Arkham Horror- Ire of the Void

by Richard Lee Byers

  But no creatures had noticed the intruder and roused themselves to destroy him. Not yet. Rather, by advancing deeper into the void, Norman had somehow brought his environs into clearer focus. His was only one of countless paths, the others suspended above, below, and to either side of him, receding until they faded into the gloom. Some were angular, and some curved. Here and there, one met another. Where they ran on the same level, they crossed via a simple intersection. Where they existed at differing elevations, ramps slanted and spirals coiled.

  Once he recovered from the misapprehension that the Hounds had discovered him, Norman still found the spectacle before him, if not terrifying, at least disconcerting. A moment ago, it had appeared he was on a road that, however dangerous, ran straight to his destination. Now it seemed he needed to pick his way through a labyrinth.

  As if in response to his dismay, a hitherto unsuspected faculty, surely another product of Stane’s magic, opened inside him. He felt he was heading in the right direction. In the same way, perhaps, that a flower sensed the sun. When he thought of the barn, the sensation flipped to point back the way he had come.

  The faculty guided him through two choice points. Then, sharpening into something akin to clairvoyance, it began providing glimpses of what lay at the ends of the paths he was passing by.

  One led to a darkened dormitory in what might have been a Dickensian workhouse, where gaunt, pale women slept motionless as corpses in their cots. Another to a room with paper walls where an Asian man was cutting open his own abdomen with a short sword. A third, to a sidewalk where a mother and child stared up at some sort of airship about to crash into one of two prodigious towers.

  If all was going as intended, Norman’s route was taking him from the present into a past remote beyond imagining, but the branching trails led to sites and moments in both the past and future, essentially randomly. The one constant was that the termini were rooms, streets, constructed places, because, far more than Nature, they provided the clearly defined angles required for breaches. It was strange to reflect that if humans had never invented their arts and sciences, they would have lived lives that were, to borrow Hobbes’s phrase, “nasty, brutish, and short,” but they might largely have avoided the predations of the Hounds.

  The next side trail zigzagged through emptiness to a room where several brown, beetle-like creatures, each standing on its hind legs and with tools hanging in metal loops riveted to their carapaces, were working to construct or repair some type of machine. As one, they turned in Norman’s direction. Their split black eyes stared, and their antennae quivered.

  Dear Lord, could they sense him in the same manner he’d sensed the scrutiny of the Hounds? He hurried onward.

  No beetle-thing entered the maze to pursue him, but the incident nonetheless served to remind him he was in danger with every step he took. He needed to stop sightseeing down the intersecting paths and stay focused and vigilant.

  He adhered to that resolve and several minutes later—if “minutes” was a word that meant anything here—approached an intersection different than any he had traversed hitherto. Before him, his zigzagging path crossed a curved trail coiling up from below. At the spot where they met, a red circle eclipsed the whiteness of the walkways.

  As far as Norman knew, there was no inherent reason why a point where angular and curved time intersected should pose a problem, but on the other hand, any new feature of the maze could prove hazardous. He prowled forward even more warily than before.

  Nothing appeared to threaten him. He sighed, slumped, and in that moment of relative relaxation, something gleamed at the periphery of his vision. Reflexively, he turned toward the light.

  At the end of the curved trail, a Stutz Bearcat sped down a highway between wooded green hills on a sunlit day. Norman’s vantage point put him in the car, perched behind the two seats and affording him a close-up view of himself and Bernadine, both joking and laughing, her hair golden with the dye that covered the gray. He caught a whiff of the orange-blossom smell of the Caron Narcisse Noir perfume that was her favorite scent.

  Dear Lord, he missed her! He had forgotten how much until recent events had unearthed buried feelings.

  It came to him then that his life need not be the lonely thing it had dwindled into. The remedy was mere paces away. If he entered his own past and contrived to keep his younger self away from a telescope on the night of March 11, 1916, that Norman would never see the six stars vanish, and from that point forward, everything would be different.

  Except, not everything. In due course, Schmidt would still come to conduct research in Arkham.

  Only this time, he would have no companion trying to reach him after a Hound dragged him away.

  Besides, much as Norman regretted the disintegration of his marriage, he still could not bear to deny himself the sight of the most extraordinary astronomical phenomenon he had ever witnessed. There were many things he would change if he could, but not that.

  With a grunt, he thrust temptation away, and when he did, the sheer statistical improbability of what he had just experienced struck him. If the paths snaked everywhere throughout space-time, what were the odds of stumbling across one that ran to a moment in his own little life?

  Steeling himself, he took another look and discovered the scene had changed completely. Now two groups of savages were fighting, or rather, they had been. The ones who resembled the men of Norman’s time had gained the upper hand while the short-legged ones with the low, sloping brows were trying to flee. Unfortunately for the Neanderthals, though, victory did not incline the Cro-Magnons to mercy. They chased down their enemies and stabbed them from behind with flint-tipped spears.

  Norman suspected that in reality the path had always led to the prehistoric slaughter. Something had tampered with his perception to distract him while it sneaked up on him. With a gasp, he spun around.

  The creature stalked on cloven hooves and shaggy legs that bent backward like a goat’s hind limbs. From the navel up, it was somewhat less hairy and more manlike, albeit with pointed ears and horns stabbing upward from its brow.

  Yet as Norman had feared, it was far different from the satyrs of classical myth. It was nine feet tall, and the non-caprine parts exhibited a burliness more suggestive of an ape than a human being. Scarlet from top to bottom and giving off a butcher-shop stench, it sweat blood, slavered blood, and someone—itself, in some ghastly ritual?—had hammered iron spikes into its eye sockets.

  Baring crooked fangs, it roared and lunged.

  Norman recoiled, and his foot plunged through empty space. Screaming, arms windmilling, he toppled into the bottomless void.

  18

  Norman just had time to wonder if, in a realm that existed outside time as human beings normally experienced it, he might live and fall forever. Then he slammed down on his back.

  The impact jolted the wind out of him and made him fear he’d injured himself, but when he tried to roll over, he could. He’d landed on a section of the curving path that twisted underneath the intersection.

  The satyr peered down from the crossing above, then turned away and disappeared. No doubt it would reappear momentarily when it started down the curved path in pursuit.

  Norman’s impulse was to flee in the opposite direction. He turned and found that the path he was on only extended several more feet before ending in a convex curve. On the other side waited a white sand beach with blue waves breaking beyond. The directional instinct magic that the incantation had bestowed was like an insistent tap on the shoulder, warning him that the vista before him lay in the wrong direction.

  At the moment, however, it might provide a safe haven. Evidently haunters of the curved portions of the maze in the same way the Hounds roamed the angular pathways, the satyrs might be similarly capable of exiting its confines. But Norman’s experiences suggested the creatures of Tindalos never ventured far from the breaches, and it seemed a reasonable hypothesis that the horned men didn’t either. If so, a dash down the sun
lit strand might take him out of danger. If not, perhaps he could hide in the tropical forest that lay inland.

  He poised himself to run and then remembered that Stane’s magic enabled a mystic to “split the angle.” What if he ended up in some island wilderness where no one had ever built anything? A place without corners.

  Given time, maybe he could create something suitable, but even if so, who was to say a second spell would enable him to navigate his way back to the barn and Arkham? It might only be capable of leading him back to the place from which he embarked. To put it mildly, he didn’t understand the sorcery well enough to know one way or the other.

  He needed some other way to stay ahead of the satyr. He stepped to the edge of the trail in hopes of spotting another path within jumping distance, preferably an angular one where his pursuer might be unable to follow, but there was nothing but gray void directly below for as far as the eye could see.

  The action, however, made the object slung over his shoulder swing and bump against his body, and it was then he recalled he was armed. It angered him that he hadn’t remembered sooner, although really it had only been a matter of seconds since the satyr startled him into blundering off the edge of the crossing overhead.

  He fumbled the Thompson submachine gun into his trembling hands. At the same instant, the satyr bounded into view and seemed to recognize the threat of the firearm despite the spikes that had put out its eyes. Spraying a mist of bloody spittle, it roared and ran down the curving path.

  Norman recalled all that Old Sadie Sheldon himself had taught him about the “trench broom’s” Blish lock, “open-bolt” firing position, and what have you. Still, his hands felt clumsy as he sought to cock and point it, as though in a nightmare where a seemingly simple task proved impossible to complete.

  At last he was ready to depress the trigger. The gun roared and rattled and, despite the practice he’d put in, the muzzle climbed higher with each round that blazed out of it until he was all but shooting straight up. Unharmed, the satyr charged closer.

  Terror screamed for Norman to lower the gun and keep blasting away. Intellect, however, insisted that a shaky novice shooter like himself was unlikely to hit his attacker until it came closer. He forced himself to release the trigger, take a breath, and aim anew.

  He resumed firing when the satyr was twenty feet away. This time he did a better job of keeping the submachine gun pointed, and the creature staggered as the rounds slammed into it.

  It staggered but wouldn’t go down. It kept springing forward, apish hands outstretched to seize its prey.

  Norman recalled the breach waiting at his back. Still, hoping he wouldn’t take a step too far, he backpedaled as he fired.

  The satyr was within three bounds of him. Then two. The trench broom stopped discharging, the 50-round drum depleted.

  An instant later, the satyr’s hand fell on his shoulder. Fortunately, it then slipped off, leaving a gory streak down his jacket as the creature collapsed.

  His heart pounding, Norman gasped for breath. It seemed incredible he’d survived and perhaps even more so that he’d accomplished it by shooting a firearm and killing something monstrous. He hadn’t been in so much as a barehanded scuffle since childhood.

  Arguably, his victory was cause for optimism. He had just demonstrated he could at least fight the Hounds’ allies and prevail if it proved necessary.

  But he couldn’t find it in himself to celebrate, not when the Hounds themselves were essentially impervious to human weapons, and not when he’d expended an entire magazine’s worth of ammunition—half his supply—killing a single satyr. It seemed all too likely he’d run out of cartridges before the labyrinth and the place beyond ran out of horrors.

  Still, he’d vowed to go forward, and he would. He loaded fresh ammunition in the drum, reminded himself that if he didn’t hold the trigger down, the tommy gun would fire in semiautomatic mode, not expend every last round in a matter of seconds, and he climbed back up toward the scarlet circle and the crossing of curved and angular time.

  19

  As Norman hiked onward, zigzag trails became more frequent, while the curved ones became less so. At one point, he spied a reptilian form scuttling on a path far to the left and just a hair lower than his own. Although he could now discern that it possessed shorter hind limbs and a dragging tail in addition to the arms he’d observed through the window of Stane’s sacrificial chamber, the long neck curling up from the body still made it seem snakelike as much as lizard-like or anthropoid.

  The Hound turned, revealing it sensed him as well. He gasped, clutched at the trench sweeper, and had to insist to himself, Not yet! The creature was still so distant that he could barely make it out in the ambient gloom.

  Perhaps the distance spared him a second skirmish. Maybe the creature mistook him for some ally with the right to travel the maze. Or conceivably, the lack of nearby connecting paths persuaded it to leave his destruction to its fellows. At any rate, after a moment, it continued on its way, and, exhaling, so did he.

  Several minutes later, at least according to his faltering sense of the passage of time, he reached a point where angular paths continued to divide and proliferate but none of the curved ones remained for as far as he could see. Instead of merely indicating, his mystical sense of direction now all but tugged him forward like an eager dog on a leash.

  Yet other sensations pierced him to offset the feeling of impending arrival. Had he thought about it, he would have said that, except perhaps for interplanetary space, a gulf could scarcely seem more of a void than the emptiness through which he crept. With every step, however, although nothing looked different, the feeling of infinite depths intensified. It occurred to him that, whereas before he had been moving through four dimensions, the three conventional ones plus time, now, somehow, he was traversing more than four.

  With that realization came a feeling of warning or forbiddance. It seemed a sign he was encroaching on a place that, even more than the labyrinth, was hostile to human existence. Had he been a religious person, he might have taken it for the whisper of a guardian angel imploring him to turn back.

  Whatever it was, he declined to heed it, and gradually Tindalos took form in the murk ahead.

  20

  The Hounds’ native realm wasn’t like Earth, with its gates into otherness hidden. When Norman looked back, the void and the jagged path he’d just walked were still there in place of the ground and sky the mind expected. The sight of two different realities jammed against one another was enough to make a sane man flinch.

  Norman resolved not to look again until he had to. He stared instead at what lay before him.

  It was night here. Perhaps it always was. There were no stars visible, so why should there be a sun? A celestial object like a broken moon infested with phosphorescent fungus cast a sickly green light that gleamed on the pyramids and trapezoidal prisms in the distance.

  With Norman’s departure from the maze, his unnatural sense of direction had dimmed as though it felt it had done the hard work and he should be able to manage the rest himself. Perhaps that meant Schmidt was somewhere in the cluster of buildings, if that was what they were. Hoping it was so, and that the guiding instinct would wake when he needed it once more, the astronomer skulked forward over cracked, barren soil.

  Somewhere off to the right, a Hound howled. Norman froze and clutched the tommy gun for a long moment before deciding the cry had come from far away and, more likely than not, had nothing to do with him. Because, so far as he could tell, the call had elicited no reaction from any creature lurking among the angular shapes ahead.

  Norman had now crept close enough to make out doorways and windows, confirmation of his initial impression that the masses were buildings, but as yet, he could see neither lights nor motion within. Nor was there anything to hear but the intermittent whisper of the breeze.

  Perhaps, for the moment, every Hound was elsewhere. Conceivably they spent most of their time in the labyrinth searchin
g for prey. Dry-mouthed and heart pounding, he made his final approach as stealthily as he could.

  Viewed up close, the buildings appeared to be made of charcoal-colored stone polished to a glassy sheen at the edges. To all appearances, the Hounds had carved each from a single huge rock. It was even possible the entire complex was one colossal stone, the seemingly separate pyramids and trapezoidal prisms aboveground could have been extrusions from an even larger mass buried below.

  The entryways lacked doors to seal them. The windows were similarly empty, asymmetrical holes without glass, the ones on the ground floors positioned lower than in a human habitation. Norman couldn’t have passed beneath them without crawling on hands and knees, so he settled for striding by quickly.

  The fetor of the Hounds wafted from doorways and windows alike, a warning that, even if the complex seemed deserted, the creatures might appear at any moment. Norman swallowed repeatedly and bore the stench as best he could. The half-hysterical thought came to him that if he died here, he didn’t want to do it with vomit in his beard.

  He peered around another corner. Soft blue light shined through the doorway and windows of a smallish pyramid a few yards ahead.

  Perhaps Schmidt was inside. If not, maybe Norman was about to get his first really good look at a Hound, a prospect that inspired curiosity and trepidation in equal measure. He skulked forward and peeked in the entrance.

  He hadn’t found the physicist. He had discovered a Hound, but despite the light, proximity, and the unobstructed view, he still couldn’t make out how such creatures looked when intact because the one before him was deep into the process of vivisecting itself.

  It lay on the floor in a pool of dark fluids, its wormlike body split lengthwise with the flaps of flesh folded back. Employing its elongated arms, each possessed of two elbows, and the claws at the end of those limbs, it had mostly emptied itself of the organs within and set them around it, and, showing no sign of weakness due to the self-inflicted damage, was busy tearing out the pulsing, twitching tubes and ovoid masses that remained. Its hind legs and tail thumped the floor as the viscera came free.