Eight Black Offerings

by Lamb, Robert

  "Maybe so…”

  He jerked the branding iron out with a shower of sparks.

  "Now, we've got six more tattoos to remove before the interrogator arrives. They're sending her up from the deep as we speak."

  "You motherfucker! you--"

  "Shhh. The more you move, the more this is gonna hurt."

  Paxton motioned to the shadows and a large, shirtless black man walked into the room. Even against the dark skin of his chest, the Dagonistic emblem stood out like a curse. A white guy, as good as his twin otherwise, followed close behind.

  "Hold him down for me, boys."

  ***

  At some point he passed out from the pain. He had no memory of them unshackling his neck to burn the mark off his throat, or of them roasting his scalp and forehead into a landscape of blisters.

  Seven wounds. Seven dripping chakras of pain.

  He lay naked in the same spot, free of the iron collar but barely able to move. Each breath fired a web of shooting pains through his side.

  He glanced over to his clothes, to the pocket with the little black bottle in it. A few drops and maybe he could think clearly, maybe it would collapse some of the pain…

  He heard footsteps and looked up to see a hulking smouthie in ragged coveralls shamble into view: glassy eyes, wide mouth, visible gill creases in the neck. A few blond chin whiskers were all that remained of his hair. The hybrid stared dumbfounded at him, inbred and genetically impoverished -- a half-retarded larval hint of worse things down the pipe.

  In one hand it held what looked like a machete.

  A second figure appeared beside the smouthie -- someone he instantly knew to be his interrogator.

  He could feel it in his balls.

  A thick head of black curls crowned her slender skull. Unlike her smouthie companion, her wide eyes seemed pooled with a chilling intellect. She smiled at him, purple lips paring back from not-quite-human teeth.

  Just sent her up from below…

  "Hello, Mr. Joll," she said, her voice practically resonating with subliminal seduction. "You're going to tell me everything…"

  With one delicate flourish, she removed the black cloak from her shoulders to reveal a slender, nude body, moist and with all the pigmentation of a corpse. He could see the map of dark veins beneath her translucent skin, as well as bones.

  She had too many ribs.

  They’d clearly called this Siren up from the deep before her transformation was complete -- a fact that didn't dull her power in the least.

  Shivering, Joll glanced down to her pudendum -- to the hairless crevice and its ripple of nestled purple flesh.

  To his horror, he felt the slightest stiffening in his groin.

  No, no…

  "You're going to tell me exactly what happened," she said.

  "You're going to confess crimes you haven't committed yet. You're going to beg us to rape you on the altars of Father Dagon and Mother Hydra…"

  She squatted down slowly in front of him with flagrant intent, her dripping sex opening wide before his eyes.

  "You'll die groveling and ejaculating" she said, "a degraded curiosity in the prisons of many-columned Yin'Havathla. But before that point you'll vomit up your soul to me."

  He was shaking now -- he felt her awful power pressing in on him. He tried to look away from her ghastly-yet-tantalizing body, tried to focus on the pain of his own burns.

  He squinted his face and felt fresh puss ooze from the wound on his forehead.

  Explosive pain.

  She was laughing.

  "Oh dear," she said. "I see you're somewhat conditioned. The Oilmen nursed you on MDMA5 and the caresses of prostitutes, but no matter. We've broken your ilk before."

  He strained the muscles in his chest, felt the nerves explode anew. He gasped, screamed and collapsed face first.

  Dear God, if he could just make it to his clothes -- to that horrible fucking little bottle!

  "How much of that training do you remember?” she asked, “The throbbing black phallus of empire tearing into you as you sucked the cock of surgical colonialism? Does that rise to the surface of your dreams at least?”

  He stared intently into the shoggoth stone beneath him and refused the temptation to look back up to here. Then he felt her fingers on the nape of his neck, cold and wet.

  "Do you remember the fallen priest of Dagon, limbless and chained? Do you remember the imprisoned fragment of Ubbo-Sathla?"

  He moaned, memory fragments tearing through him. He remembered thrusting into…

  …shuttering, glistening pillar of black ooze… tremulous… ever changing… blasphemy with a thousand orifices, a thousand cresting eyes…

  "Do you remember the taste?"

  He started to rise, but doubled over again, vomiting nothing, chocking on mere spittle.

  "I am an offic…" he choked, "an official rep-representative of U-"

  "I need more," she cooed. "I need to know why you traveled here with an assassin. Who let it happen? What did they promise you in return?"

  "I don't know shit!" he gasped. "Why don't you tell me what happened to Varney?"

  "I sense that's connected. First a spy, then an assassin.

  "Fuck you!"

  “Yes.”

  He dared to look back up at her. She still squatted in front of him, running one slender finger back and forth in the gape of her sex. She brought the dripping finger up to her lips.

  "Such bravery…" she said, licking viscous gel from her long nails. Her eyes narrowed. "I sense something… foreign in you."

  With the nimble movements of a dancer, she rose back to her feet and walked over to his clothes, narrow ass jiggling with each calculated step. To his horror, she stooped down and pulled out the little glass bottle from his belongings.

  "Oh my," she said. "What is this?"

  He opened his mouth to lie, but nothing came.

  "You need it, don't you?" she asked. "Looks like we both need something."

  She walked back over and pulled out the stopper. As he squirmed, she placed one bare foot to either side of his body, towered over him like a colossi.

  He looked up in horror and lust at her sex, at the tautness of her belly and the looming swell of her purple-veined breasts.

  She raised the bottle and began to pour the contents over her chest -- drizzling thick, black drops across her chest. With her other hand, she began to massage it into her skin, down her belly and into the slick of her groin.

  He knew her accompanying moan was pure theatrics, yet it sank the hooks even deeper into the primal reaches of his brain.

  She threw the empty bottle into the shadows and squatted down on him.

  "No!"

  "Drink of it…" she hissed.

  And before he knew it, she had his arms down against the ancient tiles. Her strength was preternatural. She dangled her pendulous breasts over his face, her bruise-colored nipples dripping with the precious, oil-black ichor.

  The blood of gods…

  "It will make you strong again," she said, ghosting them over his grimacing lips. 'It will make you virile…"

  His lips and tongue gave in, seemed to move of their own volition.

  Distantly, he felt himself stiffening, aching with rising desire as the siren's pheromonic weapons continued to cut through his jaded, callous shell.

  But he also felt the drug begin to take effect almost instantly. A mistake on her part -- and likely the last chance he’d get.

  "Yes," she said, crawling forward so that his lips moved along the cool, drug-slick surface of her belly. "Now tell me what you know of NASA and Nyarlethotep…"

  His tongue stole the thick gob that had collected in her navel, driving the fear further away, sharpening his mind -- even as his cock twitched blood-gorged and erect.

  "Tell me, ape, how you came to cover for a Mi-Go assassin…"

  Now! It has to be now!

  "Tell me what deals your masters made with the agents of the outer dark…"

&
nbsp; Her groin hovered hot and dripping over him now. It was all he could do to resist smothering himself in it.

  He reached his hands up underneath to cup her ass. Then shoved the siren up and over him.

  He bolted -- scrambled like a dog for the pile of clothes. His wounds screamed at him.

  He heard her laughing behind him, heard the smouthie grunting as it rushed after him.

  He skinned his knees over the shoggoth runes as he fell again, but he was there. He turned over the discarded pants, grabbed the thick brochure from the back pocket.

  He placed his thumb over the redhead’s face and slid his ring finger over the counter point on the back of the brochure. He didn't even feel the two minute implants in his digits fire. Nanoids in the brochure activated and the pages seemed to collapse, crumpling in to form a different shape entirely.

  He felt the shadow of the guard fall over him and rose up with an arching slash.

  The razor-sharp knife in his hand looked like a papier-mâché stage prop -- part of the redhead's face here, a jumble of letters there. And it nearly took the fucker's head off.

  Joll roared in rage and the guard fell clawing at the flapping gash in its throat. Blood sloshed down its coveralls and over the inhuman tile work, forming dark pools.

  The siren was rising up from the floor.

  He flipped the deceptively hefty blade into throwing position.

  The blade flew like a charm, weighted just enough to cover the necessary distance.

  It vanished into her right eye socket.

  She took one more step and then stopped, wavered as if she suddenly remembered something important. Then she feel face-first onto the tiles like so much dead fish.

  Panting, bleeding, and arching a massive hard-on against his heaving belly, Joll stumbled over to her corpse. The drug was surging through him now -- way more than he'd ever taken in one sitting. He flipped her over and began digging the hilt of nanoid blade out of her eye socket with his fingertips.

  He looked down at the black Onii Kuro smeared over her groin, jelled in the tantalizing crevice.

  Fuck…

  He needed all the strength he could get if he was going to make it out of there, right?

  Fuck…

  He faced uncertain odds, didn't he?

  With surgeon-still hands, Joll parted the dead siren's legs. Then he dipped his head to drink from her warm font.

  ***

  He lost track of time.

  In the perfect calm brought on by the Onii Kuro, it seemed completely logical to go ahead and dispel his irritating cravings and rid himself of the distracting erection. His system purged, what chance would any other sirens have against him during his escape?

  Jesus, he'd never taken this much of the drug before.

  He finished with her body. He had no idea how long it took.

  He pulled on his pants, fished the cyanide-cap cigarette out of his box of smokes, and slipped it into his back pocket. He picked up the knife, flicked the last smear of brain from its hilt and began his way back up through the maze.

  When he came to an antique mirror in a hallway, he stopped long enough to examine his horrid reflection. He raised the tip of the nanoid blade to his chest.

  There was no pain. It was all lost to the dark reaches of the drug.

  "Fuck every last one of you fish-frog mother fuckers," he grated under his breath.

  When he lowered the blade again, a bleeding elder sign gleamed on his left breast.

  He moved on. He had to get back to the sub, had to get back to the surface and warn them.

  Warn them what?

  That the Deep Ones suspected UDEX of moving against them? That they feared something enough to torture an official UDEX representative and do god knew what with a key board member?

  And just what was all that about NASA? What the fuck was Mi-Go? Who would the Deep Ones possibly fear? There were the Elder Signs of course, but that was all tied up in old myths about the Outer Gods -- the sworn enemies of the Deep Ones' ridicules sea deities, Father Dagon and Mother Hydra.

  But all that horse shit was just the primitive belief system of a degenerate, subhuman species.

  Wasn't it?

  He thought again of the girl, of the horrible claw-like appendages that had butchered one of UDEX's oldest board members right before his eyes. He remembered the whispering sound he had heard while he was in the shower.

  Why didn't you hear the hatch opening? You heard a faint fucking whisper but not the fucking hatch?

  Was Mi-Go a rival corporation? Perhaps offering nuclear fusion or some other new energy to end the reliance on shoggoth-bored oil wells? To say nothing of the transgenic population surge.

  His mind raced with the drug. He barely noticed as he stepped over body after slaughtered body in the maze of corridors, some already knee-deep in chilling seawater. Everywhere he turned, there were more smouthies split open from dick to chin whiskers, guts strewn like party streamers in the cold, silent halls of the tomblike facility.

  He passed a tank like Lady Marsh's, likewise reduced to shattered glass and violated tumor meat within. It was difficult to distinguish what he was looking at, but it appeared that something had sawed off the top of its malformed skull and hollowed out the brain.

  When he finally made his way through the silent audience hall, he passed the naked corpse of Phil Paxton, face down, in flagrante delicto with the corpse of the headless male siren.

  His spine had been laid open.

  Mi-Go…

  Had the entire station been massacred? How much time had he wasted with the siren?

  What if the Deep Ones suspected him of doing all this? Or UDEX of ordering the attack?

  And what if the world above blamed the deep ones?

  Maybe it was the drugs, but for a moment of pure clarity, he envisioned the possible future with heart-stopping certainty: an open war of extermination between the surface and the deep, rapidly rising sea levels…

  He had to get back. His account might quell the brewing storm.

  He crossed the walkway over the burning shantytown, heaved himself through the cargo doors and sent them rolling shut behind him.

  He was halfway through the cargo hold when he realized he was following a trail of blood. He followed it though the hold and towards the cabin -- towards the override controls for emergency undocking.

  And then he saw her.

  Mara.

  She stood with her back to him, long blond hair falling like a shroud across her back as she tended to the contents of an open shipping crate. Blood dripped from her hands.

  Human hands.

  "Mara?" he asked, unsure what he was doing.

  As he walked closer, he heard the groan of the docking machinery already disengaging. He watched her slip a pulpous mass of gore-streaked brain into the top of a silver canister. Greenish fluid slopped out onto the floor and there was a spark of strange light from within. A musical chime filled the air as the canister’s lid sealed shut.

  Joll noticed that the open crate contained a number of wigs and several curious waxen masks. In the uncertain lighting of the cargo hold, they seemed to twitch.

  As if they were alive.

  "What's happening?" he asked, and felt his voice strangely echoed. "What--"

  Mara turned around to face him and Joll looked into the eyes of another pale, jaundiced countenance, another mask that twitched with a perfect mimicry of human life.

  This one had an elder sign on its forehead, as well as a pair of hard eyes he knew all too well.

  It placed one feminine hand on his shoulder -- the same it had caressed him with -- and he saw the skin loosen momentarily like a great, fleshy shroud.

  A membranous wing wrapped around an alien limb.

  Then it flexed into the shape and texture of Joll's own arm, Jesus tattoo and all.

  He looked back into the doppelganger eyes of the waxen mask, and realized that this was this face UDEX suits would see in some distant war room. Those u
n-bloodied lips would give an altered account of what happened on Marina Station, all in the interest of unimaginable ends.

  What is it about the human face that requires a prosthetic?

  The wings so perfectly mimic the rest…

  Joll felt a sharp tearing in his abdomen, a strange release of pressures in his gut. Only the slightest tinge of pain surfaced above his drugged calm.

  Such a lifelike mask…

  "Everything ends," the being said in a stolen voice. "Every process runs its spiral headlong course."

  God of Wounds

  The woman’s breasts were but slight dabs of flesh against ribs -- probably just large enough to suck whole into your mouth, to flick the nipple with your tongue, hardening it, raising it, changing it with each succulent saliva swirl.

  Not that size was of any real consequence. The breast, after all, was just a delivery system for the nipple. And these, brought to full, thimble-sized arousal by death’s quick tongue, were undeniably alluring. The diameter of the areolas was just a little greater than that of a half-dollar, the flesh surrounding them soft and pallid. They were barely touched by the blood at all.

  The rest of the dead girl’s beauty plunged sharply into carnage as Detective Quinn’s gaze moved down her torso, through the caked blood on her stomach and into the dark ruin of her genitals: slashed, lacerated, no longer even remotely human.

  The bank of lights they'd dragged in stood off to the side like some kind of leering, tripedal insect. It filled the dark room with a steady humming. The glow left little to the imagination, illuminating the twisting topography of every wound in gleaming detail.

  The remnants of a bloody stream, now still and stagnant with black coagulation, ran down from between her spread legs. It had cut a swath through the dust, down the tiled flooring and into one of the grated, circular drains in the abandoned locker room.

  The place smelled of blood and dust.

  Her back, stiff with rigor mortis, arched awkwardly up from the floor. Her palms and curled fingers too seemed captured in frozen movement. Her body looked imprisoned in a crescendo of pain or ecstasy -- as if death had released her during the apex of sensation, leaving only this cicada’s shell.

  There were, of course, plausible reasons her spine might have set like that. Quinn imagined her wrapped in plastic, draped over the wheel well of a truck. Alternately, he saw her killer bending the body over carefully arranged heaps of clothing to ensure the rigor set the way he wanted it. Yet his initial impression was hard to shake. It reminded him of foot cramps during sex and nitrous hits on E.