'What happened to him?'
'Dot you wouldn't understan'.'
Ralf had to look away from Henley. He stared up at oyster-shell clouds, saw the full moon, a pale vapour in the day sky. 'Tell me.'
'De Old Ones - dey have corried Henley away. And dere, das dere messenger. Das Nyarlathotep. H-s-s-t? 'Huh?'
'He de One dream Henley afar.'
'How?'
Autway shook his head. 'Best you ask why. How brings madness.'
Henley had turned and walked off with the toughs, drifting away as if he were vapour. From someplace there was a thin mournful whistle.
'Dere are star pools in de hills. Up dere de minions take shape. B-r-r-r-p! De Kingdom been comin'
for a long, long time.'
'You see - dot you wouldn't understan'. It is de Kingdom. Nyarlathotep was de Key. De world de lock. Entering, de Key is de blindness in the lock's eye, de dream dat always returns.'
Ralf ran a hand over his face. His fingers were trembling. He bent to pick up his attache, but the old man laid a hand on his shoulder, rain-soft, urging him to wait.
'You want de drug?'
Ralf looked up at him with quiet eyes and straightened slowly. 'You got the heroin?'
'You can have it. In exchange. For dat.' He extended a knobbed coffee-coloured finger and touched the talisman.
'You're kidding?'
Autway reached into his mantle and pulled out a large cotton ditty bag.
'Let me see that.' Ralf snatched the bag and tugged it open. He fingered the powder inside and touched it to his tongue. His head snapped back, and he grinned. 'You got a deal.' He pulled tight the bag, bent down, and put it in his attache. With one hand he secured the case lock, and with the other he removed the stone from around his neck and handed it to Autway.
As soon as the gangan got his hands on it, he let out a giddy laugh that twisted under his tongue like a cry and curved off into a howl. 'You stupid mon. Reap de wind. Thresh stone. All is lost. You have thrown away your only hope.' He whooped.
Ralf scowled and stood up, but Autway was already moving off. Ralf watched him disappear down the back wynds and alleys of a cluster of huts. Despite the fact that he at last had what he was looking for, he felt burned, and that was a dangerous way to feel.
He decided that he wanted the stone back. It was a dumb animal illumination, Ralf realized, but that hunk of rock was suddenly important and getting to mean more each second.
Attache under his arm, Ralf loped down a cramped alley, leaping over stacks of rubbish and debris.
When he rounded the first corner, he pulled up short, swivelled on his heels, and threw himself back out of the alley. He had his Walther out, and he sat hunched behind his attache as a man with a bison chest and a tight, sad smile came around the corner. It was Pantucci.
'Slow down, stooge,' he said, swinging his hands free of his body. 'If I was gunnin' for ya you'd be dead awready.'
'Turn around, cap'm.'
Pantucci spun about. 'I'm light as a feather.'
'Sure, sure, I'm Doctor Strange. Lift those pant legs.' The captain lifted his trousers to his knees. 'I've been in your shadow for days, dupe. I was waitin' for you to connect.'
'Yeah? Well, what's it to you?'
'Somebody's going to have to move that stuff. And all seriousness aside, Gusto wants you to cry more than he wants that dub.'
'You're always best stating the obvious with a sense of awe.'
'You don't think you can move that kind of weight yourself?'
'Captain, I know you haven't been dog-breathing me all these days to keep me out of trouble. You're here to make your good out of my bad. Now I know that. There's a small fortune of sin in this case.
If you want a part of it, you're gonna have to do what I say.' 'Okay. Shoot - not literally, chump.'
Ralf didn't smile. 'First, we'll leave your bag of lethal anecdotes in the alley where you dropped it. I saw that carry-bag. How many sappers have you got in it?'
'A Magnum.'
'Great. The neighbourhood kids'll love it.' Ralf stood up and put his pistol away. 'Next we're gonna find that old man I was talking with. He's got something of mine. After that, we'll talk percentages.
Jake?' Pantucci nodded, eyed the attache.
'Oh, yeah,' Ralf added, running his thumbnail along the length of his jaw. 'Don't underestimate me, cap. You're a lot bigger, but I'm very, very fast.'
They prowled the trenchtown for an hour, but there was no trace of Autway. Ralf decided to head up into the hills along the one path that was available. Four hours later, after much foraging through cypress groves and fern-matted glens, they heard the rattle of Autway's calabash.
Pantucci was restless and wanted to move towards the sound, but Ralf quieted him down, and he went off behind some bushes. Ralf moved up the trail a short ways and slipped into the chute of a granite outcropping that was hung with Spanish moss. Presently, Autway came padding along the trail. When Ralf burst out behind him, he bolted. His speed was incredible. If Pantucci hadn't been up ahead, he would have lost him.
Pantucci grabbed him by his mantle and threw him to the ground. Ralf came up quickly and pressed the barrel of his gun against the old man's ear. 'Where's my stone, gone-gone?''Dots not yours.'
Ralf swiped him across the face with the butt of his gun. 'Your life's not mine, either, but I'm gonna take that, too, if you don't turn over that stone.'
Autway's face was bleeding, and his one eye was open wide, red-webbed. 'I dawn have it.'
Ralf raised his gun to strike him again, but Pantucci moved to grab his wrist. Ralf rolled off in a blur, came up in a crouch with the Walther aimed at Pantucci's head. 'Belay that, cap!'
'Ralf, it's just a friggin' rock!'
'Mister, he laughed at me. He laughed at me hard. It's not a friggin' rock to him.'
'He was Huck Finnin' ya - making you think he got the better end.'
Ralf shook his head. 'Maybe. But I want that stone or I ain't leavin'.'
Pantucci lifted Autway to his feet by his ears. 'Awright, crabface, where is it? Talk fast and clear or I'll pop that eye like a grape.'
'I dawn have it. It's back dere.' He nodded over his shoulder.
'How far?'
'Far back. Deep in de forest.'
Ralf grabbed a shock of Autway's hair and jerked him around. 'Let's go get it.'
'Hold it, Ralf. He's gonna lead us into trouble. His boys are probably in lurch back there.'
Ralf opened his attache and took out the forty-five and the thirty-eight. He checked to see if they were loaded, then he took the knives and hand-grip out and threw them into the bushes. He shoved the attache to Pantucci. 'You carry Satan.' He put the Walther in its holster and the thiry-eight under his belt. The fortyfive he pressed against the back of Autway's head. 'Drop your rattle here and march.'
Autway undid his calabash and started up the trail. As they climbed higher, a stillness settled around them like a fog. Even the grass and the leaves were still as if lost in thought. The trees became larger, thick-boled old trees. After a while they became so dense that only a few threads of light came through. In that calm undersea light, dolmens and giant wheels hewn out of rock and carved with curious oghams began to appear among the trees, most of them half-buried or peering through luxuriant growths.
Soon Pantucci started getting restless again. He looked back over his shoulder. 'Ralf, we're being watched.'
'Is that right? Well, try to look your best.'
A kilometre later, the trail narrowed to a trace so tight they had to lean forward to pass. But there was a plangent breeze sifting through the forest.'How much farther?'
Autway waved his hand, a gesture like wind in a sapling. 'You go through dat brake up ahead and you dere. But go slow, man. Go slow.'
Pantucci pushed through a tangle of hedge growth, and Ralf shoved Autway after him. On the other side, they stopped and looked out across an expanse of pools with water green as fire. There were half a dozen of the
m, ellipsoid, mirror flat, separated by huge mamo mocked trees and grasslands swaying in a fumy and spiritous mist. Beyond them, the horizon jazed into jungle. A green glow hung in the sky, waving over the rim of the world.
Pantucci was gazing into the water, ensorcelled by pale sketches of coral shaped like ladders. There was a nutant look on his face. This is a dream,' he said.
It is eerie, Ralf thought, focusing on a drowsy sound - the whittled-down thunder of waves shogging to shore faraway. He looked hard at the glades of blue trees, some growing out of the water, bent like witches. He had to shake his head to snap out of it.
With the barrel of his gun, he turned Autway around. The gangan's face was calm and dark as amber.
'Where is it, pop?'
'With dat which came from it.' The seamed face grinned cretinously.
On the opposite side of the nearest pool, from behind a massive shaggy tree trunk, the long man with black skin emerged. He was naked, elongated, unreal, and there was a sheen on his shoulders that made them look like glass. It was a peculiar body light that addled the air around him. He glided through the grass like an apparition, his arms writhing, unjointed, undulant. Even as far off as he was, rounding the turn of the pool, it was obvious that he was not human. The flesh was crumbling off his bones like soaked bread, and the bones themselves were long and rubbery.
Ralf fired without thinking. The bullet stopped him. Or seemed to. But the wrinkled air around him kept coming. It was like a sheet of rain - static, warped air, transparent but vibrantly distorted. As it approached, a whistle, very high, far, faraway, twined in their ears. Before anyone could move, it became a shrill-pitched wail, a projectile nose-diving through the atmosphere. Then the trembling sheet of air swept over them, and the intensity jumped to a spinning siren. The whine became a needle skewed between their eyes, crashing them to the ground, fluttering rags. The ringing agony drilled into the bones of their teeth, shook vision to splinters, exploded louder with each heartbeat.
The shriek was white hot, and they knew it would kill them. Nyarlathotep was screaming.
Then, like a slamming door, the wailing stepped. But their ears kept roaring. They were deaf as sod and would have sat there in the rusted grass swaying like old women except for what they became aware was happening around them. All three of them saw it at once. Ralf quivered like a gong and Pantucci let out a pitiful moan. Autway began to laugh, then to howl.
Henley's black and distorted body was writhing on the ground in the most inhuman way, the head bending backward to the feet, the waist twisting full around. There was a vast greasy hole in its torso where the bullet had struck, and that gap was widening and ripping. The body was peeling away, cracking open like a pod, droozing a quivering cheesy bladder - the delirious, gelatinous body of Nyarlathotep.
It was massive. By some abominable infusion, it swelled to twice the size of the body it hatched from.
Its surface was covered with something sticky, a black sap, bubbling, running off at the sides, carrying with it a bed of pearls, shiny curdled clods of milk, thick clusters of eggs. Something like pinworms needled over the gummy black silk, glimmering with a rabid bacterial fire. The body it pulled from was reduced to a cake of filaments that crumbled and lapsed with blue volts to dusty embers cooking in a soft camarine light. Then the thick singed-grease odours wafted across the field to them, and Pantucci began to retch.
Ralf couldn't take his eyes off the thing. It was hovering a few meters off the ground, its jelly sac bloated with webs of blue-pulsing veins. Tendrils, lionred, fiayed open around mouthlike gaping seams that writhed below the bulbed body. The tentacles were pushing it off, into the air, and it was lifting, its hideous rippled hulk was rising up over the puddling mess of its cocoon.
Ralf heaved himself to his feet. He wanted to flee, to bolt like wind, but another horror had fixed him.
The pond was churning. Dense forms were rising to their shadows and breaking the surface.
Webbed appendages lashed among the foaming waters - fiat faces, lizard-eyed shark maws splashed towards the shore. Autway was standing before them, his arms outspread, his wild hair whipped by his ecstatic movements.
The forms that were bobbling towards the bank were soaked black with the leakage and seepings of a putrid hell. Autway was savagely dancing, and Ralf heard him - he knew it was impossible, his ears were gluey with blood - but nonetheless he heard his cracked voice vomiting its laughter in his skull: 'Nightroarer! Domn mine enemies. And corry me. Corry me afar de dream. Vever dos miroir!
O Nyarla! Sonde miroir! Nyarlathotep!' And then he was gone. A humped, bubbling gob lurched out of the pool and sprawled over him. For an instant, Ralf thought he could see his shocked, screaming face in the milky translucence, then there was only a red cloud in the midst of a throbbing amoebic thing.
Pantucci bellowed and clutched the attache. With a whipped run, he scampered along the rim of the pool towards the forest. A beaked, squid-headed mauler slobbered to shore and with gangling limbs pursued him. He was crying as he ran and, desperately, he heaved the attach~ away. But it was no good.
The creature was on him, all the seams and pleats of its throat fibrillating insanely as it hoisted him up with one pincered, blotched arm. Even after the greenscaled beak crushed him, he was kicking spastically, swivelling his arms.
Ralf almost choked on his fear. A gun in each hand, he backed off into the forest, blasting several rounds into a gaping eyeless sucker-mouth. He burst through the hedge and broke into a frantic clipped run. Howling and sobbing, he hopped among root-tangles, lashed through hanging vines, and slammed into a thick thorn bush, shredding his jellaba, tearing his flesh to be free, and kicking off into the gravedark forest. He could hear nothing. He was still deaf and too terrified to glance back. But there were vibrations. Dull, thudding, deadfall sensations that reached him through the ground.
Ralf lunged over the rotted shell of a tree, felt his leg catch on something, and saw the green-tangled ground jerk towards him. His guns flew out of his hands and vanished in the ferm growths. Rude hands banged him on to his back, and he stared up into the gnawed and lacerated face of Duke Parmelee. Hi-Hit Chuckie Watz was standing behind him, his face puffed up, scabby, the lower lip merely a crust. They were both holding heavy butcher's knives.
Wildly, Ralf tried to communicate with them in the forced medality of the deaf, but all that he could voice was whimpers. The Duke stooped to start in with his knife, but something beyond the trees distracted him. It was Hi-Hat who screamed first. Ralf saw his face stretch with horror as he shuffled backward. His foot tangled, and he fell to his back. Before he could rise, there was a blurred flurry, and a huge segmented bulk with frantic legs and membraneous wings descended on him. The Duke gawked bug-eyed and was still gawking when a lamprey with stalk-eyes lolled on to his back. He fled crazily this way and that, shrieking, trying to stab the slug-ball off his body, but it clung to him, melled into his flesh.
Finally, the slick mass swelled over his head, and he collapsed, still clutching at it.
While the Duke was convulsing, Ralf rolled off, bucked to his feet, and ran headlong into the clumsy hooked arms of something loathsome. The claspedforebrains of its head swung from side to side, and its mandibles swivelled with maniacal joy. But before it could crush him, Ralf unsprung his butterfly blade and slammed it into the shimmering bulk. He spun backward, wheeled crazily to get his balance, and then kicked off into a cloud of leaves.
On the other side was a steep bank, and Ralf plunged down it, head over heels, in a clatter of stones and dust. He splashed through rocky shallows and crashed to a stop against a thrust of boulder, his head and shoulders underwater. The cool current revived him, and he shuddered to his feet, teetered like an old man, and plopped back into the water.
Above him, among the high bank's shrubbery, he could see humps of things lumbering in and out of view. Quickly, he rolled to his belly and dragged himself out to the deeper water. The stream buoyed him and carried hi
m off.
Hours later, he came out of a faint and found himself washed upon a gritty shore. Pale ferns fronded nearby, and beyond them he could see the tin roofs and cardboard doorways of a trenchtown. He pulled himself to his feet, slowly, painfully, and limped towards higher ground. His ears were still whining, and his head felt heavy, but he could make out the shadow of sounds: the stream rushing over pebbles with a murmur that was almost song, the curse of gravel under his feet.
He staggered towards the town mindlessly, in a daze, his eyes small and shiny as a reptile's. His mind was shut, and he moved mechanically. The people who saw him coming shied away, except for the children who pelted him with stones and ran close enough to snag him with wire-strung tin cans and garbage. Ralf shuffled on, unaware, his face empty, his eyes drifting. He had sunk into his mind.
A day later, the local police picked him up outside North End. He was being baited by a pariah dog and kids with slings and crude blow darts. Though he had been lurching frantically from street to street, occasionally lashing out with a pitiful cry, he gave the police no trouble when they cuffed him to take him away.
Days afterward, his mind shuttered into place. It took a long minute for him to take in the stained and pitted walls. Then the cretinous look drained entirely from his features, and he hunched over, weeping.
When he had got hold of himself, he stood up by the bars of his cell. He could see in the faces of the police and his cellmates that he had been raving. They wanted to know what had happened to him, if it had been mushrooms or village anis that had gone bad.
Ralf waved all speculation aside, and in a halting, fragmented way, told them what he had seen in the hills. The police laughed, but his cellmates were quiet, eyes averted.
The next day they freed him. By then he regretted telling them anything. An officer from Port-au-Prince had been called to hear his story, and Ralf was afraid they'd somehow find out about the heroin and detain him. But the officer was only concerned about the exact location of the star pools, and Ralf told him.
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