Jigsaw World (8 page)

As they watched, the crimson robed man, who
must have been the High Priest, was speaking in English as three of
the black robed figures came before him.

“
We call upon Black Throned
Azathoth, ruler of all time and all space, greatest of the Great
Old Ones save he whom we summon. Aid us in opening the gate for he
whom we summon. We offer these three as a sacrifice to Thee. Help
us to open the gate! Accept our tribute!”

There was a sound like a distant flute, and
the flitting shadows that they had seen earlier returned,
possessing a depth that made them seem solid objects themselves.
One of the shadows touched one of the three offerings, and she
screamed and dissolved into the shadow. Other shadows touched the
other two offerings, and by their screams Tom determined that they
must be men. From beginning to end, it lasted but a few seconds,
but it seemed to last for hours.

“
We thank you, great Azathoth, for
your blessing and aid. With the coming of your Consort, He who is
the All in All, we shall bring an end to the blight of Man on
earth, and at last the Great Old Ones shall rule this
world!”

During this interlude, the naked girl on the
altar was struggling frantically. The High Priest took a second to
tighten the bindings on the girl, and then he started the
invocation for which all the former chanting was just a
prelude.

“
Yog Sothoth, He who is All in
All, He who is in all spaces and in all times! We call upon you,
who is the key to the gate, and is the gate, and is that which is
outside the gate, and that which is inside the gate! We offer you
this virgin sacrifice, and we speak the ancient words of unbinding,
that you may enter our world through the gate, and rule our world
forevermore!”

The high priest began to massage the girl's
breasts and nipples, and made several arcane gestures over the
girl. He raised the Athame, and by his body language, it was
obvious that he would soon sacrifice the girl. Tom felt a bit
regretful about that, but it was unlikely that the two of them
could take on the group of Cabalists, and rescue the girl for
future activities. The Priest began to speak in an unknown
tongue.

“
N'GAI, N'GHA'GHAA, BUGG-SHOGGOG,
Y'HAH! YOG-SOTHOTH, YOG-SOTHOTH, IA! Y'HAH, BUGG-SHOGGOG,
N'GHA'GHAA, N'GAI! Y'AI 'NG'NGAH, YOG-SOTHOTH H'EE—L'GEB F'AI
THRODOG UAAAH!”

Just as the priest croaked out the final
'UAAAH
!’, a shot rang out from some
unknown point from what sounded like a 30 caliber or so rifle,
possibly set up as a sniping rifle. The priest fell, and dropped
the Athame. As he fell, several more shots from the same rifle
range out, and the three red robed priests also fell. The black
robed priests started to mill around in a panic, and most of them
began to run away from the beach area.

For the next sixty seconds or so, the trio
watched from the outcropping as the rifle picked off the rest of
the black robes one by one. When at last they were all down, a
figure came down from the nearest inland hill, where he had been
crouched behind a tree with his sniping rifle. Tom, George and
Bailey crested the outcropping, and started down toward the altar
where the girl was still struggling. When they got close, the man
with the gun challenged them.

“
What is your business here?” He
asked. He interposed himself between the girl on the altar and the
trio.

“
Probably the same thing as you.”
Tom said. “To make sure that the girl is okay, and maybe untie
her.”

“
Got it covered.” Said the man, as
he worked at untying her bindings. Tom handed him the Athame to
assist with freeing her, while Bailey took the opportunity to stick
his nose into the girls exposed crotch and sniff it
enthusiastically.

Finally the girl was free, and she was
standing unsteadily on her feet. Regretfully, Tom lent her his coat
to cover herself, even though he secretly had no desire for her to
cover up. Once she was free and equipped, she looked hungry and
cold still. Tom suggested that they might want to go to the RV and
fuel themselves up, so to speak.

A few moments later, the group of them was
clustered around the campfire, roasting more hot dog wieners, and
drinking beer, glad to be out of the fray. The man was Sidney, and
the girl was named Charla. Tom could tell that Sidney was smitten
with Charla, so he privately promised himself that he wouldn’t
aggressively try to have a Charla taco, but he knew himself well
enough to know that he would not turn it down.

When they had arrived back at the RV, Tom had
rummaged about in the RV and managed to come up with some suitable
clothes for Charla that was part of the former owner’s wife’s
wardrobe. For the sake of social ease, the dead owner’s dead wife
had become Aunt Ida, and Tom had borrowed their RV for this little
vacation/pilgrimage.

A couple of hours of campfire communication
revealed that both Sidney and Charla had a touch of the old Watcher
magic. Sidney had just got back from Afghanistan, where he had
started seeing Rocs vying for airspace, and Ifrits occasionally
tangling with the troops out in the desert. Charla was simply a
home town country girl, and she was one furrow that Sidney had
wanted to plow from before he joined the army.

After sounding the two of them out about their
immediate plans, it was determined that the two of them would be
happy to tag along with the trio in this half-assed pilgrimage to
fix the world. Bailey was very happy to have Charla tagging along.
Apparently, whatever he sniffed in her crotch made him very
attached to her. Tom thought that Sidney had competition for
Charla, and not just from Tom.

The next few hours were devoted to each of the
members of the group filling in the rest of them on what parts of
the jigsaw puzzle that was reality that they had been made privy
to. Bailey spent the time training Charla to scratch him on the
belly like he liked. When he had a reason to get to his feet, he
now had a special ‘I got a bitch’ spring to his step.

Charla was the least experienced of the group,
mostly just seeing the occasional warping of reality, a few
relatives had appeared to her that were long dead, and of course,
her tour of duty as the sacrificial virgin at a summoning of one of
the Great Old Ones. She was a bit doubtful as to whether she
qualified as the virgin in that scenario. She thought that some of
the things that she had done with the local boys, girls, animals
and inanimate objects should have given her the status of
‘ex-virgin’.

Sidney had seen a few monsters in his time,
and he had developed that battlefield sense of intuition that keeps
you from stepping on a land mine, and that puts that lump of rock
in the pit of your stomach for days, as you wait for the next shoe
to drop, that shoe usually being a surprise attack by the enemy of
the day. He did not have a visual on what was about to happen to
our world, but he had a bad feeling that he needed to do
something.

George filled them in on what he knew about
the Sage in the East, and collaborated most of the information that
the new couple
almost
knew, and later he collaborated the
factoids that Tom brought to the table. He covered his recent
history, including the odd tornado that he encountered in Tennessee
which went through the town, damaging nothing. The people were all
mystified by a full-on tornado which did no damage, but then people
started discovering that all of their money was gone from their
billfolds and purses. They took to calling it the
Larcenado.

Tom took it up from there, and brought the
discussion home. He described his recent history, the dreams that
revealed some relevant information on the situation, and the
oddities that he had experienced such as the stretched roads, the
extinct grazing animals, the universality of the monsters behind
recent events, and what he knew of the mission that seemed to be
assigning itself to the group.

Tom also addressed his doubts about if he
wanted that responsibility or not. In a moment of rare un-monetized
honesty, he confessed that he was not sure which side of the coming
conflict he belonged on. Figuring that this was a good time to fake
a little intimacy, he confessed that he was not sure if he was
always a good man. Tom could tell that the girl was eating that
shit up. He figured that trick might come in useful later. The men
were not impressed with his honesty, but he figured fuck’ em, who
cares?

In a final part of the conversation that
wasn’t bullshit, Tom related his belief that the connection with
other worlds, where he thought that the monsters and events that
they were all witnessing came from, felt like it was growing
stronger. Almost every time Tom fell asleep now, he would have a
dream, or a vision, or just a knowing during the night.

Finally, the night wore down to the hours of
sleep. Everyone stumbled to their newly assigned beds, after
agreeing that all would be loaded up on and traveling together in
the RV, with the start-time tentatively scheduled to be slightly
after the crack of noon tomorrow.

******

The RV pulled into the previously unknown town
of Mildew, which had apparently now become a central Texas
replacement for one of the Dallas Suburbs that no longer existed.
Mildew proudly advertised a population of 8,738, and from what they
had seen so far, a fast calculation suggested that it must have
nearly one church for every ten residents.

After Tom drove the RV down the road into the
town, and it appeared that they were about to emerge on the
opposite side of the town, Charla suggested that they might want to
stop at a park that the vehicle was passing, and get out to stretch
their legs. Tom agreed, and a moment later, the party was offloaded
from the RV, and felt grass under their feet for the first time in
a while.

Bailey ran out into the field, and found a
stick to throw up into the air with a flip of his neck. Tom was
quite sure that he was missing his once cherished finger, which he
used to flip into the air in exactly the same way. As women so
often do, the advent of Charla on the field of doggy romance had
put an end to Bailey’s wonderfully fun game of ‘throw the finger
and catch it’. Both items would have exuded an exciting musky odor,
although to be fair, the Charla parts were not ripe due to
putrefaction like the finger was. Maybe Bailey chose the right
scent after all.

It was about 4PM when they started
lollygagging about the park, and by the time the dog was beginning
to get tired of frisking about in the grass, and the human
contingent was over the first buzz, and started into that
secondary, less fun, buzz that comes with drinking iced beer at the
proper pace, it was somewhere between 5:30 and 6 PM.

It was Charla who asked the question. “Hey
guys, check out that odd looking graveyard over there. Want to go
look at it?” She pointed over to the east side of the park, which
was bordered entirely by a huge graveyard, with those giant statues
and mausoleums that are usually a legacy of the South. Being by
that time suitably juiced, the group readily agreed to an
expedition to that sophomoric destination. Only Bailey probably had
a suitable reason for going, needing to secretly replenish his
finger supply.

The group good-naturedly got to their feet,
and trudged across the open field of the park, and to the ironwork
fence surrounding the graveyard. A few more feet saw the group at
one of the ancillary gates to the bone-yard. They entered the final
resting place of the local deceased.

It was immediately apparent that the recently
deceased were no longer at rest. Indeed, it could be said that the
deceased were not even at their ease, as the entirety of the graves
in this graveyard had been dug up, and at the bottom of each of the
open graves could be seen an open and empty coffin.

“
What the hell do you think
happened here?” Sidney asked.

“
There are only a couple of
possible explanations.” Tom replied. “Either somebody dug up all
these graves, or the bodies inside them dug their way
out.”

“
Check this out. These graves have
compacted soil inside them, with only a small amount of loose soil
thrown up out of the grave.” George remarked. “I am going out on a
limb here, and say that the bodies clawed their way up out of the
grave. They made room at the bottom of the grave by compacting soil
until they could open the lid and get out, and work their way up
toward the surface until they could break out to the
surface.”

“
Seems a mite premature to be
burying folks before they are dead.” George ventured. “Anything is
possible, but I haven’t seen any zombies lately, so what is going
on?”

“
I saw a bit of Zombie action on a
newscast a few days ago. This could be more of that, but I would
place odds that this is something else.” Tom mused. “Zombies are a
bit more aggressive in trying to find human flesh to chow down on.
We would be hip deep in rotting walkers right now if it were
zombies.”

“
Well, there are just a few body
riders out there that it could be.” Sidney shared. “Maybe some kind
of vampire or some weird possession that only happens to dead
bodies. I don’t think that these are examples of mummies, and all
of the eaters of the dead would tunnel down to get to the bodies,
not up and out.”