‘R’luhhor mgepah, r’luhhor ah, ng r’luhhor ahor ah—’
Tom’s cry failed but his mouth continued to move. He shoved at the thing that had pretended to be Father James, sending it staggering backwards, but it didn’t let go, and Tom went with it. He jerked free before he fell into its embrace.
“Friend, do not…do not run—” It giggled, extending a violated arm in a parody of warmth. The holes it wore as eyes were without emotion.
The midnight cloak broke apart, sending obscure shapes out into the forest in a tidal wave, where they then rose from the ground and pushed back through the trees and ferns and toetoe until they crowded up against the road. Terrible, indescribable things, shapeless conglomerations of protoplasmic pustules, glowing with a sickly yellow internal light. There was the suggestion of eyes, horrible gleaming, staring eyes, too many to count. Eyes that were human and so many others that were not.
Tom lashed out, catching the Father, monster, demon or devil, across the face. He hit the fiend again, and a third time, each a solid punch to the slippery face, the right cheek, and all the time screaming, “Mary’s there! She’s in there and you can’t have her! None of you can have her!”
Father James fell over backwards and his head hit the ground with a dull thud, a sound to make Tom gasp. The Father’s arms and legs, which had flopped about him as he’d tumbled, went still, as did the world around them; a sudden, shocking stillness.
Tom’s panic was the only thing to penetrate that silence, a heartbeat broken and running askew, ragged breaths of the sinful. Gone were the nightmare sights, the demonic visions. Even the presence of oppressive terror had passed, as if whatever had borne down upon him had now passed him over. All that lay in front of him was a beaten old man of the cloth.
Tom moaned, then covered his mouth with his hands, scared the land would announce his deed, pass it onto the wind and the trees to take to the authorities, who were far from here.
He fled. He thrust one hand deep into his pocket and pulled out the ring he’d given Mary on their wedding day and clutched it to his chest. He glanced back as he ran, although he didn’t know if he expected the Father to be rising from the road, or if the sirens would be coming for him.
All he saw was the lump of broken humanity, and he stopped glancing back. He looked towards the glow he was certain he could now see ahead of him. His panting breath was filling with sobs, his vision blurring with tears.
“I’m sorry,” he cried to Mary. “I didn’t, didn’t mean for that to happen. But he was…he wasn’t human!”
His words ran out for they did nothing to appease his guilt.
Even surrounded by vegetation he couldn’t explain, and enduring sights that threatened madness, Tom fought against acceptance of the new reality. It was too much.
The Father was right.
Loneliness and despair had driven him here, out to Te Kore as it was locally known, and he knew all too well how vile such emotions could be and what they could do to someone. Surely that was a more likely explanation?
But his mind swam with possibilities, the wild, insane tales that filled the news.
Countless millions had travelled to the original site when it had first ruptured, and when there had been no more room, they had sought other so-called thin places where the veil between realities was thinnest—St. Peter’s Basilica in the Vatican City, the Blue Mosque in Istanbul, St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York, Bangla Sahib Gurdwara in New Delhi.
In the days leading up to the paganist Samhain, desperate flocks hoping that narrowness between worlds would help them traverse the boundary and find Nirvana, waiting for the midnight culmination of the Pleiades, built to crushing weights at these sacred sites, but all to no avail. The doors, when they opened, had done so randomly.
The clouds were thickening as he hurried on, darkening, dimming the light, and the shadows expanding, deepening, and becoming their own doorways.
He struggled to catch his breath but the shadows felt wrong, distended and infinite, dragging him into impossible worlds that broke apart his thoughts as though they were never meant for such places. Further back from the road, the darkness stirred, but the trees weren’t moving and he couldn’t feel any draft.
That sense of motion increased, getting closer.
He grasped the ring as this ancient land swelled about him. Ghostly hands tugged at his clothes and tried to drag him into the forest, fingers curled in his hair. Ahead, demonic figures stood waiting for him but wafted away as he came close; and then, amidst the trees, he saw gigantic faces, skeletal, stretched, with eye sockets filled with stars and mouths with grinning teeth. They all watched as he went past. Some slipped from those trees to fall in behind him, their gaunt forms of tangled limbs slow on the gravel road, in mockery of his stumbling walk.
Tom moaned again. He whimpered and began sobbing. He tripped over his feet, tumbling towards the bushes, where ghastly figures delighted in his approach. He cried out and arrested his fall, wobbling back into the middle of the road. He glanced around and saw a horde of impossibility following in his wake. His scream pierced the shadows and tore apart the trees, but the night stitched itself back together again even as he ran out of breath.
He fled, no longer looking back, unable to accept that sight, but expecting them to reach for him, to grasp him, devour him. Having been ignored, those wretched shapes surged up alongside him, festering undefined figures made of the rotten newborn night. He shut his eyes, gripping the ring tight, so tight it was imprinting upon his palm. It was hot too, burning him.
After several seconds, he opened his eyes, terrified of walking off the road. The entities were gone and he felt suddenly sick in their absence. Even behind him, the way was clear. He rushed onwards, giddy with relief as the burning ring went cool in his hand.
As he rounded a slight bend, he saw a small group of people on the roadside, ambling towards him but so deep in conversation that none of them had seen him. His first instinct was to cry out in delight and run towards them, but a ghastly thought caught him. He stopped, backing up until they passed from sight again, taken by the gradual bend in the road that had first revealed them.
Only then did his pace begin to slow, his every step weighted with monstrous guilt until he so resembled the Father’s crippled walk. Unable to go on, he bent over, his hands on his knees, keeping his mouth shut so he wouldn’t burst into screams.
A second passed, and it was an eternity. He gave himself longer, seeking control again. Hoping his trembling would pass, hoping to make sense of what was happening.
He heard them, up ahead, faint voices talking among themselves.
They’d pass him and find the Father.
But what would they do? Did such crimes have relevance anymore? Would they mete out their own justice, eager for the chance to flex their muscles?
Another question burned into his trembling thoughts; why were they coming this way, when everyone else was heading to Te Kore?
A frightening answer struck him as quickly as the question had come, making him think of the Father again, and the sights he’d seen.
“I don’t know,” he muttered. “I don’t know! Oh Jesus, Mary, I don’t know what to do!”
He clapped a hand over his mouth, but his sin continued to scream within.
He had attacked the Father and left him there to die. The man hadn’t tried to hurt him; he’d tried to stop what he considered suicide. There’d been a monster there, all right, but it hadn’t been the Father. It had been his own mind that had given him the excuse to do what he’d done. His poisoned imagination, rotted with pain and loneliness.
He had to return. He had to; how could he go on, knowing what he had left back there? How could he reach salvation with that sin tattooed onto his soul?
Mary would never accept him.
Unless what he’d seen…
He o
pened his hand and stared at the wedding ring, seeing Mary’s happiness on that day so long ago, but she wasn’t happy anymore. The smile that had captivated him was lost, replaced with condemnation, and sadness, too.
He moaned at the deformed memory and closed his fingers around the ring. She had always smiled at him from there; she’d guided him through his darkness, his light, leading him to safety despite the nightmares that had come in her wake.
But he had let her down. Seen madness where there hadn’t been any.
“No,” he said between tears. “I’ll make this right, Mary. I promise.” With a quick glance back to where that group would soon appear, Tom straightened and replaced the ring back in his pocket.
He looked back down the road and his heart lurched.
“Have to,” he muttered, thinking of the hungry forest. Was that just more madness?
As he began retracing his steps, the shadows grew smaller, shallower, and the suggestive movement inside those shadowed pits stilled. He kept far from them, not trusting their laziness. Once, he heard words in the air, weird distant chanting that jarred his brain and curled his stomach. Words that made no sense but carried such an oppressive and ancient weight that they made him reel. He stumbled towards the ruined trees and fetid toetoe, and they surged out from their languid state and stretched out for him, almost clasping. Tom shrieked and jerked back.
‘C’ ah kadishtu ot mgahehyee nilgh’rishuggoggg—‘
The chanting faded away and didn’t come again.
He shrank within himself as he walked, hoping no one or nothing would pay him any further heed.
From one hundred feet, the Father was an indistinct shape, without humanity. A wart upon the road, and there were many such things now. Would one more matter?
Yes. It mattered more now than ever before.
The trees were settling, the native grasses and ferns growing still. Even the light was improving. The charged feel of the air had dissipated, the thrumming that vibrated within his soul and told him he was on the cusp of the infinite. He was left with mutated, near dead-looking trees and endless toetoe, and the rank humidity, as oppressive as ever but almost natural in its oppression.
When he reached the Father, he dropped to his knees and checked for a pulse. It was there, weak but there, and with that, Tom sobbed with relief. There was a lot of blood, most of it from the back of his head where it had collided with the bigger rocks near the edge of the road, but his cheek was split badly, too.
“Father?” He whispered, but the man didn’t stir.
Unable to stop himself, he pressed a finger against the skin below the Father’s split cheek. Panic flared within him and he staggered away.
“What do I do?” He asked the world. “Oh Mary, what have I done?”
He didn’t have a phone and couldn’t carry the unconscious man anywhere for help. Even if he could, did he want to, after what he’d done?
He looked in the direction Te Kore awaited, and thought of his wife, waiting for him there.
Soon after the group from the Raupunga Orthodox Church had made their pilgrimage, she had pressed her wedding ring into his hand and kissed him goodbye, slowing long enough to wipe the tears from his cheeks before leaving the house and closing the front door behind her.
There had been a taxi waiting to take her as far as possible towards her destination. It had sat there while they’d argued; him begging her no, and she telling him she couldn’t go on anymore. Her depression had been getting worse and Mary had spent three months last year in hospital, barely caring enough to eat during that time. She couldn’t take any more of the greyness, she’d said. It was slowly devouring her. She needed the light, and the happiness it entailed. She needed her own salvation.
And wasn’t that where Te Kore led?
He had wanted to join her but she had said no. “You still have colour in your world, even without me. But I’m grey, flat. I know I love you, I know that somewhere deep within me, but I just can’t reach that feeling anymore.”
“You are the colour in my world,” he’d said, but it hadn’t reached her, either. Or if it had, she hadn’t let on.
Tom bowed his head.
The New Zealand Defence Force had made a token effort to isolate Te Kore when it had first been discovered. Before the madness had come through.
The local iwi had helped, doing everything they could to protect their lands from the trespassers that came in droves, but soon it wasn’t just words that leaked out from the rugged forests. There were gods let loose, gods they didn’t know and had no room for in their pantheon. From neither their heavens nor their hells, these chaotic gods brought with them madness and despair, and they drove off the iwi and the military alike.
Mammoth forms now stole thought the night, rippling reality as they went. Disjointed sights and sounds to terrorize the heart had reached south to the capital of Wellington, and far north to Auckland. There were no signs of them stopping there, either. It was the same in Asia, and Europe too. The States, Africa, even Antarctica had broken open.
Voices from up the road stole into his despair.
There was one thing to do, but he was running out of time to do it. He took a deep, steadying breath, and returned to the Father, crouching in front him. Pulling out Mary’s wedding ring, he placed it in the Father’s front pocket.
Mary would understand. She knew all about sacrifices.
Her depression had meant they’d had to give up on their dreams of having children, so he had centred his life around her instead, being her rock when she needed him, even as she had spiralled inwards.
Whether he believed in Te Kore or not, it no longer mattered. This was where she’d come, so this was where he had to go. She was all he had.
“This will keep you safe,” he whispered to the Father. “I’m…I’m sorry for what I did.”
Then Tom rolled Father James off the road, grunting with effort and praying to his lost God for forgiveness, or at least understanding. The Father would be all right. He’d come to, and have a headache, but he’d be fine. And by then, Tom would be gone.
But as he committed this deed, the toetoe closest broke into movement, reaching out for the body. Tom leapt back, falling over, rolling and scrabbling away on his haunches.
The pulsing orange flowers surged in brightness as the toetoe pulled the Father into its fold.
“No,” Tom yelled, clambering back to the Father, whose eyes had opened wide, his mouth doing the same in a silent scream. Father James saw him and one hand, the one not yet devoured by the writhing plant, stretched out towards him. Tom reached for it, but then caught himself. Slowly, and with horror, he pulled his hand back, then closed his eyes and let his hand fall to his side.
In that internal darkness, Tom heard the slow, insidious rustle as the plant took in the sacrifice, and a single, solitary moan from the Father that made him flinch.
Tom kept his eyes closed until the sounds had ceased. When he reopened them, Father James was gone. He opened his mouth to cry, to moan, or wail, but there was nothing. He felt numb.
What had he done? Oh Jesus…
The light began to darken, the pretend night falling into place about him, congealing and going sour, great clumps of the night falling to the ground and leaking black to further spread across the landscape. Strange, glowing orbs formed out amongst the trees, merging into a pulsing mass of vibrant colours, before breaking apart again and drifting off into the coagulating darkness, re-emerging and growing together once more. The size of the entity was impossible to gauge; it filled the forest, extending upwards in more directions than possible, shimmering out of this reality and continuing elsewhere. It was endless, impossibly endless.
And there, on the edge of its existence in this plane, Tom saw a gigantic three-lobed eye staring down at him.
He felt opened up right to his insignificant soul, and dee
per, down to every molecule of his sinful being. The feeling lasted mere seconds, and then that surreal eye discarded him, judgement complete, and the colourful orbs broke apart one last time and vanished, leaving a writhing suggestion of yellowish tendrils composed of shadows in its wake, before they, too, were gone.
“No, no, please.” Tom babbled, reaching out to where it had been, pleading for it to take his hand, and, seeing the Father instead, reaching out for his. Then Tom was left with the twisted forest and its polluted shadows. A high-pitched trill sounded in the distance, and the trees echoed that cry.
Movement caught his attention and he saw a solitary figure standing on the road. The figure was tall, skinny and dark-skinned, wearing odd clothes, an old black suit of some kind, dusty and stained, with a red waistcoat.
“Father!” Tom cried out with joy, before realising it was someone else entirely. He screeched and scuttled away like a broken crab as shining, shimmering eyes violated him. The figure grinned and its teeth shone as brightly as its eyes, making Tom’s vision spin, a whirlwind that threatened to engulf him.
A voice came to him amidst his terror and insanity, a deep sounding whisper that rent the remainder of his soul with the screams of nightmares; ‘the stars await outside…’
He screamed for Mary; he’d held her tight so many times when he’d been trying to banish the darkness that was swallowing her. This time he needed sheltering, but he couldn’t find her. He tried shutting his eyes so he could see her but terror wouldn’t let him.
Somewhere in between those rapid blinks, the roadside figure vanished.
Then Mary was there. She was crying, tears causing her whole image to shimmer. He didn’t dare wipe away his own tears because he knew that’s where she existed, but she was fading as he watched, and he cried out for her, spiralling into a silent lonesome darkness where even his screams didn’t penetrate.
No longer could he hear the group that had been approaching, nor the rustle of the hungry forest.
Cthulhu Land of the Long White Cloud AU Page 18