Sothtoth n’gha-ghaa naf’lthagn.
The words still meant nothing. Was Cthugha the god worshipped here, or was it Hastur or Sothtoth? He’d never heard of any of them, and the way his stomach was churning he thought he probably never wanted to. Some of these foreign cults involved things like human sacrifice and worse.
There was a part of his mind – quite a sizable part – that was screaming at him to get out of there, but he took a deep breath, quelled his rebellious stomach and moved in past the pillars, through the portico and into the temple itself.
Inside was a large, rectangular open space. Apparently rectangular, because, like the outside, the corners and edges where the walls met didn’t appear to be straight unless Casca looked directly at them, in which case they were fine and it was everything else around them that was wrong. At the far end of the temple a statue rose up to the ceiling, and Julius Caesar was standing directly in front of it.
If Casca had thought the strange, twisted architecture of the temple exterior and interior had caused him digestive problems then the statue in front of which Caesar was now prostrating himself very nearly caused him to vomit. It was a dirty grey in colour, with hints of green in the folds and creases, as if there was mould growing on it – or out of it. The stone itself seemed to be pocked with holes, like volcanic pumice, but it also looked soapy, with a strange glint where the light from the braziers set around the edge of the space reflected from it. Casca had seen many bizarre statues of gods in his time, but this one beat them all.
In form it appeared to be animalistic – like a recumbent lion, perhaps – but the angle of the limbs and joints meant either that it had several badly broken bones or that the sculptor had put the head where the tail should be and vice versa. Instead of paws it had claws, like those of a vulture but thicker and crueller, and its tail gave the distinct impression that it ended in a second head: blunt and featureless, but carved in such a way as to suggest it was somehow still watching the viewer with malign intent. It was the actual head that was the strangest thing, however. It seemed to be covered with globular excrescences that could only be eyes, except that there were hundreds of them of various sizes. It was watching all directions at once.
How could anyone in their right mind worship something like that?
But it seemed that Caesar was doing just that. He was now lying on the marble floor between the front claws of the statue with his arms extended towards it in supplication.
“I can’t do it,” he was moaning. “Please – don’t make me. Let me go.”
There was movement in the shadows of the statute, and a man walked into sight. Casca moved back into the shadows of the portico, enthralled. It was the man in the yellow toga, the man with ragged holes for eyes, and he stood over Caesar, looking down at him. The flickering light from the braziers made the shadows of the eye-sockets dance, and Casca thought he could even see the reflection of the red light off the bloody tissue within.
Casca pressed himself back against the cool marble. He thought he could detect something beneath the palms of his hands – a regular thudding, just like the noise he had heard earlier. Like someone hammering iron against iron, somewhere far below.
“There was an agreement,” the man in yellow said, distracting Casca from the mysterious vibration. His voice was mellifluous, measured. Casca recognised well the sound of a man who was used to manipulating crowds or potential investors with his words, and with the tone of his voice. It was a tone of voice that Casca had successfully used himself – in politics and in business – and had heard Caesar use with equal success. This man, however, had mastered it perfectly.
“I didn’t understand,” Caesar moaned. Casca was shocked to hear the pain and anguish in his voice. He was used to Caesar being strong. Self-serving perhaps, even petty, but strong.
“That is the nature of agreements,” the man in yellow pointed out. “The one party rarely understands what they have signed away to the other party until it is too late. You wanted absolute power – we gave you absolute power. We wanted influence – you will give us influence.”
“I thought you meant favours, influential positions, money!”
The man in yellow laughed, but there was no humour in the sound. It was like something echoing in a dark room. “Those things are not influence. They are glittering baubles. Treasures for the foolish.”
“I didn’t understand,” Caesar whispered. “I want out of the agreement.”
“There is no ‘out’. You are with us, or you are nothing.”
Caesar rolled slightly, and his right hand reached clumsily behind his back. He was trying to reach something on the nape of his neck.
“I reject you,” he said, and it sounded to Casca as if there was something of the old Caesar in his tone. “You would destroy Rome, and I will not let you do that.”
“You will destroy Rome, and we will watch.” The man in yellow gazed down at Caesar’s prone body. His face was devoid of emotion, but his voice had a note of slight surprise in it. Perhaps even the beginnings of respect. “But we confess that we had not anticipated the strength of your will. That was a surprise to us. We did not think you capable of rejecting the crown in the way that you did.”
Caesar’s fingers tightened on something that Casca couldn’t see. He tugged at it, and his entire body convulsed. Whatever he was doing was agonising, but he continued to do it. “I reject you! I reject you and this abomination that you gave me!” With that he pulled hard, and something came away from his neck. For a moment Casca was confused – it looked like Caesar’s hand was suddenly three hands, all connected together in some bizarre contortion – but then Caesar threw the thing that he was holding away. It bounced and slid to a halt, leaving red smears behind it on the marble tiles.
The thing that lay there on the cracked marble looked like two thin, white hands lying on their backs with long fingers that twitched a
nd clutched at the air. The two hands weren’t separate, however. They were joined at the wrist, forming a terrible whole with one set of fingers facing forward and one set facing backwards. A single creature made up of two impossible hands.
And that wasn’t the worst. No, the worst was that the middle finger of one of the hands was covered in blood up to the second knuckle, and when Casca’s horrified gaze slowly but inexorably moved back to Caesar’s twitching body he saw that blood was trickling down the Dictator’s neck from a ragged hole in the base of his skull.
The thing on the marble was shuddering now, the fingers fluttering as if it was dying. Its white skin seemed, to Casca’s horrified gaze, to be shrivelling as he watched. Wrinkles were forming and running into each other as it shrivelled back to the bone beneath. If there was bone.
The man in the yellow toga bent down and picked up the conjoined hands. He held them, cupping them in his own hands, as if he was holding a sickly baby, and then with a single smooth motion he bought them up to his face.
The long, thin fingers tightened around his head and beneath his jaw while the thumbs slid into his empty eye sockets. When he bought his own hands down the thing was clamped to his face. Over his face, like a mask – a terrible, grotesque mask. The long middle finger that had been inside Caesar’s head had left a smear of crimson on the man’s cheek. Within moments the hands appeared to be filling out, the wrinkles vanishing as they absorbed precious life from their host.
“Something stronger is required,” he said calmly, as if nothing untoward had even happened.
A skittering sound, like rats on a tiled rooftop, filled the temple, and as Casca’s incredulous attention was drawn to the massive statue behind Caesar and his horrific master he saw that the statue’s back was now covered with the double-handed creatures. They scampered, scuttled and ran across the stone in a sick wave, stopping around its haunches and its shoulders, eyelessly watching the events below.
Shakespeare Vs Cthulhu Page 14