The Dark Rites of Cthulhu (6 page)

On a warm and clear morning, she saw again the familiar broken skyline of the Dominion of Manhattan across the great river. Conflicting emotions roiled in her. She was relieved to be home, even though the memory of Monica and the women in the tower lurked in the back of her mind.    

The Lord of Manhattan had changed his ways in her absence, and Laura crept into a trap as she tried to sneak across the great, creaking bridge. Men and sea-devils with guns emerged from wrecked cars and chased her down.
She cut three of them before being overwhelmed. They tied her tightly with straps onto a metal frame, and carried her, like a slab of meat, into the Dominion.  

The Lord of the island kept his court in the tremendous Central Park, his throne at the bottom of a large depression with seats, his castle a little ways off to one side. The crumbling towers of Manhattan stood silent and stern above it all. 

The theater was full of filthy men, who pounded hands on their thighs as she was carried down the steep incline. They grunted an unintelligible monosyllable in time with their fists.  When she reached the nadir she was pitched upright, face to face with the grossly fat Lord of Manhattan. Wedged into a leather, bucket-seat throne, at least three times as wide as she, blubbery fat as if he wanted to grow huge like a Master. His face was heavy and drooped like diseased fungus off a tree trunk. Four inhumanly tall fish-men flanked him, guns in their frying pan-sized claws. In front of the massive sea-devils were a pair of young, naked woman, absent-mindedly running their hands through the Lord’s hair and touching his greasy skin. Their eyes were deader than those of the fish-men. 

“A wild girl, I see.” The Lord’s deep, forced rasp sent unpleasant chills up her spine.  “Let her go.”  

The straps were undone in a moment, and Laura was unsteadily on her feet. Above her the still sky was white with overhanging clouds. She stared into the Lord of Manhattan’s pale-blue eyes, and said, very slowly, “There will be a time when you and your Masters will die.”

He laughed, a heartless, fleshy earthquake that left him coughing and wheezing. 

“You’re one of Dornier’s little followers, aren’t you?” He moved his face close to hers.  Laura turned away from his reeking breath, but someone grabbed a fistful of hair and forced her head back to him. 

“Let me guess, he told you that you are the chosen one.”  

“The what?” She tried to bluff, but her heart quailed. His laugh was cruel.

“Release her.” And she could move her head again. “Dornier is just like us, the only difference is that he was stupid and backed the wrong horse. We came to power, and now he’s just a beggar, seeking after the scraps left by our lord. He finds gullible children and tells them they’re the chosen one, like a fable off TV. He teaches them a useless spell so they think they’re something special, then runs off to find another one. We’ve killed six of his chosen ones this year. I don’t know what he thinks he’s doing, but he can’t stand against the might of Great Cthulhu.” 

The crowd shuddered at that awful name. 

“You see that?” He regarded the cringing throng with open contempt. “That’s power.  Fear is power. You want to get anywhere, people have to fear you. I’ve got the power of life and death over everyone here, and your Dornier lives like some sort of shit-eating scavenger. Nobody tells me what to do.” He glared at the mob. 

“You!” The man he pointed to was pale and wasted-looking, with few teeth left in his head. The crowd backed away, as he fell to his knees, too paralyzed to beg for mercy. 

“Tear him apart and feed him to the crowd.”

Two of the sea-devils were on the man instantly, his inarticulate screams replaced with wet tearing and the spatter of liquid on concrete. Laura didn’t even bother turning away. After they’d ripped the terrified man into raw chunks, they jammed handfuls of human meat and offal into the terrified faces of the crowd. They ate, the blood coursing down their chins. They hated it, and glared in the direction of their Lord, but they ate. 

“That’s power, little girl. They hate me. They’d kill me if they could. But I’ve got power, and your precious Dornier doesn’t. All he can do is seduce the young and send them out to learn one of Azathoth’s idiotic spells.”

Azathoth. One of the words of the chant. Laura tried not to show recognition, but the Lord of Manhattan smirked. 

“Azathoth. Goddamn blind demiurge, the size of a star. The awesome daemon-sultan, that sits and does fuck-all at the center of the universe. Destroys everything he touches, doesn’t even know what power is all about. What the hell is your idiot god going to grant anyone? The power to drool and shit themselves? Dornier backed a second-rate loser, not even a contender. Your spell doesn’t do anything, you stupid bitch.”

Laura concealed a relit spark of hope. The chant did something, even if she didn’t know what. And if the Lord of Manhattan didn’t know what the spell was, it would take him by surprise. She looked at the sky. 

Two fish-men grabbed her and took her away. It didn’t do any good to struggle–they had hands like steel. They wrestled her into a cell at the Lord’s castle. The door was too strong for her, the walls unforgiving stone.   

Now she knew the despair that Monica felt. Tomorrow she would go to the tower, and sometime later, a fish-man baby would tear its way out of her. If she survived the first one, there would certainly be another, and then another until whatever luck or strength had sustained her gave out. Would the spell work if she was dead? She thought about the Lord’s jibe about Dornier and the chosen one. He was a liar. 

She watched as the clouds slowly broke up, revealing a fine red sunset. Daylight turned to darkness, and no one
bothered her, not even to feed her. She paced in the nearly-blind dark, the stars remote and uncaring. Did she have it in her to escape from the fish-men? 

She curled into a ball for what might have been hours in the timeless, trackless cell, sick with fear and failure. Almost imperceptibly, darkness gave way to a faint green luminescence.  She looked up. Beyond her tiny cell window, the sky was a roiling, inverted pot of boiling green water. She marveled, dumbfounded, before realizing what it meant. The time had come. Dornier was calling for her and everyone who knew the spell. She chanted. Somehow, she had imagined doing so surrounded by many people, the women and children she had taught, their voices joining up into a triumphant, ascending chorus. Instead, she pressed her face against her cell’s filthy bars, chanting alone, her words echoing off stone walls. Nothing happened. The hot spark flew up, but that was all. Was that it? She started again.   

And then she heard a reply, off from the distance. First one voice, then many. Women’s voices, and then more, men now, men angry with the Lord of Manhattan. Laura sang it, stronger now, exulting in the sound of the people around her, all chanting the same spell. After two inconclusive tries, they were suddenly all saying the same words at the same time, clamped together by some force greater than all of them. When the last syllable was said, an invisible hand pulled her tongue out by the root. 

Laura collapsed, hands at her mouth. When she moved them, there was no blood. Her tongue was numb, her teeth scorched and blasted. Somewhere deep inside her was a dull ache.  The green churning had vanished from the sky, leaving once again the moon, and remote stars. Nothing had changed. She measured time by the painful throb of her body. Laura wept. She hadn’t been good enough, or strong enough. Not enough people had chanted, and their single opportunity had been wasted. They were defeated, the Masters had won. 

When she glanced up, a strange new light was filtering into her cell. Hope surged, and she pressed herself against the bars of the window. The sky had turned a tainted red. A tremendous new object dominated the horizon, nearly touching the zenith directly overhead, somehow behind the moon.   

Laura stared, her mind numb with fear at the sight of the impossible, seething monstrosity of chaos. She saw
its inconceivably alive, churning surface, and the thick tentacles like the snouts of blind worms, questing with slow, terrible majesty. She quailed before Azathoth’s horrifying size and awful splendor, its utterly alien nature.

Uncountable tentacles groped out blindly. One touched the moon, and then a storm of tentacles swarmed over the surface. Laura watched in sick horror as the thick worms rent the moon asunder with slow grace. In fifteen minutes, all that was left was a coating of light dust on the reddish tentacles. Done with that, they reached out again, inexorable, blindly seeking something new. 

Laura scrabbled at a corner of her cell until her fingers were bloody, desperately trying to find something–anything–to put between her and the slow, monstrous tentacles that grew ever larger.   

“Then, crushing what he chanced to mould in play,

The idiot
Chaos blew Earth’s dust away.”

-
HP Lovecraft,
The Fungi From Yuggoth

Changing of the G
uard

By Peter Rawlik

From the Files of Detective Robert Peaslee

November 20, 1928

Megan and I walked through the dreary streets of Arkham and made our way over to Miskatonic University for my morning appointment. An icy wind had moved in from the North and turned the air of the city frigid. Morning reports said that there was ice on the river. The year seemed determined to end on a bad note. So much had happened, so much horror had been hinted at, hinted at and more, I doubted that Arkham could endure another year like the one that was nearly over. There was hope that something could be done to bring the current round of horrors to a close. Some had an idea to prevent them from ever happening again. This is why we were on our way to see the library staff. We were to speak to learned men who thought that something could be done, and that they were the ones to do it.

Oddly, to meet with the university library staff, I didn’t go to the library. There isn’t room for them all there. The Old Marsh Library, what they now call the Tabularium, has its main hall, mostly filled with files, school archives and the like, but it can hold one hundred people easily. My plan was to fill it with the entire staff of librarians, their assistants, the clerks, and those members of the campus police assigned to the library. It was a simple request, and it needed to be. Things needed to change, and the powers of this little empire had nominated me to be the one breaking the news.

Cyrus Llanfer, the Acting Director while Armitage recovered, met me at the steps and escorted both myself and Megan inside. He was a nervous little man who looked at his watch disapprovingly. “You are late, Detective Peaslee.” His pace was almost frenetic.

“The cold and wind slowed us down,” I lied. “Is everybody here? I don’t want to have to go through this again.”

Llanfer nodded. “Everyone is waiting, from Armitage all the way down to that annoying little woman down in receiving. What is her name? Stanley.” He clucked her name. “Some kind of prodigy: a Law degree at twenty-two, but she ditches that to work in the pit. Who does that?” The inside of the building was warm. The old library had its own furnace and the old thing was still in fine working order.

Megan touched my hand. “I’ll wait in the reading room.”

Llanfer spoke with a condescending tone. “Thank you Miss Halsey. Be sure not to wander around, there are no clerks or librarians available to help you, and I would hate to see you get lost.”

I call out to her, “This will take me an hour, not counting questions.” She kisses me on the cheek and I watch as she struts down the hall while Llanfer takes me through the massive double doors of the entrance to what was once the Marsh Library. The room beyond was full of chattering academics. The venerable Doctor Armitage was sitting in a chair off to the side. He looked weak and sad. His actions had thwarted the Dunwich Horror, but while he had been fighting monsters, his wife had fallen ill, and eventually passed away. Her funeral had been just two weeks earlier. Behind Armitage was Harper, the former director, who was a little younger than Armitage, but not nearly as spry. He was supposedly retired, but still maintained an office and did a little research.  Occasionally he served as an academic advisor to graduate students, but only to very promising candidates.