Southern Gods

by John Hornor Jacobs

  Ingram moved forward, raising the sword.

  “Bull. Wait.” Hearing her own voice, Sarah realized she sound shrill, on the verge of hysteria.

  He stopped. “What?”

  “I know him, I think.”

  He looked at her for a long while, too long, as the dead boy walked down the long room toward them. Bull dipped his head in acknowledgement and waved them back.

  Andrez touched her lightly on the shoulder, his soft eyes searching her face. “Come, Sarah. We will wait for Bull out here.”

  She looked back at the boy. He was closer now, and in the light. His gray skin looked waxy, mask-like. The open O of his mouth was as black as the opening of a well, and his eyes were pure white. As she watched, his waxy skin shifted, as if something beneath the skin was moving. The mask of the boy’s face reassembled itself into one of pure hatred.

  Somehow the boy was even more pitiable now that some dark thing inhabited him, forced him to move.

  They take. That’s all they do, these petty gods. They take from us and give nothing back.

  The realization did not give her the fire of outrage, the strength of the desperate. She felt only an overwhelming sadness.

  She let Andrez pull her through the open door, and he held his pistol tightly, knuckles white, as they waited for Ingram.

  There was a loud grunt and a bellow, and then Ingram was back, holding his hand. It dripped with blood.

  “Mercy didn’t work too well,” he said. He tried to laugh but it failed in his throat, and he opened his hand to show them the ruin of it.

  His smaller fingers were missing and the two stumps pumped blood. Ingram shrugged, raising his big shoulders and letting them fall. “Get the tape.”

  They wrapped his hand in gray hurricane tape, and Ingram stood and switched the sword to his left hand.

  “We still have more boat to search.”

  They moved forward, back through the galley, and forced open the next door, exposing a musty barracks. The lights didn’t work in there and Sarah, the stink of carrion filling her nose, desperately searched their duffel for a flashlight. When she found it, the beam was pitifully small in the darkness.

  A bed held a graying, fly-swarmed corpse. And the light revealed another door on the port bulkhead.

  The latch moved stiffly under Ingram’s hand. Using his weight, he shoved down on the handle and shouldered it open.

  Brightness from the room streamed out over them, casting a wedge of light into the ranks of bunk beds. The room was lit from grimy round porthole windows and the soft yellow glow of electronic equipment. Wires crisscrossed the small chamber floor in a morass. The cables fed through a porthole, leading to the fore of the boat. A table held a microphone and turntable, still spinning. Sarah’s heart leapt in her chest. The music!

  Ingram stood over the turntable and, with one hand, swept the electronic gear from the surface onto the floor in a barrage of sparks and smoke. The room filled with the stink of ozone and burning rubber.

  Andrez moved into the room further, walking toward the door in the far wall. Passing the table, the priest looked to his side and jumped, jerking away from the corner hidden by the table.

  Sarah moved around the table and saw what—who—was there.

  Elizabeth Rheinhart huddled in the corner, hair white. Any remnant of sanity had been driven from her. She gibbered silently, her glazed eyes roaming the corners of the room, her bleeding fingers tracing bloody doodles on the wall.

  Stepping forward, Andrez moved to Elizabeth and put his hands on the woman’s shoulders, as if to comfort her.

  She whipped around and sprang from her crouched position, fastening bleeding hands on the priest’s neck. He bowled over, crashing into Sarah and sending her reeling into the wall, banging her head on the porthole’s rim. Elizabeth ripped violently at the little man, fists flying. Her hands fell with such a preternatural speed Sarah, head spinning from the blow against the wall, had trouble following her mother’s movements. She saw, through what felt like gauze, her mother leaning forward and biting into the priest’s cheek while Andrez’s hands beat a frantic tattoo on her face, her head, desperately trying to fend her off.

  Behind Elizabeth, the wreckage of Sarah’s mother, she perceived Ingram moving glacially, his sword coming up. Sarah threw herself in front of the man, even as her mother ripped at the priest. Ingram swept Sarah away with his wounded arm, pushing her once again against the wall. He grabbed a handful of her mother’s hair and yanked her viciously off Andrez. Throwing her as easily as he would a rag-doll, he tossed her across the table that had held the microphone and electronic gear.

  Sarah’s chest heaved.

  “Mother!” Her voice boomed in the close confines of the radio room. It had a strength she didn’t feel.

  “If there’s anything left of you in there, stop! Listen!”

  The thing that had been her mother paused, cocked her head like some sort of predatory bird, and blinked slowly, her mouth dripping with Andrez’s blood.

  “You bargained away Franny, Momma. For that, I can never forgive you. But if you stop now and help us get her back, maybe—”

  “Maybe?” Elizabeth voice was like gravel, harsh and hoarse. But even then, recognizable. Full of contempt.

  “It takes the end of the world for my miserable daughter to show real strength. Or offer me forgiveness.”

  “You could go to your grave without this terrible thing on your soul—”

  Elizabeth chuckled, a harsh phlegmy sound. “My soul? Have you been listening to this little priest?” She pointed a clawed finger at the Andrez. Sarah’s mother’s face curled into a smile. A smile full of sharp teeth. “Have you? Did he not tell you?”

  She laughed again. Slowly, she turned her bloody claw and tapped her chest. “There is only this. Only this! The flesh! Nothing else. Why do you think they war over us, the godlings? Because the living is all there is! They must infest us to assure their own survival. And I’m not ready to leave this husk.”

  Giving a bloody grin, Elizabeth vaulted onto the table as if to defy gravity and landed with her legs spread wide, arms out like a wrinkled and desiccated wrestler. Her tongue flicked in and out of her mouth, snakelike. Then, cackling, she leaped over Ingram’s grasp and landed on top of Andrez. His limbs jerked like a marionette with its strings cut.

  Sarah’s arm acted of its own accord, lancing out and hitting her mother with the flashlight. Batteries, glass, and metal flew in all directions. Elizabeth whipped her grisly head around and fixed her eyes on Sarah.

  Something in Elizabeth changed. Her skin darkened and her face began to elongate. She jumped backward, away from Andrez, then climbed the wall and hung upside down from the ceiling.

  She was becoming a wolf. A hideous black thing, with snout and hands, nude of fur but obsidian and oily, thick with muscle. And deadly teeth. An image of the obsidian child that screamed obscenities and fled into the streets of Podgorica, a world away in Montenegro, flashed in Sarah’s mind.

  “He is coming.” The new shape of her mouth made the words indistinct. “You can’t stop him. The world devourer. The lover of destruction. Coming. I will be his whore. His wife.” Her tongue flicked in and out. “His servant.”

  Lightning fast, she leapt at Sarah, who stood, dumbfounded as her mother transformed into this thing.

  Ingram’s fist slammed her to the floor of the cabin. His foot lashed out viciously, catching the black thing that had once been Sarah’s mother in the chest.

  Ingram moved before she could begin another attack, grabbing the thing by the neck and hoisting her into the air. She clawed frantically at his arms, drawing furrows in his already bloody skin.

  He slammed the pommel of the sword into her face, and she went limp in his hand. He tossed her across the room, back into the corner they had found her.

  “No!” Sarah screamed. She scrambled to where her mother had fallen.

  “Momma!” she screamed, cradling her mother’s limp form. Blood s
treamed from Elizabeth Rheinhart’s nose, her eyes, her ears. Her form mutated, changed. Her skin became pink and white once more. Her body vibrated, shaking and spasming. After a while she stilled, the tremors leaving her limbs.

  Sarah closed her eyes and wept.

  Ingram went to Andrez and helped him up. A quarter-sized hunk of flesh was missing from his cheek, pumping blood. The priest’s eyes and cheeks had already swelled horribly, turning purple. Andrez spat blood to the floor, and two teeth pinged off the metal.

  Woozy, unsteady on his feet, Andrez gripped Ingram’s arm. Sarah looked at the priest, his gory mouth, then back down to her mother.

  No more tears for this… this… thing. She sold my baby to become some Old God’s whore. She deserved to die.

  She shoved her mother’s corpse away and stood.

  She looked at Ingram. Gore covered his torso. Blood streamed from wounds on his right arm. The bandage covering his missing fingers was no longer spotted with red, it was soaked. Sarah reached out and touched his shoulder, concern in her face.

  Ingram’s eyes searched hers. He leaned forward.

  In her ear, he whispered, “Don’t cry for me. I chose to be here. And so did the priest. And so did you, and so did your mother, for that matter.”

  He swallowed, glancing at the priest who was touching his face gingerly, lost in his own pain.

  “Just so you know… being with you, with Franny has been… it’s changed me. I feel like I could become a good man with you. We could be good together.”

  Andrez cleared his throat. His voice sounded different, the plosives coming strangely. “It’s been hours now. We have to move.”

  Ingram straightened. “You’re right.”

  He moved to the door, and peered through the porthole.

  “Looks like we’re right under the pilot house. There’s the stairs leading up.” He turned back to them. “It’s time to finish this. Whoever’s steering this damned boat will be in the pilot house. We’re gonna go in there and get Franny back.”

  At that moment, the boat lurched, sending them bouncing off the metal hull.

  “Feel that, Bull?” Andrez asked, eyes wide.

  “Yeah. We hit something, submerged tree probably.”

  “No, do you feel it?”

  Sarah nodded. “Yes. Something’s changed. Something’s happened.”

  Andrez shook his head. “We have to hurry. They’re trying to bring something through. This feels like Godshatter. But worse.”

  “Let’s go.” Ingram lifted his sword.

  “I can’t find my gun, Bull. I must’ve dropped it.”

  He faced Sarah and shook his head. “Well, it’s too late to go back in there.” He looked down, as though checking himself one last time. “Stay behind us, Sarah. If you see anything you can use as a weapon, pick it up. When we go out this door, you’ll both need to be right on my ass. I’m going out and up the stair and through the door, even if I have to knock the bastard down.”

  “Let’s go get Franny,” Ingram said.

  Ingram turned, opened the door, and moved quickly into the gray light of day. Andrez scrambled behind him, and Sarah followed as best she could, keeping close behind the little man.

  The shore was nearer now—brown and green foliage whipping past, thirty yards off the starboard bow—as the barge took a large crook in the river. The wind ripped through Sarah’s clothes and she smelled the river, like dead fish and dead men and river mud.

  The three raced around a short dividing wall and mounted the stairs to the pilot house. Ingram took the stairs two at time, sword out, the muscles in his back rippling.

  At the top of the stairs, he stopped and looked at his companions.

  The instant he turned, she saw everything about him, his pain and loneliness, his determination and viciousness, his wounds and fiercely beating heart. She felt her heart swell and rise to meet his.

  Ingram nodded to her, then wrenched the handle down and shoved open the door. Andrez pushed his body into motion after him, and Sarah followed.

  Her senses slowed, and she felt as though she moved through water, everything happening with a dreamlike intensity. Her perceptions became almost mechanical, ticking off details as if she was inventorying a still-life.

  A room. Two men—both living—one by a table and the other at the pilot’s wheel, backlit by river and sky. The light streaming through the windows, thin and bloody. Ingram stepping forward, filling the space with his presence. Andrez moving toward the pilot, raising his pistol. The blood spattering the walls and windows glistening in the weak half-light from outside. The room smelling of iron and incense and…

  She felt her pulse throbbing in her temples, her chest heaving. A panic filled her, suffusing all of her awareness, senses distilled down in to short, sharp shocks. Her mind registered what was in the middle of the room.

  Franny lay splayed on the table, surrounded by candles and incense. Her once bright blue eyes shone wide and horrified and dim, her mouth gaped in a rictus of pain and fear. Her flaxen hair ringed her face in a soft halo, darkened in places by blood. Her delicate fingers—once so chubby as they grasped Sarah’s fingers—curled inward towards the nails that fixed her to the table.

  Too late. They were too late.

  They’d split Franny from vagina to throat and spread her ribcage to display her organs in gory loops. She died terrified. Her corpse gleamed red in the low light of the pilot house. Sarah could feel her mind breaking as she gazed on the remains of her daughter.

  Where Franny’s heart should have been was a swirling blackness like a whirlpool. And in the instant that Sarah’s mind comprehended her daughter’s fate, the darkness grew. It pulsed, expanding, sending small tendrils of blackness spilling over the edges of Franny’s chest cavity. At its edges, phantoms twisted like tentacles coalescing from smoke and vapor and blood. It grew.

  The Pale Man stood beside Franny’s body chanting and moving his hands in obscure patterns. His nakedness didn’t register on Sarah immediately, the blood caking his body—his legs, chest and flaccid penis—gave the impression of clothing. He looked up at Sarah with blue, piercing eyes that held her. His lips withdrew to show yellowed teeth and a black tongue.

  Oun tulu ia denu fin ia.

  Everything happened all at once. From the corner of her eye, she saw the silhouette that stood at the pilot’s wheel turn and bat away Andrez’s gun as it fired. The priest fell backward and the pilot—a dark-skinned man with tight kinky hair and a well-groomed mustache—raised a pistol and snarled at them, firing. In the flash of Andrez’s gunfire, Sarah saw that the pilot was as naked as the Pale Man.

  The pilot’s gun barked three times quickly, flashing in the room, deafening her. Sarah stood tranfixed. Red flowers blossomed on Andrez’s back and his skull. A bloody mist remained in the air as the priest slumped to the floor.

  Ingram bellowed wordlessly and lurched toward the pilot. The pilot wheeled, brought the gun up into Ingram’s stomach, and fired again. The larger man jumped, his body jerking with the gunshot. Another bloody flower blossomed, this time from Ingram’s back.

  Oun tulu ia denu fin ia!

  Bringing up his mangled right arm, Ingram grabbed the pilot’s throat. Before the man could pull the trigger again, Ingram raked the sword across the man’s face, cutting deeply into the pilot’s cheek and peeling off the man’s features—his nose, his lips, his brow—like a butcher denuding a pig of skin. A high-pitched scream pierced the air. The air whistled and burbled in the open wound of the pilot’s face. Where his nose had been was now only white cartilage and blood. Sarah couldn’t tell if the sound was the pilot’s screams or her own.

  As Ingram raised the sword again, to drive it into his eye, the pilot squeezed the trigger convulsively, and Sarah saw Ingram’s body jump once more. He screamed and shoved the sword home, impaling the man through the mouth. Spattered with red, Ingram fell.

  “Bull!” Her voice didn’t sound like her own anymore. He toppled over as she reach
ed him. He hit the floor heavily, coughing crimson at the impact.

  “Get…” The words burbled in his throat. “Get the Pale Man.”

  She realized that the chanting had stopped. She stood and whirled. The Pale Man watched her over the body of her dead daughter.

  “Now, at the end of all things, it would be a Rheinhart to thwart me,” the Pale Man said.

  Sarah gasped.

  “Wilhelm!”

  The Pale Man grinned and flicked the black tongue in his mouth.

  “Yessss,” he hissed. Then suddenly he coughed, a deep hacking sound coming from someplace further than his chest. Blood darkened his lips.

  “I was once Wilhelm Rheinhart. And you are my blood. And so was she.”

  Sarah’s eyes burned with the gunsmoke in the room. She brought up her hands to her chest and glanced wildly about, looking for something to use as a weapon. In the smoke, she couldn’t see Andrez’s or the pilot’s guns. Ingram must have landed on his own sword as he fell. She clutched her chest, felt hardness there, and remembered.

  “She was…” The Pale Man smiled, bloody lips like heated and fluid wax. “She was blood of my blood? My niece. My great niece. Ah. That explains why it was so sweet. Her pain… exquisite.” He shook his head. In the light, his skin looked like paraffin, waxy and inhuman.

  “But it’s too late now. He’s coming over the threshold.”

  Sarah looked down at Franny’s remains. The blackness spilled over the sides of her daughter’s chest cavity like water flowing from a high place. It spread out from the table and lapped at the walls. Sarah felt the cold of the darkness touching her legs. As she watched it, her perceptions skewed, tilting sickeningly. For an instant, she felt like she stood at the precipice of a gigantic vortex, massive and unknown. The rim of the abyss. At the center, she sensed something vast and monstrous moving through limitless dark spaces.

  “No,” Sarah said, raising her eyes from her daughter’s corpse. “No.”