The Madness of Cthulhu Volume 2

by Joshi, S. T

  It made no sense.

  None.

  At this depth we were beneath a hundred million years of ice. Maybe twice that. No one had ever built a city here.

  And no one, I was absolutely sure, had ever built a city like this. It was as if the builders of ancient Egypt had constructed a megalopolis on the scale of New York or Hong Kong.

  Only bigger.

  Much, much bigger.

  We stopped talking about what we were seeing. It was an impossible conversation, and the echoes of our voices seemed incredibly tiny in that vastness. It made us feel like ants. It took us ten more minutes to reach the bottom of the slope.

  We stood there for a moment, looking around, looking everywhere but at one another.

  Then we heard a voice say, “Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!”

  7

  WE SPUN TOWARD THE SOUND, GUNS UP, FINGERS SLIPPING INSIDE trigger-guards. The voice was far away, but it was piercing and shrill.

  “Boss,” snapped Bunny, “on your ten o’clock.”

  We all turned.

  A figure came walking around the end of a long row of crates. It walked slowly and a bit awkwardly, but it wasn’t another albino penguin.

  It was a man.

  Thin, fortyish, wearing a lab coat over a plaid shirt and khakis. His feet were bare. His glasses were nearly opaque from the blood that was splashed across his face. It soaked his clothes and dripped from him, and he left a long line of bare red footprints behind him.

  “Stop right there,” I yelled.

  He kept walking.

  “Sir—you need to stop right there or I will put you down. Do you understand me?”

  He walked three more steps, but then he slowed and stopped. He lifted his head as if listening to something far away, and again I thought I heard that voice cry out those same meaningless words.

  “Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!”

  We couldn’t see who spoke, but it was closer now. Half a mile? Less?

  “Put your hands on your head, fingers laced,” I said. “Do it now.”

  The man seemed to smile for a moment. “We are always what you want,” he said in a voice that was muddy and thick. “We are always what you need.”

  “Put your hands on your head,” I repeated. “I won’t tell you again.”

  “It is our joy to obey.”

  He said those words—or at least those are the words I heard—but I swear to God that those aren’t the words his mouth formed. It was so strange, like watching a foreign film with bad dubbing.

  “It is our joy always to obey.”

  “Tell me your name,” I demanded. “What is your I.D. number?”

  The man opened his mouth to say something else, but this time instead of words a pint of dark blood flopped out and splatted onto the front of his shirt. He made a faint gagging sound, and then his knees buckled and he collapsed with exaggerated slowness to the ground.

  “Go,” said Top as he moved up to cover me.

  Bunny and I broke cover and ran cautiously toward him, checking each side corridor in the maze of crates, covering each other.

  “Green Giant,” I said, and Bunny grunted an assent. He took up a defensive posture while I dropped to one knee by the fallen man. I put my fingers to his throat and got a big silent nothing. “Dead.”

  He was a mess. Blood everywhere. A nametag hung askew from his lab coat.

  ERSKINE.

  The scientist in charge of this project. From close-up I could see that his skin was as gray-white and mottled as the penguin’s feathers had been. Like the skin of a mushroom.

  Erskine looked up at the ceiling with dead eyes and a slack mouth.

  And then he spoke again. “We are always what you need.”

  We all jumped. I jabbed my fingers back against his carotid and got the same thing. Top tried, too.

  He jerked his hand back.

  “We have waited since the lands split to serve,” said the dead man.

  We scrambled back.

  “Boss,” yelped Bunny.

  “I know, I know,” I said, my heart hammering in my chest.

  “No,” insisted Bunny, and he held his BAMS unit in front of my face. The comforting little green light was glowing bright red.

  We scrambled back from the dead man.

  “Reads as unknown biological agent,” Bunny said.

  “Yeah,” growled Top, “but what kind? Bacteria? Nerve gas? A virus?”

  Bunny shook his head. “I don’t know … it paused on spores for like half a second and then went to unknown particles.”

  Top looked at his while I covered everyone. “Mine says bacteria … no, I’m wrong. It’s reading unknown, too.”

  I glanced at mine just as the reading changed from virus to unknown.

  We stared at each other, then at the units, then at the dead man.

  We backed away from Erskine and tried to get readings from different parts of the airflow. Every few seconds the BAMS units would shift. Virus. Fungal spores. Bacteria. Mycotoxins. And even plant pollen. But each time the meter flicked back to the display for UNKNOWN PARTICLES.

  “Something must be interfering with the sensors,” said Bunny.

  “Can’t,” said Top. “They’re self-contained and they have ruggedized cases.”

  The red lights flickered like rats’ eyes at us.

  On the floor the dead man spoke again, and once more his words and his mouth didn’t match. His body trembled as with the onset of convulsions, but the tone was normal.

  No, normal isn’t a word I can use here. Normal was not in that place with us.

  His tone sounded casual, as if he was having a calm conversation with someone. The tone and words were well modulated. It sounded for all the world like a tape playback of something this man might have said at another time and under incredibly different circumstances, but somehow repeated now despite his condition.

  “There’s nothing to worry about. This is a clean facility.”

  I could feel the shakes starting. They started deep, in my bones, in my muscles, and then shuddered outward through my skin.

  “Cap’n,” whispered Top, “that motherfucker is dead.”

  “I know.”

  Bunny said, “What?”

  “No pulse. He’s dead.”

  “We defeat time because it interferes with service,” said Erskine. Or, at least, that’s what the voice said. His mouth formed different words. Even dead. I made myself look at the shapes his lips formed. And as I read those words I could feel—actually feel—my blood turn to ice.

  The words his dead mouth formed were, “God forgive us. God forgive us.”

  Over and over again.

  His dead, cold lips pleaded for mercy while the cooling meat of his body spoke to us in this vast and impossible place.

  Bunny held his BAMS unit in one hand and had his M4A1 carbine pointed at the man’s head.

  “There’s nothing to worry about,” repeated the voice. “This is a clean facility.”

  Suddenly all the red lights in the BAMS unit turned green.

  I stared at my unit. The display read NO DETECTABLE PARTICLES.

  I’ll buy one malfunctioning unit. Maybe two at an absurd stretch. Not three. And not three malfunctioning in the same way at exactly the same moment.

  Then the dead on the floor sat up.

  He didn’t struggle to get up; he sat up as if he’d been doing ab crunches five times a day for twenty years. With his legs straight out in front of him Erskine’s upper body folded forward until he sat erect. He turned his head very slowly toward me. His eyes were no longer totally vacant. There was a strange new light in them, but it wasn’t the kind of thing that says someone’s home. It wasn’t that at all.

  Bunny actually shrieked. It was the only thing you could call that sound. I was so close to doing the same thing that I had to clench my jaws shut.

  Erskine said, “In any operational model form follows function.”

  Top said, “What?”

  “
Function is a byproduct of need,” Erskine said in that same reasonable tone, “and to operate at absolute efficiency the precise structure of form is decided empirically.”

  Blood, thick as molasses, dribbled from the corners of his mouth and ran down over his chin.

  Dead things don’t bleed.

  But that blood didn’t look like normal blood. It was so dark, almost like oil.

  “The question of imposing form on the formless is solved at the quantum level.”

  The dead man looked at Bunny, then at Top and then at me.

  He smiled. With black blood oozing from his mouth, he smiled.

  It was the worst thing I’ve ever seen. In a life spent fighting every kind of human monster, every twisted aspect of natural evil, here was a smile that shook me, stabbed me through the heart, froze my soul.

  Behind us we heard a voice say, “Tekeli-li!”

  I whirled and saw a shape. Pale as one of the penguins. I fired at it without pause, without thinking, breaking all protocols and training. The bullets tore into the flesh of a naked man. Holes opened in his flesh and black blood poured from it.

  The man I shot was Dr. Erskine.

  I froze, finger still on the trigger, smoke drifting from the barrel.

  Behind Dr. Erskine was another man. Another Dr. Erskine.

  Other figures emerged from the shadows. More Erskines.

  Then other people. Some in bloody clothes, others naked and pallid as mushrooms. The lights on the BAMS unit flared red again.

  “Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!” they said.

  Then behind me, the first Erskine said, “Function is a byproduct of need.”

  There was a rattle of gunfire as Bunny emptied half a magazine into him.

  Then the man said, “Tekeli-li!”

  More and more figures stepped from the shadows. Dozens of individual people. More than a hundred. Some of them were dressed in the bloody shreds of lab coats. Some were in military uniforms or engineers’ coveralls. Some were American. Some wore the uniforms of Chinese or Russian military. Beyond, amid, and around them were hundreds of others. Copies of each. Hundreds of copies of each.

  “Tekeli-li,” they said. “Tekeli-li!”

  Though they each spoke with their own mouths, it was all said with a single voice. One voice that spoke in perfect harmony.

  One voice.

  Beyond the figures I thought I saw something else, something hidden in the darkness that moved with a fluid bulk, as if a body of viscous liquid was somehow moving without the need of containment. There was an oily iridescence about it and a stink of pollution worse than anything I’d ever experienced.

  “No,” said Bunny.

  “God,” said Top.

  I said nothing. I opened fire.

  It was a target-rich environment. We filled the chamber with thunder.

  We fired every bullet.

  We threw every grenade.

  We hurled every satchel charge.

  Then we turned and ran.

  We screamed the whole time as the collective voice screamed back at us.

  “Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!”

  8

  THE LC-130 WAS STILL TAXIING DOWN THE RUNWAY WHEN I called in the air strike. The USS California hit the Vinson Massif with six Tomahawks. I told them to empty the whole closet on them, so they sent the other six.

  There is no Vinson Massif anymore.

  Within ten hours we carpet-bombed the site with fuel-air bombs.

  Mr. Church canceled my clearance when I tried to order a nuke.

  Top, Bunny, and I spent a week with him and some shrinks. They even tried lie detectors on us, and I could read the expressions on their faces. I knew what the results of those tests would be.

  Church used our testimony to crack open the Proteus project. I never got all the details. I never asked to see them.

  I’ve already seen my share of things. Maybe I’ve stood too close to Nietzsche’s abyss.

  But Church laid a confidential congressional report on my desk anyway. It was marked CLOSED. I leafed through it. It included a project proposal paper written three years ago by Dr. Erskine. Most of it was scientific mumbo-jumbo, but one thing was highlighted in yellow.

  The acquisition of an organism specifically engineered to take on whatever form is deemed useful by its creator or handler has more potential worth than an entire army of trained soldiers. All that’s required is the development of methods by which a desired shape/function is conveyed to the organism and a reliable method of practical control. Archaeological evidence suggests that the original designers achieved that level of control. All we have to do is rediscover the process.

  The remark was footnoted to indicate that this was the key passage used to secure the black budget funding.

  I set the report aside.

  Beyond that copy of the report, which I planned to shred, there was no mention anywhere of any bases established by China, Russia, or the United States. The name Proteus Nine was being systematically expunged from all documents by MindReader. The ENRIX program was likewise being expunged.

  My testimony carries some weight. It’s a side-effect of the things I’ve done since joining the DMS. I don’t exaggerate and I’m not prone to flights of fancy. I’m pretty sure the transcripts of the testimony of me and my guys scared some people.

  Really and truly scared them.

  But get this and tell me if you think people aren’t just crazy as outhouse rats.

  Last week two senior researchers and a general from the Air Force met with a special congressional budget committee to try and get funding to start a new program. A different program, not at all like Proteus. They swear. And not in Antarctica because there’s nothing left but slag and ice. No, they have a report from a deep submersible that was searching for a sunken research vessel in the southern Pacific Ocean at coordinates 47° 9′ S., 126° 43′ W. That puts it in the oceanic pole of inaccessibility, which is the place in the ocean that is farthest from land. Seriously remote. Sixteen hundred miles and change from the nearest land. The photos from the submersible show what looks like ruins. Ramparts, big stone cubes, cones.

  It’s not Atlantis, though. It’s not anyplace I ever heard of.

  The name R’lyeh keeps popping up. Apparently the place ties into something described in some old books.

  I told Bug to keep an eye on this. If these guys convince Congress to allot them money to investigate it, I think I want to do something about it.

  I think I have to do something about it.

  I’d really have to.

  Or I’d never sleep again.

  DEEP FRACTURE

  STEVE RASNIC TEM

  WHEN THE QUAKE HIT, TOM’S FIRST THOUGHT WAS TO WISH HE were somewhere other than in Betty’s Nackery, among breakable objects with no purpose other than to take up space, searching for a ceramic frog.

  He looked over at Walt, who’d been tagging along with him most of the day as he tried to complete Naomi’s “To Do” list. One ceramic frog: check, assuming he got it out of the shop intact, a replacement for the one destroyed by the last quake two days ago. Bristol was averaging three a week, 3.5 to 4.0 magnitude range, according to Walt—not common in these old, heavily worn Appalachians.

  Walt had been a geologist for the coal companies over twenty years, and if this kind of thing bothered him he sure didn’t show it. He held up a couple of ceramic deer, grinning. “Caught ’em when they fell off the shelf.” He looked over at Betty, who was cowering under the old kitchen table that served as her checkout stand. He held the deer up, made them dance. “Saved them!” He grinned even wider. Betty looked sick.

  Yesterday morning Naomi had demanded, poking at loosened mortar with her thumb, “What if the house comes down? Can’t we reinforce the walls somehow?” Her house inspections had become an everyday thing.

  “How could we afford that? Maybe they’ll just stop.”

  “The coal companies ought to pick up the tab—all those old mines riddling these hills, no
wonder we’re having quakes.”

  Walt had just laughed when Tom had told him about that. “You might break your back falling down an unmarked shaft, but those old mines aren’t going to bring your house down. If there’s a big’un it’ll come along the New Madrid fault through Memphis. Naomi shouldn’t be none too concerned about the mines.”

  This morning when Walt said he wanted to ride along he hadn’t seemed quite as jovial. When Tom asked if anything was wrong he’d said a couple of inspectors were late checking in.

  The shop trembled for a couple of minutes, although it seemed much longer. Tom had the frog cupped safely between his two palms. Walt put the deer back on a shelf, although he hesitated on the second, as if he were considering an unlikely purchase. He looked around at the broken pieces filling the aisle and shook his head. “Better get the foundation checked, Betty. The store felt a little more slippery than it should have. And I’m seeing some wall cracks I don’t like much.”

  Betty let Tom have the frog for free. She wanted to close early.

  His cell phone rang that awful nerve-jangly jazz tune Naomi had chosen as her signature ring (“That way you’ll know it’s me”). That way, too, he managed to ignore about half her calls.

  Walt stared at the phone where it lay on the seat between the two of them. “Not answering it, bud?”

  “I’ll call her later. She’s probably just checking our progress.” She was meeting with the drain cleaning company that morning about the disgusting backup in the basement, a problem with the clay line. He would pay whatever had to be paid but he’d never been able to deal with that stench.

  Since dawn the sky had looked like saturated cotton and tasted like ice. What appeared to be the arrival of flurries subsided into an extended period of cold, overcast hiding the sun. The last few days the cautious ones stocked up on basic foods, antifreeze, umbrellas, and snow shovels. The incautious ones just drank. The uncertainty was intolerable.

  “So what’s next on Naomi’s list?” Walt stretched, yawning. “Plaster ducks for the lawn? Maybe a nice stuffed squirrel for the table?”

  “Very funny,” Tom said, trying to study the tattered list while driving. “Won’t this get you in trouble at work? I had to take a vacation day for this.”