The Lovecraft Squad: Dreaming

by Stephen Jones

  And the woman who led the enemy.

  Nefertiti Bronze. The Magnificent Bronze.

  She wore a charm bracelet of small, white-furred ears. She carried her father’s famous eleven-shot bronzed automatics in red-leather shoulder holsters. All her bullets counted.

  Curwen had ordered her killed. Exham had other plans.

  It was all about blood and bloodline. Martenses—like Curwen-Wards—were thin stock, addlepated from cousins marrying cousins, or freakish from the conjoining of parents, children, and siblings. It was a wonder the inbred chimps didn’t cough themselves to death at the first draught of New York City air. The Delapores were hardier. His family practiced selective co-option of strong blood. Teuton warriors brought in chains as studs for Delapore daughters. Saxon princesses claimed as brides of the conqueror. Englishmen paired with Viking women. The Empire brought in other, older races. The Exhams and their rat-queens bred overmen. His own mother was a Nazi Valkyrie experiment. Ebony was as good a skin hue as any. John Bronze’s mother was the seven-foot Waziri princess Ashanti. His wife was the Caribbean snake dancer Nubia Dusk. The children Nefertiti Bronze would bear Exham wouldn’t be pale and thin . . . but tan and strong. In the dark, there was no color.

  Just blood.

  “. . . So long as you cut the wench’s throat after she’s come to term,” said Whateley. “No good comes from keeping brood sows alive.”

  Of course, the wizard didn’t need a woman. He could mate with himself and birth the next generation from the sacs girdling his belly. The outside strain in his line wasn’t human. The backwoods wizards had been tupped by tentacles from beyond for generations. Whateley was closer physically to the Great Old Ones than the other captains. With his weight, he was happier in swamp water than walking around. The tubers, suckers, and pods pulsing under his muumuu sensed things—not just the simple trick of reading surface thoughts. But his anatomical uniqueness removed him from consideration for a position in the public eye. He could not replace Curwen.

  And he did not want to.

  Sometimes, Exham thought Whateley didn’t even care about Cthulhu. His deity was Yog-Sothoth. A bolus of filth passing through a wormhole between universes. A smear on reality.

  Whateley’s stomachs rumbled.

  Exham saw three men in the chapel. They had entered silently and stood like teak statues. They wore baggy, dusty suits and sandals. Black men, but ashen-faced. Their eyes were marbled.

  Zombis.

  Exham reached out to the rats, and found they were reluctant.

  He exerted his influence, but the vermin didn’t rally. Even the cockroaches scattered away, exposing circles of stone picked bone-clean around the zombis’ feet.

  “We have guests,” said Whateley. “Goodie goodie gumdrops.”

  “Uninvited guests,” said Exham.

  “All are welcome in the Order,” said Whateley. “We are a broad church. Olde Fellowes must shelter under our bumbershoot. We of all faiths cannot be prejudiced against the dead.”

  A loudspeaker crackled.

  “Zombis aren’t dead, Fat Man,” said a woman’s deep voice, booming from speakers around the chapel. “They just have low metabolisms. Their minds are clouded by venom extracted from puffer fish. Tetrodotoxin. It’s not magic powder, no matter what bocors like my late husband tell you. Its structure was mapped at Harvard in 1964. Just a pinch of TTX blocks passage of sodium ions to nerve cells. Zombis are basically just salt-deficient. Not the walking dead, but the walking slow. Fit for the cane fields of Haiti and running numbers up in Harlem. Dull knives. Can you dig it?”

  Exham knew who was lecturing them.

  Even the goats seemed to pay attention to the commanding purr.

  “Willie D, Perceval, and Ti-Jean are bonded to my voice. They are no threat to you. Not by themselves. Oh, they feel no pain when you chop them with machetes or shoot them with bullets. But they will be stopped and can die.”

  Whateley clapped his hands and discharged lightning.

  The nearest zombi was struck and fell, suit smoking, eyes boiled.

  “You see,” said Nefertiti Bronze. “No threat at all.”

  There was a straining sound, a shaking, nonhuman whine. Mechanical.

  Rats wanted to flee, but held fast. Armadillos rolled into balls.

  “TTX doesn’t raise the dead,” said Nefertiti. “For that miracle, you need WRA. West Re-Agent. Not much of that in circulation these last fifty years. Harvard doesn’t research it. Even Miskatonic U keeps it locked up in the basement. No one wants West-heads freaking out across the campus. My father had a supply, though. One of his associates was a patient of Dr. West. More a subject than a patient. Claudius Buchanan Robinson. Better known as the Harlem Smoke. He’d have been champion, if he weren’t technically dead. Dad refined the West formula. Buck Robinson was raised from grave dirt by Honky Herbert. But he was brought to life by John Bronze. Funny thing. Buck hated zombis. Hated what was done to men to make them zombis. It was about slavery, of course. TTX is just a shackle in powder form.”

  Whateley listened to the lecture, probing for its source.

  The wizard reached for Bronze with invisible tentacles.

  Exham was almost concerned. He still had plans for the woman.

  She must be in the room where Montresor Mountmain maintained his expensive audiovisual equipment. The chapel was wired for sound and vision. If the Devil didn’t oblige his flock by appearing on cue at a Black Mass, other arrangements were made. Using science. Not black magic, but stage magic. Special effects.

  The rats didn’t want to go near the tech room.

  The whining-straining continued, almost a shaking in the walls.

  Exham looked up and saw pipes and sprinklers. The chapel was outfitted with the latest fire-retardant system. Whole covens had been killed when braziers overturned during frenzied rites—too awed by Satanic presence to stay out of the flames or too blissed on drugs to avoid smoke inhalation. Mountmain had installed safety measures.

  The sprinklers whirled, and liquid burst forth.

  Not water, but something pungent and green.

  “WRA,” said Bronze. “At seven hundred dollars a gallon, you should be flattered. It doesn’t do much for the still-living. It’s deadstuff that’s affected. You should try not to get the gunk in your eyes or your mouth, though. Nasty taste.”

  The felled zombi shook where it lay, muscles contracting.

  Mouths and eyes opened all around—the dead heads of the Satanists on spikes, or still attached to torsos. Severed arms flexed. Raggedy-wrist hands scuttled, crunching through cockroaches. Innards uncoiled like snakes.

  Exham strained to summon vermin.

  The rats would not rally.

  Whateley shambled, swatting living corpse parts which floundered against him. He picked up a convulsing foot and shoved it under his muumuu. Some of his lower mouths had teeth like an industrial mincer. The foot was shredded and absorbed.

  Exham was soaked with Re-Agent. Vile stuff.

  Whateley was laughing now. He crammed more and bigger struggling morsels into himself. Heads with gaping jaws and rolling eyes. A whole saluting arm. Strands of flexing muscle. Snapped-off goat horns.

  The reanimated zombi struggled to stand.

  Exham knocked it down with a single blow, snapping its neck. He stamped on its chest, crushing it. The thing writhed still.

  Whateley stood under the sprinkler, letting the last of the WRA cascade on him. A tongue the size of a Gila monster slithered over his face, washing it clean.

  “Delicious,” he said.

  “I said you shouldn’t get it in your mouth, Azathoth Whateley,” said Bronze.

  “Oh dear,” he responded, drolly. “Such an expensive cordial. I hope I don’t develop a taste for it.”

  “Trust me, sugar, you won’t . . .”

  The wizard burped, incredibly loud.

  “I do apologize,” he said, then burped again. Some of his apertures were ripped wider. “Better in than
out.”

  “You say that now . . .”

  Things kicked inside his belly, like elephant babies. Exham wondered if he had been incubating fresh shoggoths in his sacs?

  No—it was the Re-Agent, vivifying the meat in his stomachs. Bringing to life everything dead in the room.

  Many mouths were open . . . those with throats and lungs attached screamed.

  A side effect of WRA was madness. True reanimates were not docile and biddable like zombis . . . but feral, dangerous, vicious.

  Still, none of them was in any shape to do real damage.

  So much for the Harlem Smoke.

  “Oh dearie me . . . dear dear dear dearie me . . .”

  “What is it, Whateley?”

  “Your fat friend has a habit of eating things which disagree with him,” said Bronze. “It’s about to prove fatal—temporarily, perhaps—for the both of you. You should have stuck to soul food.”

  Whateley’s eyes were wide, with something like terror.

  His body swelled like a pudding rising out of the tin, bursting his muumuu.

  The head of a reanimate rat—eyes green like glowworms—burrowed out of the fold under his mammoth teats, sharp teeth slick with ichor. A human face worried under the skin of his belly.

  Whateley tried to hold himself in.

  Exham summoned his vermin protectors, but they would not come.

  Aza Whateley exploded . . . showering the whole room with coils of waste-filled guts and pulsing cuds. A thousand bone fragments became shrapnel and tore through Baron Exham like volleys from a hundred firing squads.

  He had a moment to realize he had been killed.

  Then, with the Re-Agent seeping into his skin, he was alive again and his mind was on fire. In his rage, he found Whateley’s still-living brain, shuffling away like a snail. He chewed off its eye-stalks, then tore into the pink gruel with his bare teeth.

  His mind was gone—just anger and instinct were left.

  He spent what was left of his strength, tearing into goats, ripping his wounds open wider on sharpened horns.

  Then the zombis—who ignored bleeding holes made in their dusty bodies by the bone burst—held him down as his rats finally came for him.

  The hungry vermin feasted on their Lord.

  VI

  “Drowned!” exclaimed Curwen. “How in the name of the dreaming cuttlefish does a Deep One drown?”

  Carolyn Marsh had been found floating faceup in the basement swimming pool of her building on Broadway and West Forty-eighth. Dead as a shooting gallery prize goldfish two days after the carnival leaves town. Mouth open, eyes clouded, skin slick with milky mucus. Her gills sealed with duct tape.

  Hester was noncommittal.

  Curwen’s teeth cracked as he tried to bite away frustration. Jolts of pain shot through the hinges of his jaws.

  Randy Zann was in the office again, near hysterical.

  “It ain’t supposed to be this way,” insisted the musician. “It ain’t cool, Curwen . . . not the way it was to go down. It was written, man . . . written in stone, written in blood, written in the stuff between the stars. As it freakin’ was, so shall it everlovin’ be. Not just prophecy, but a promise. This wasn’t supposed to be a bar fight. This wasn’t supposed to be a shooting war. This was sold to me as an ascension.”

  Had Curwen’s mistake been putting so much weight on the Five Families?

  If he alone were responsible, would the great design have been perfect? Or had the Esoteric Order grown complaisant? With thousands of years of inevitability tossed in the trash, there was now a dizzying prospect things would not be as ordained. The cosmos was not on rails, with stately celestial bodies moving into predestined configurations. This wasn’t a coming-together . . . this was an explosion.

  And he could name the fuse.

  “Nefertiti Bronze,” he said.

  He knew more about her now. Hester had assembled a thorough dossier on the woman. What Curwen didn’t know is why she was still alive.

  It wasn’t as if they hadn’t tried.

  After their captain’s death, the Innsmouth Marshes summoned avengers from the depths to deal with her murderess. They wound up on the waterfront, webbed feet planted in buckets of concrete, choking on toxic city air ten feet from the oily river that would have saved them.

  The Esoteric Order sent assassins for Nefertiti.

  Hooded acolytes with thrice-blooded daggers and Uzis. Kamikaze initiates with bandoliers of bombs. Ravening ghouls recruited from crumbling New England necropoli. Stalkers from beyond the stars. Crawling things.

  She fought them in the streets . . . on her own, and with allies. Survivors of the Temple of the Seven Golden Fists—Zann’s fiefdom—joined her cause. She commanded a military force—almost exclusively Vietnam veterans—drawn from the Black Panther Party, other radical groups, local criminal interests, and devotees of her father’s adventurous career. In her corner were blacks, orientals, gutter whites, dropouts, hippies, yippies, bike gangs, beatniks, nudniks, and science-fiction fans—the scum of humanity! After wavering, the dime-store magicians decided she was a surer bet than the Esoteric Order. Expected tributes went unpaid. The portfolio was shaken. The Olde Fellowes was hemorrhaging money. The rival temples were bloody ruins, but enough true believers remained in Manhattan to swell the ranks of the Army of Bronze.

  The Order’s best killers—human and otherwise—were struck down.

  The Woman of Bronze had the Sight. She—or someone close to her—knew what was coming. Scriers staring into pools or chicken innards alerted her to dangers.

  At Hester’s suggestion, Curwen reached out to other murderers.

  “Aren’t you rolling in brass?” she prompted. “This is New York. You’re supposed to be able to buy anything.”

  He put an open contract out on Nefertiti Bronze. With a record-setting purse.

  The next day she was on the cover of Rolling Stone, over the headline THEY CALL HER THE TEN MILLION DOLLAR MAMA!

  Men and women with code names took notice—the Icepick, the Pencil, the Kisser, the Mechanic, the Acupuncturist, the Nurse, Don Slaughter, Mr. Whippy. The greatest professional assassins in the world. Collectively known as the Heavy Hitters. They flew into JFK, Newark, and LaGuardia on commercial flights and private jets, disassembled sniper rifles in dust-proof custom attaché cases, throwing knives sewn into the linings of sharp suits. The Extremist, the Garbage Man, and the Cowboy knocked each other out, hoping for a clear shot at the prize. The Eraser, the Deep Freeze, and Needle Nose weighed the odds and quit town. The Tracker, from Out West, and the Quiet Dragon, from Hong Kong, played and lost—drawn into killing boxes in Harlem, and left broken on vacant lots, stripped by scavengers.

  When the Heavy Hitters failed to get results, interest in the Cool Ten fell away. Don Corrado Prizzi, capo di tutti capi, decided to sit it out. Every hit man in the continental United States found better things to do with their skills. There were consequences for going against Sicilian rulings. It did not do to violate the Killers’ Code, which just left crazies to chase the prize. The Bronze Army found hopped-up, frothing goons no more of a problem than gnats.

  The Martenses were driven out of Harlem. The family was an oxbow lake of the evolutionary river. Now, the lake was close to being drained. Where the Martense Mansion had stood was an open-air soul disco. Revelers danced in stack-heeled white alligator-hide shoes on the graves of the family. There was a fifty-dollar bounty on white pelts, paid in coin by the John Bronze Foundation. The hounfor was open again for worship. All day and all night, drums beat like the rhythm of pulsing blood.

  What happened in Hell’s Kitchen wasn’t clear, but Baron Exham would need permanent care. His wriggling body was deposited in the lobby of the Ward Building, shrouded in a dry-cleaners’ clear plastic suit-protector. Dead and mindless, he wouldn’t lie down. An angry, uncontrollable thing, no use to himself or anyone else, but terminally alive. The Baron couldn’t be killed. They tried bullets, a sword, fire, suffocation,
rituals of banishment. Acolytes set on him with sledgehammers. Crushed to a paste, he remained a writhing mess. They stuffed him in a basement room.

  Aza Whateley was in the same state, but at large. Sightings were reported of an uneven flesh-carpet the size of a basketball court, hauling itself along on ropes of muscle, eating stray dogs and their messes. Cast out by Yog-Sothoth, Whateley generated limbed headless fetuses which couldn’t survive outside their ichor sacs. Tabloid stories told of aborted “mummy lobster babies” found in basements.

  And Carolyn Marsh was drowned.

  The Families were not covering themselves in glory.

  “Music, that’s how to challenge the harpy,” said Zann. “My strings, her pipes. Battle of the bands. I’d blow her away, man. The wraiths out there . . . they’re soul-eaters. Piranha of the waters between worlds. One solo and they’re summoned. They’ll latch onto her head and feeeeed till there’s no soul left. I can husk her in a heartbeat.”

  “It may come to that,” said Curwen.

  “Yay, verily, so it hath been said and so shall it forever be, my mage . . . so shall it freakin’ be!”

  Zann spoke to a tune . . .

  Curwen wondered if the musician even knew which tune had got into his head and wouldn’t leave.

  “Supernatural Soul Sister,” he breathed, almost humming.

  Expert assassins could not find Nefertiti Bronze . . . but she made time to be on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, promoting her new single “Supernatural Soul Sister.”

  Supernatural Soul Sister

  Groovin’ on the street

  Supernatural Soul Sister

  Got no fear of any ghoul you’d meet . . .

  She’s got a funky plan . . .

  To stick it to the honky man . . .

  Who’s tryna break cover . . .

  But no matter what they did . . .

  She’s cuttin’up the squid . . .

  Who’s no kind of lover . . .

  Supernatural Soul Sister

  Takin’ up the fight,

  Supernatural Soul Sister