A nauseating riot of unnatural light and impossible colors, the incorporeal mass gradually unfolded itself, exposing a vague configuration appropriating characteristics of both plant and animal life, complete with ill-defined blossoms, unformulated limbs and members and myriad tenuous orbs that might serve as eyes. Like the image she had seen on the monitor back at Earthwatch, Virginia saw how the entity muddied the background and interacted with the environment. It displaced the omnipresent gray dust and pressed into the ground as it oscillated atop the hill.
But it was more than just shadow and light and vapor.
The abomination worshiped by these deluded field laborers manufactured itself from its surroundings. Virginia guessed its ghastly secret upon their arrival. Surrounding that hill, she saw mounds of animal bones and human carcasses. That thing—that colour out of space as well-meaning Miskatonic scientists once called it—had spent decades cultivating itself out of reconstituted organic matter from a variety of sources. Whatever living things it devoured over the years to sustain itself—be they animal or vegetable—had been reanimated into a blasphemous muddle of living horrors.
Still, Virginia had not yet grasped its most frightening aspect.
One by one, the cultists approached the squirming mass atop the hill. One by one, it welcomed them back into the nebulous matter which had spawned them. Its followers weren’t disciples—they were detachable appendages.
Soon, Virginia knew, she and Napoleon would join the others—devoured and resurrected as willing pawns, sent out into the world to spread the blight.
6.
“I can’t tell you how pleased we are to see you two fellows.” Lyndon Chaney, head of operations at the Earthwatch facility monitoring the Polk Exclusion Zone in Florida, welcomed Grady Hatfield and Javier Salas. “Professor Olivier tells me that you’ve been working on something very promising.”
“Yes,” Grady said, trying to stifle any doubt. “Tests have shown this method to be quite effective. This will be the first full-scale implementation.”
Lyndon introduced the two biotechnology field researchers from Miskatonic University’s Department of Plant Sciences to a number of his key staff members in his conference room. Although the team had been briefed on the situation, the strategy for resolving it remained a mystery.
“As you know, we have had an eventful week here,” Lyndon said. “We’re hoping to get this operation underway as soon as possible. How does your treatment work, exactly?”
“We’ve developed a series of redevelopment strategies that begins with the introduction of several oxidants, including sodium permanganate, potassium permanganate and a solution of hydrogen peroxide with ferrous iron as a catalyst that is used to oxidize contaminants or waste waters,” Javier Salas said. “The second phase involves bioremediation and utilizes fungal mycelia.”
“It sounds like a lengthy process.” Lyndon looked to his staff for comments but found only dull eyes and blank stares. “We’ve begun relocating communities situated within one mile of the barrier wall as a precautionary measure. That process will be complete by this afternoon. The crops—well, the crops will be abandoned, I suppose. It’ll mean a deficit in production for the next few years, but…”
“If all goes as planned, you’ll have more fertile land than you’ll know what to do with in a few years,” Grady said, managing a nervous smile. “We can start as soon as tonight. The first phase takes a week or so; the second phase lasts about six months.”
“Excellent,” Lyndon said. “I believe we have the coordinates of the actual impact point—something Professor Olivier said you would need…” He sorted through his notes but could not find the document. “Can someone give me that data?”
“It’s right here, sir. I also put together some maps detailing the zone’s geography, in case that might be helpful.”
“Thank you, Virginia,” Lyndon said, passing the dossier onto Grady and Javier. “Gentlemen, you may want to work closely with Ms. Sandoval—she led a team into the zone just this week. Thought we’d lost them for about 48 hours—but an extraction team located them. Tired and out of supplies, but otherwise in good shape.”
“No contamination?” Javier asked.
“No sir,” Virginia said. Her voice sounded oddly tinny in the cramped space of the conference room. “We made it in and out without incident, thankfully.”
“You were one of the ones who saw the entity on the monitor originally, weren’t you?” Grady gazed at the woman for a moment. Her vivacity and statuesque beauty nearly charmed away his senses and made him momentarily forget the seriousness of his mission. Something peculiar about her eyes brought him back to reality. “What did you see inside the zone?”
“For the most part, nothing one would not expect,” Virginia said, her eyes shimmering with a hoary radiance as she spoke. “But out there, at night, amidst the blighted swathes of gray desolation and among the crumbling old homesteads and abandoned townships, there is something there—something not of this world. I hope I am wrong, but somehow I don’t think it can be stopped now. It’s been waiting there, atop the swollen boughs that sway though no breeze stirs, below the black roots that have supped malevolent poisons from the soil for ages. Can you eradicate something that has become ensconced in the environment, Mr. Hatfield?”
“Let’s hope so, Ms. Sandoval.”
After a few more minutes of planning, Lyndon Chaney escorted Grady Hatfield and Javier Salas to the transportation center where they would assemble their team and travel to the Polk Exclusion Zone to implement their strategy.
Virginia Sandoval declined an invitation to join them. She had her own mission, her own objectives—an undertaking shared with more than a few colleagues. More would soon join their ranks.
“One by one, they will awaken.”
7.
It had taken him two days to find his way home—except, he knew it was no longer his home.
He knew he was no longer Napoleon Mullin, too—although he had most of his memories. He still carried his grief over his mother’s death. He still felt remorse for not heeding her final wishes. He still loved his sister, Zoe.
He watched her from a distance, hidden in the fields where he once worked. He stood in a vast field of tomatoes baking in the Florida sun. He had discovered his mere touch could render a single leaf brittle and gray—and that if he grasped a plant at its base and held onto it, it would slowly wither and die before his eyes.
He had become the blight personified—a bringer of death and disease.
Like others who had been converted, he felt a compulsion to carry out the mission—to spread the borders of the wasteland, to assimilate more organic matter and to transfigure more humans. Whatever feeble obstacle the indigenous population would next devise would be dealt with accordingly by other members of the collective. For now, his role was simple, primal even: Reproduction. Ensure the preservation of the species. Colonize.
His township in District 8 often ended the work week with a celebration and a bonfire. That his fellow laborers had constructed such a bonfire on this night seemed fortuitous to him as he gauged his willingness to fulfill his obligation. He kept watching Zoe, wishing he could speak to her one last time. She swept the porch and fed the animals. She went inside their modest cabin and closed the door. In a few minutes, the lamplight faded.
“Sweet dreams, sis,” he whispered.
In the morning, none of the townsfolk noticed the curious patch of strangely colored embers amidst the cinders in the fire circle.
Cognac, Communism, and Cocaine
Nick Mamatas and Molly Tanzer
GHYSLAINE BURNED THE INSIDE OF HER LEFT ARM AS SHE REMOVED a tray of rolls from the oven. The seared flesh went cold, then hot as she almost swooned, rolls skittering across the parchment paper with the sound of autumn leaves over pavement. Then the nausea hit her. No matter how often she burned herself—and she did so often—she never got used to the sensation. The way the back of her neck prickled as she br
oke out in the inevitable icy sweat. The way her limbs went weak. She turned, looking for a place to set the rolls, and gasped as Maxim’s maître d’ leapt out of her way.
He did not look to be in an understanding mood.
“Watch out, you daft slut,” he hissed, his words blending with the tap as she ran her arm under water. “Ones preserve me! They’re arriving, and—” He gestured expansively at the busy kitchen. “Just look at it down here! Chaos!”
Ghyslaine was not in charge of the kitchen, but that did not concern Mr. Sarkozy. Nor for that matter did it concern him that neither was he—it was not his job to scold anyone in the back of the house, even a humble boulangère like herself.
“There is no bread out on the tables,” continued Mr. Sarkozy, as Ghyslaine applied a smear of butter to her arm. “Where are the rolls, Ghyslaine? The rolls!”
“Here, Mr. Sarkozy,” said Ghyslaine, singeing her fingertips as she distributed the hot little rolls among several baskets. Philippe, the tournant, earned himself a grateful look as he brought out the dishes of beurre maître d’hôtel from the icebox. She would thank him later, when things had quieted down.
“And what are these, exactly?” Mr. Sarkozy, who ought to have been instructing the waiters to bear the bread out to the tables, if he was so concerned about it, picked up a roll and inspected it. “So plain. So small! Perhaps you think you are baking for prisoners, instead of the international literati?”
Ghyslaine desperately needed to get away; her brioche was at a tricky point and she still had more displeasing rolls to bake. “The chef sets the menu, Mr. Sar—”
“The chef!” spat Mr. Sarkozy, as if this was the most absurd protest she could come up with. “I don’t care what the chef says, I am telling you—hmm?”
It was one of the waiters, hovering anxiously. “Mr. Sarkozy, the gentleman who arrived early, he says he’s here in advance of the guest of honor, and he wants, er, or rather he needs…help with…” the waiter looked to Ghyslaine, clearly unwilling to say whatever it was in front of her.
“Help him, then!” exclaimed Mr. Sarkozy, throwing his hands into the air. “Are you confused about what a waiter does? He waits on the guests!”
“Please, Mr. Sarkozy,” urged the waiter. “I—we—need your expertise for this one.”
This was the correct thing to say. The maître d’ nodded, lips pursed; after shooting Ghyslaine a nasty look, he departed.
Willie, you can afford the party, Maugham told himself. When he thought of himself as “Willie,” he knew he was feeling anxious. Well, why shouldn’t he? Even if he had been certain his plan would work, he was never any good at parties.
Maugham took a sip from his hip flask. Somerset, calm down. Everything will work out.
His stomach growled as the liquor hit it, souring his guts rather than soothing them. Where was the bread? Bloody hell, where were the guests?
Maugham wasn’t even in the restaurant yet. He was standing out on the street, peering in through a corner of the window. He had wanted to make an entrance, swan through the front of the house, and then stuff his face with bread and with so many of the new “pommes frites” made popular by Maxim’s that he wouldn’t have to make much conversation.
Wuh-wuh-wuh wouldn’t ha-ha-have to make much cuh-cuh-cuh-cuh-cuh…
When Willie mocked himself for his own stammer, he was in deep.
Everything was wrong. He should never have agreed to all of this. Alone with the sick and the dying, that was a fine life for W. Somerset Maugham, medic. At the very least he shouldn’t have chosen Maxim’s for his party—the new electric lights were garish, though they performed their duty of cutting through the greenish miasma that had permanently settled over Europe back in ’48. Still, Somerset was fairly sure that his scheme was a bust—not one of the invited guests was inside, much less the two most important ones. At least, he thought so. There had been a swirl, or perhaps a tendril, of fog that drifted past him, but it could have been a passer-by, or a member of the staff, or a juvenile blanc-manger that had oozed out of the sewer grates in order to hunt. Or perhaps Willie had managed to get himself a case of syphilitic meningoencephalitis thanks to his particular tastes and had just now decided to go mad. Another worry!
Though if someone had spotted him, outside Maxim’s, nose pressed up against the window to see if anybody liked him, that would have been even worse, shu-shu-shu-surely so.
Yes, thank the Ones for small favors: he was alone in his misery. And perhaps in his cleverness. He had chosen Maxim’s after hearing of the pommes frites from Gerald Kelly. “I swear, Willie. They look like cocks. Tens of cocks served up in a cone.” Kelly had been repulsed, but Maugham…? Wouldn’t it be grand to have everyone at his party engaging in unwitting irrumatio? Yes, Maugham had thought. Yes. There was the side benefit of imagining Ulyanov in particular stuffing his Russian face with phallus after phallus.
Crowley, of course, would enjoy the spectacle, and Somerset needed to be on his good side, too. Keep the magus happy, and out of England, and away from Davidson and the Archbishop of Canterbury’s seat. Oh, it was too much responsibility! More cognac, Maugham said, and Willie added please and Somerset complied.
Willie and Maugham. The boy from Whitstable, and the man of the world. The nephew of the last true vicar of the Anglican Church, and the adult buggerer. The newly wealthy playwright and novelist who threw himself a great party, and the shy youth too awkward to enter. It was difficult being two men at once, to say the least, but the man had three names. So who was Somerset?
Somerset was the spy.
It was a plot his novelist’s heart had adored. Get close to the exiled revolutionary Ulyanov, who called himself Lenin in his missives back to Russia. Write a novel about the upstart Crowley who had so handily risen through the ranks of the New Church of England, the Church of the Ones, as a lure. Host a party in Paris to get them in the same room. And then, for King and Country and Humanity and Sanity…
Unfortunately, only now was his spy’s mind raising objections to the scheme. So many things could go wrong! Were going wrong…
Just as Maugham straightened his shoulders and resolved to enter the restaurant he had hired to host and cater his party for the release of The Vicar, the aforementioned lure, and let his so-called friends be damned to the ink-dark sea if they wished to spend the night elsewhere, a mob of well-wishers turned the corner and shouted “Hip-hip hurray!” and “Willie, the chap!” “It’s the dude himself!” As they ushered him inside, he felt ever so relieved.
W. Somerset Maugham was not alone, and there was bread on all the tables. It was going to be an excellent party.
The brioche had over proofed.
Everywhere was warm these days, ever since the return of the Ones, but the kitchen at Maxim’s especially so, apparently. The chef had needed all the room in the icebox for some sort of ghastly mini-terrines, so she’d set the dough in a cool corner, but between the temperature and hustling to meet Mr. Sarkozy’s demand that she bake a second batch of “special” rolls to bring out with the dinner, it was ruined.
And likely, so was she.
Tipping the puffy ruined mass into the bin, Ghyslaine sighed. She had been so glad to get this job; had needed it so very badly. After her brother had been hanged as a traitor—quite rightly, no one could say otherwise; he had, after all, been discovered beneath the city with a group of unrepentant Catholics—she’d had to close up the bakery or risk waking up some night choking on smoke from a cleansing fire set by pious arsonists. Her cousin Marc, the plongeur, had suggested her, and while women weren’t usually hired at Maxim’s, as a cost-cutting measure it was very effective as they could pay her scarcely a third of what a man of her experience would demand.
If they let her go without a reference, she was done for. She’d never get bakery work again, most likely, unless it really was for a prison, as Mr. Sarkozy had early suggested was her true calling…
“Idle hands are the devil’s workshop,” said Philipp
e.
“Eh?”
“I just mean, if Sarkozy, or Ones forbid, the chef sees you not working…” he glanced into the bin. “Is that the brioche?”
“It…was?”
“What happened?”
“It doesn’t matter.” She shrugged. “Nothing to do now.”
“Yes there is. You’re needed.”
“Oh?” For some reason, her stomach turned over. “Who needs me? Where?”
Now Philippe shrugged. “A waiter told me you’re to report upstairs. Now.”
She stared at him. Had a guest complained about the rolls? Was she to be called out and humiliated before all and sundry to save Maxim’s precious reputation?
“They want to see you in the manager’s office.”
Ah; upstairs meaning the third floor. Ghyslaine frowned. She really was going to be sacked. She wiped her hands nervously on her floury apron.
“Oh,” was all she could think of to say.
“Best get going,” Philippe advised. “Maybe it’s not so bad?”
As she climbed the stairs, she began rehearsing a desperate appeal—please, monsieur, I was just doing as the cook ordered…as for the brioche, I take full responsibility but these things happen, take it out of my pay, just give me another chance. It sounded stupid even to herself. She began to concoct a sob story about keeping a roof over her dying grandmother’s head, even going so far as to practice her “angel face” as her mother used to call it.
She knocked, and after hearing, “Come in,” she entered, her eyes slightly wider than normal, mouth closed, lips just gently pressed into an innocent blank line, chin high. She lost this composure, however, when someone she did not know cried,
“Perfect! She’s perfect, monsieur.”
“Good, for she’s the only woman we have on staff,” answered Mr. Sarkozy. “Ghyslaine!” He snapped at her, as if she were a dog. “Say hello to the gentleman.”
“Hello,” she said, promptly, if not warmly.
The man was running to fat but not unhandsome, and looked at her appraisingly, like a man might look at a horse before a race. While there was nothing comforting in his gaze, neither could she see any cruelty. Just amusement.
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