Differently Morphous

by Yahtzee Croshaw

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  (Names redacted)

  25

  “Tremble in your comfort zones, people of the mundane world!” said the human-sized cloud of red smoke that was unfolding in the underground car park. “Diablerie has returned to—what is that thing doing here?”

  “What thing?” asked Alison.

  Diablerie flapped his cloak left and right until enough of the smoke had dispersed that she could see where he was pointing. “That! That infernal dollop of hellspawn!”

  “This is Shgshthx,” said Alison, in a hurt voice. “He’s a fluidic. I don’t think you’re supposed to say hellspawn anymore, Doctor.”

  “Diablerie bows to no authority!” He wrinkled his nose up and threw his cloak up over his face for the first time that day. “Are we called upon to exterminate a single shoggoth? Must Diablerie forever waste away on such crass trivialities?”

  “No! We’re investigating the murdered fluidic!” said Alison, getting between him and Shgshthx protectively. “I thought Shgshthx could help because fluidics seem to have a sort of psychic link.”

  “Investigate? Murder?” Diablerie snorted. “Afterwards perhaps we might investigate the matter of who murdered the mildew stain on the bathroom tiles. Hold! ’Twas the chambermaid! Another murder solved by Diablerie.”

  Alison left a sizable silence after he had finished, gaping with horrified disbelief. “Haven’t you heard . . . that fluidics are actual citizens now?”

  “Pah! Diablerie has higher concerns. Surely you do not propose to admit this foulness to my vehicle’s upholstery?”

  “I weawwy don’t want oo cause a fuss,” squelched Shgshthx, flutter-ing some stubby tentacles, the fluidic equivalent of anxious thumb twiddling.

  “No, it’s all right,” said Alison, opening one of the rear doors. “I bought one of those new fluidic car seats. See?”

  It wasn’t much more than a large tub with slots on the side to admit a standard seat belt, molded from plastic a shade of organic dark green that accompanied fluidic colors well. Shgshthx slithered across the concrete and poured himself into it, taking as much care as he could to avoid touching any other part of the car. It looked like reversed footage of a bird defecating.

  Diablerie eyeballed the fluidic as it arranged itself into the approximate shape of a sitting dog. “Elizabeth Lawrence herself gave Diablerie this task?”

  “Yes, to both of us,” said Alison, one hand on the driver’s-side door handle.

  Diablerie met her gaze. “Why?”

  Alison reddened. “Because it’s suddenly become quite important.”

  “Ugh.” Diablerie moved to the passenger door. “If Diablerie’s dark power must be squandered to serve the Ministry matriarch’s madness, then so be it. Diablerie will humor the shoggoth’s grievances.”

  “Um, you’re not supposed to say that word anymore, either, Doctor,” said Alison, as she took the driver’s seat and pulled the door closed behind her. “His name’s Shgshthx.”

  Diablerie scowled beside her, staring straight ahead. “I will humor this assignment,” he growled. “I will tolerate the presence of a blight within my sanctum. But Diablerie draws the line at giving the blight a name. Next it will be wanting to wear my hat, and none could foresee where it would end.”

  Alison let it drop. She keyed in the address of the tin mine in Dartmoor where Casin and Hesketh were theoretically waiting for them, then guided Diablerie’s car out of the underground car park and into the streets of London.

  The three occupants of the car sat in three subtly different silences, each occupying different points on the sullen–embarrassed spectrum. Diablerie sat with arms folded, glaring at the passing scenery, while Shgshthx rolled over and over in his bucket, farting self-consciously.

  When the car was on the motorway, and after the first of the now-expected honks of derision from more sensible vehicles had passed, Alison coughed nervously. “Doctor, can I ask you something?”

  “Have you forgotten the nature of our contract?” spat Diablerie. “You have no outstanding boons, girl.”

  Alison bit her lip. “Could I maybe get one in reserve?”

  Diablerie’s jaw dropped. “You offer a boon to me?”

  “Is that all right?”

  He shook his head, a perverse smile upturning his mustache. “Diablerie knows that the great negotiator shows not his hand, but you would do well to not bargain so freely with the forces of chaos. You have no understanding of what value a virgin soul carries in an open market. The contract is sealed. Ask your question.”

  “Um, okay. Do you think that, when a magically infused person gets possessed by an Ancient, is that necessarily bad?”

  Diablerie sucked in his cheeks for a moment, then touched his temples with his fingertips. “Girl, it is not that, in purchasing this question, you sold a cow for a magic bean. It is that this was your third and final cow, and you have completed a master’s degree in economics since the second.”

  “Seriously though,” pressed Alison. “If the person knows how to stop it but lets it happen anyway, isn’t that their choice?”

  “Girl, the last time you encountered a possessed tainted one, as far as Diablerie knows, it was only Diablerie’s quick thinking that saved you from being strangled to death.”

  Alison considered disputing this version of events, but resolved to stick to one argument at a time. “Yes, but should he have been locked up just for being possessed, or because he tried to kill me? Is it that possessed people are dangerous, or was he a dangerous person who just happened to be possessed?”

  “One hundred percent of the possessed tainted ones you have encountered have been hostile,” argued Diablerie, his dictatorial air tinged with amusement. “Speaking from the depths of Diablerie’s esoteric knowledge, your experience is by no means unrepresentative.”

  “Yes, but—everyone used to think the same thing about fluidics, right? Because no one ever seriously tried to understand them?”

  “I haff no opinyun,” added Shgshthx worriedly, whose enhanced fluidic senses offered a better sense for the emotions building up inside the car.

  “If you recall, girl, the communication with Aaron Weatherby opened with him attempting to bewitch our minds and attack our person with knives. And if the next sentence that flies from your mouth begins with the words ‘yes, but,’ then you will find yourself beneath the scorching blaze of Diablerie’s most fiendish ire.”

  “Y—well, we weren’t being completely upfront, either, were we? Maybe he didn’t think we’d give him a chance. I dunno, I just think maybe possessed people are only hostile because no one’s ever tried to treat them with respect and socialize them properly.”

  There was a thoughtful pause. Diablerie cocked his head and peered at her through one slitted eye. “To whom have you been speaking, girl?”

  “What?”

  “Thoughts such as these do not sprout unbidden in the bottomless cavern that is your mind. Someone must have placed them there. Whom?”

  “Nobody!”

  “Do not lie to a master trickster.” Diablerie allowed a little anger to burn the edges of his statement.

  Alison hung her head and surrendered immediately. “There’s this new adviser at the Department. She bought me dinner, and we had a really long talk. But I don’t see why that makes the point—”

  “Diablerie is calling in his boon,” he declared. “You are bound by the contract and helpless against Diablerie’s will. I command thee to stop talking for the duration of this drive. Thus the pact is sealed.”

  Alison clamped her lips shut to halt the protest as it rose from her throat, ballooning her cheeks stupidly. She wasn’t sure how much power the boon had, but she felt that, as with mental patients, little progress could be made with Diablerie by contradicting him. She focused on the drive, on keeping the car in the lane, and staying quiet.

  After a tense fifteen minutes, Shgshthx gave a little choking gurgle that was probably intended to be a po
lite cough. “Can we have the wadio on?”

  26

  Alison passed the time for the rest of the journey by memorizing the number plates of every car, as well as the obscene gestures made by the drivers. Several dull hours later, they reached the overgrown B-road turnoff in Dartmoor that led to the tin mine. Alison would have driven straight past it if Adam Hesketh hadn’t been waiting by the roadside to flag them down.

  “Oh, you brought a fluidic?” he said, as the three occupants of the car stumbled, stepped, and decanted themselves onto the grassy verge.

  “Is that okay?” asked Alison.

  “Yes!” said Adam quickly. “Perfectly okay with me. I just thought, you know, would it be all right with them? The trauma, I mean.”

  Alison regarded Shgshthx as he joyously hoovered up some discarded plastic bags on the roadside. “I think he already had all the trauma when it happened, from the psychic link they’ve got.”

  “Oh, right. Sorry. It’s just, you know. You never know when you need to be sensitive these days.”

  “Enough prattling, tainted one,” interjected Diablerie, who was still standing by the passenger door of the car with hand on hip. “Diablerie would resolve this farce swiftly.”

  “Um. Right. This way.” Adam began pushing his way through the undergrowth toward the fenced-off mine entrance, and Alison followed closely behind. Diablerie brought up the rear, walking stiff legged and straight, somehow avoiding every single piece of foliage with no apparent conscious effort.

  “Where’s Victor?” she asked, as one would probe a mouth ulcer to check for pain.

  “Waiting at the tunnel entrance,” said Adam, lifting his chubby legs high to avoid stinging nettles.

  Victor was sitting on a rusty metal drum turned on its side, staring at his phone like a monk in prayer. There was a crumpled carrier bag from the nearby service station at his feet, surrounded by discarded chocolate wrappers and energy drink cans. He glanced up when he heard Adam lumbering through complaining vegetation, and a sarcastic little smile tweaked the corner of his mouth.

  “Oh dear,” he said. “I didn’t realize this was a black-tie crime scene. How’s it going, Dabbers?”

  “Your mockery betrays your fear, child of taint,” answered Diablerie, throwing up his cloak with particular indignance. “You would not speak so easily were you facing Diablerie in a trial of psychic combat.”

  “Isn’t everyone a child of a taint?” said Victor, still smiling, addressing Adam and Alison. “Of something near the taint, anyway.”

  “Weak, dude,” said Adam.

  “Enough pleasantry,” growled Diablerie. He stalked straight past the mine entrance toward an ancient portacabin nearby. “I must gather my energies before we begin. In private.”

  “Maybe you should’ve gone before you left,” called Victor. His statement was punctuated by Diablerie violently slamming the portacabin door.

  “Is he in a bad mood?” asked Adam.

  “I don’t think he liked having to bring Shgshthx along,” said Alison tactfully. “I think he might be a bit antiprogress.”

  Victor boggled his eyes and framed his face in his hands. “Nooo! The Phantom of the Opera is a bit behind the times? That really doesn’t come across. Of course he’s antiprogress, you idiot. The bloody Treaty of Versailles was a bit newfangled for his taste.”

  “All right, sorry,” sighed Alison. She stared at the ground, awkwardly rocking on her heels as Diablerie’s usual strange vocalizations drifted through the flimsy portacabin door. “Hey,” she said, looking up. “You guys are magic infused, right?”

  Victor looked at the palm of his hand, as if needing to be reminded. “Er . . . yeah, turns out we are.”

  “Do you think possessed people should be allowed their freedom?”

  Victor used the same hand he had been staring at to pinch the bridge of his nose. “Oh, not you as well. Some crazy bint at the Department sent an email round this morning, and he hasn’t stopped going on about it.”

  “I happen to think she has a point!” said Adam, at an uncharacteristically high volume. “I never gave Arlgheen a chance, just because the school told me not to.” He casually pronounced the gh with a gurgling sound from the back of his throat. “And now I’m wondering if maybe she had something important to offer.”

  “Well, yeah, she was going to possess you and erase your being,” said Victor. “I might have appreciated that, come to think of it. Maybe she and I’d get along better.”

  “They don’t erase your being,” protested Adam. “Apparently it’s like you and the Ancient combine together to create a whole new being. You’re still you. It’s just you with the Ancient’s thought processes as well.”

  Victor’s expression darkened. “I got enough of an insight into Ifrig while he was keeping me awake back in the dorms, thank you very much. All that ‘murder your friends, burn the world’ stuff. Don’t think he’s got much to contribute to polite society.”

  Alison tilted her head, interested. “So your Ancients actually talk to you?”

  Adam waggled a hand horizontally. “Not in coherent sentences. It was like, whenever you used magic, you got this sort of impression of what they were thinking.” His gaze unfocused. “Arlgheen always seemed really sad.”

  “Yeah, I would be too if I had nothing but your thoughts to keep me occupied.”

  “You both went through the secondary school?” asked Alison.

  Adam shuddered, grimacing in memory. Victor folded his arms defensively. “Certainly did,” he said, with a hint of pride. “That’s the other thing the crazy bitch was going off about. You don’t agree with her, do you?”

  Alison tapped her index fingers together, glancing awkwardly to the side. “Wasn’t it, you know, a bit oppressive?”

  “Every day they made us walk around in circles for hours on end,” said Adam, staring at the ground.

  “Oh, don’t milk it. It was only two hours before lunch. Built up an appetite.”

  “Two hours is still hours on end! There was a monk with a megaphone shouting instructions, and we had to obey straightaway, ’cos if we didn’t we’d have to spend an hour in the observation pit . . .”

  “Hey, I’m not saying it was crumpets and rice pudding.” Victor tossed his head left and right, bored. “But it needed to be like that. The megaphone thing is about enforcing what voices are coming from outside your head and what aren’t. All I know is I went into the school with Ifrig trying to get me to set fire to everything, and by the time I got out, he’d given up. I don’t think we should mess with a winning formula.”

  “The point was maybe not all Ancients are like that,” said Adam.

  “Hashtag NotAllAncients.”

  “Wait,” said Alison. “The Ancients don’t talk to you anymore?”

  “No,” said Adam, looking down guiltily. “I think, after a while, they just sort of give up trying.”

  “That’s a bit sad,” said Alison.

  “Yeah. I never really thought about it until now.”

  Victor rolled his eyes. “Ugh. You are such a sucker. It’s only ’cos you got a girl Ancient who knew when to turn on the waterworks. Doesn’t mean she had any nicer plans for the world. Just proves she was smarter than Ifrig.” He turned his head towards the portacabin to end the argument and assume victory. “What the hell is keeping Dr. Caligari?”

  The portacabin door remained closed. Alison noticed that she could no longer hear Diablerie’s strange chanting. She assumed he had done enough gathering of energies and was now opportunistically using the portacabin for its intended purpose.

  “Let’s just start without him,” said Victor. “Don’t even know why we needed to wait for him in the first place.”

  “Do you know anything about crime-scene investigating?” asked Adam.

  “I can tell you this: I’m more qualified than him.” Victor jerked a thumb towards the still-silent portacabin. “Come on, we can go in and take some photos. Or just get Arkin to look around it, same thi
ng.”

  Alison wrung her hands nervously, the teacher’s pet being tempted to misbehave by her friends. “I don’t know,” she said. “This is a real murder, guys. We have to take it seriously.”

  Victor gave her a piercing look. “Do you really think the net amount of seriousness is going to increase with Diablerie involved?”

  Alison looked down and saw Shgshthx a couple of feet away, searchingly fluttering himself through the grass. “Hold on a second. Shgshthx, are you getting anything from out here?”

  “Yes!” gurgled Shgshthx. “Got thwee cigawette butts so fawr. Yum byum.”

  Alison forced herself not to glance up and see what kind of looks Victor and Adam were giving each other. “I meant, from the other fluidic. If you can tell us anything about the attack, or whatever.”

  “Oh. We weally don’t want oo make a fuss—”

  “I know, Shgshthx,” sighed Alison. “But . . . we do. You know? It’s important to us to find out who could be doing things like this. It’s . . . maybe it’s an individualist thing.”

  “Oew-kay.”

  Shgshthx flattened himself against the grass, turning into a huge, semitransparent cowpat, and Alison took a few steps back to give him room. A moment later, a hundred thin tentacles burst from his form, waving back and forth like a sea anemone on the ocean floor.

  “What’s it doing?” asked Victor, grimacing.

  “I think he’s searching,” said Alison, not looking away. “Shgshthx, have you got anything?”

  “Yesss,” said Shgshthx’s voice from the narrow mouth in the middle of the crowding tendrils, lent a sibilant quality by the acoustics of his new shape. “I can feeeel Shgshthxsss. He’ssss not awone.”

  “Who’s with him?” asked Adam.

  “He can’t sssee them.” A small clump of the tendrils began to move more quickly and urgently, and the rest began to fold towards them in waves. “He’sss being chasssed.”

  “Through the mine?” prompted Alison, after Shgshthx went silent for a moment.

  The tendrils stiffened for a moment. “He’sss afwaid. He thinksss the perssson chasssing him iss going to kiww him. He can hear footssstepsss. There’sss pain. Sssomething ssstingsss in hisss ssside.”