The Tree of Azathoth, page 11
“There’s a reason I like dogs,” I said, looking at Jackie. “I’m going to need your help tracking this thing down.”
“Is that a ghoul joke?” Jackie asked, referring to my dog comment.
“No,” I paused. “Maybe. Not intentionally.”
“We need to get some things straight, first,” Jackie said, keeping her hand on her shotgun. I wasn’t sure if she was safer holding it or the cat she frequently hauled around in its place.
“Like why I’m still alive?” Jessica asked, shaking her head.
“That too,” Jackie said. “But first I’d like to know who the hell those bodies are?”
I looked over at the dead men in the water beside us. “You know, I’d almost forgotten them.”
“You’ve seen that many bodies, Dad?” Jackie asked.
“You’ve been living here in the City awhile,” I said, wondering if it really was the sort of place where you stopped thinking of death and violence as a constant companion. Then again, maybe it was me since I’d killed two men since this morning and was working on a third—if you thought the Napper was a man.
“They’re Knights of Arkham,” Jessica said, looking down at the bodies. “Specifically, they’re Hunters. They could be cops underneath that uniform or citizens playing soldier. It doesn’t matter because they came here to kill me.”
“Because you were trying to save cats?” I asked.
“Because I was married to you,” Jessica said, dryly. “You were a real popular guy in the City.”
“I’m getting that impression,” I said, looking down at the corpses. “Just what did I do to piss so many people off?”
I didn’t want to believe it was just the obvious answer that I was an alien, and she was a human woman. There were many places in the Wasteland where that would have gotten me assaulted or killed all by itself. Indeed, human tribalism would have made it an impossible union for other, even more stupid, reasons.
“What you would have done in the same position,” Jackie said, pausing. “Okay, I’m going to need a second because this is still pretty damn weird for me. I’m glad you’re alive but are you alive? Are you the same John or like his doppelganger from Planet Ten?”
“You read too many pulps, Jackie,” Jessica said.
“My John got me started on them,” Jackie muttered. “Okay, that sounded wrong.”
I shook my head. “Let’s ditch the existentialism talk and focus on getting the Napper.”
“Going into a zoog’s lair alone is insane,” Jackie chastised Jessica. “This one can control the angles.”
“What does that even mean?” I asked.
Jackie stared at me. “You, of all people, should know that.”
I had no idea what she was talking about.
“I’m not alone,” Jessica said. “I have you guys now and we still have find those kids.”
“That’s assuming they’re still alive,” Blackman said. “I don’t smell them. This might well be a mission of revenge. Which is fine, it’s what we cats love more than anything else. Well, except sleep. One of our advantages here in the Dreaming City.”
Jessica looked away.
Blackman walked up to the wall the Napper had fled through and stared at it. Just as before, it shimmered and our surroundings once more changed to become different, providing a passageway down further into the zoog’s lair.
“There,” Blackman said.
“Should I even bother asking?” I asked, looking down at the cat.
“No,” Blackman replied.
I sighed. “Well, we should go then.”
I didn’t want to admit because it was a foreign feeling to me but, I was scared. I had mastered my fear long ago, having accepted death as the inevitable consequence of my choice to become a New Arkham Ranger. Long after I had abandoned that profession, I’d steeled myself against unnamable horrors and unspeakable things that I was willing to throw myself into the jaws of, but now I had a lingering feeling inside the pit of my gut that I loathed. One that I had not been willing to entertain before, which was the antithesis of effectiveness in the face of the supernatural: hope.
I mentally cursed myself for this indulgence and wondered if my children had been cruelly abused by the fact that I’d never accepted the possibility of a future before this day. I hated that I was entertaining such an idea now. The City was an illusion, the proverbial utopia that existed nowhere for the simple fact that it continued to exist in the face of my dead world’s fate. Yet, exist it did and if it didn’t magically vanish like a soap bubble popping, I wondered if a life might be possible here.
I expected at any moment for Nyarlathotep to appear and slay Jackie, Jessica, or the entire Dreaming City just for the sheer cruel indulgence of depriving me of them. It would be akin to taking the wings off a fly or burning ants with a shard of glass but well within the immortal’s character as I’d observed it. Yet, I could not suppress the wonder that I had people to lose now and potentially time with them.
What a cruel joke it was that I had spent my first day murdering two police officers over my own grave before crawling into a monster-filled pit where only freak occurrence or alien miracle had saved Jessica’s life. It seemed the age-old proverb that one could not teach an old dog new tricks held true and the previous Booth, my unfortunate doppelganger, had paid the ultimate price. Was I doomed to come to a place of civilization and life, only to die in violence or burn it down to the ground? I felt an overwhelming kinship to the long dead mythical Conan and how his own clean barbaric ways had clashed with the corruption of urban life.
“I’m with you,” Jessica said, frowning. “We’ll see this monster dead or die trying.”
“Better still the former than the latter,” Blackman said. “Preparing for defeat is something I have never understood. Perhaps that is why so very few human dreamers are as effective as cats.”
“And yet you’re living in Randolph Carter’s city rather than one dreamed up by cats,” Jackie pointed out. Perhaps she was the only one who was willing to argue with the cat about its arrogance. I personally felt it was a bit like arguing with a fish about swimming or a human about fucking. There was no point and even if you succeeded, they’d fall back into it.
“If it’s his city, where is he?” Blackman asked. “Humans are the ones who expect their gods to be absent. Cats embody theirs.”
Jackie didn’t have an answer for that. Instead, she said, “Come on, John, let’s go kill this thing. Otherwise, we’ll be retreating rather than advancing.”
How I envied her overconfidence. I’d briefly considered going, once more, alone into the zoog’s lair, but such sentiment was as tactically unsound as it was pointless. Not only would neither Jessica—as strange as her behavior was to me from the woman I remembered—nor Jackie agree to it, but if I ended up going alone then I would almost certainly be killed. Then our group would be more vulnerable, and they would be more likely to die than be saved. Nobility was fine for those Wastelanders who could afford it, but it was rarely practical. Those who died for it were also forgotten by the survivors.
“Agreed,” I said, turning back to the tunnel leading deeper into the Stygian darkness.
The cat smelled the air as it moved ahead of me. “It is wounded. Crippled but still alive.”
“That gives us one advantage,” Jessica said, picking up a belt from one of the dead Knights of Arkham and wrapping it around her waist. She then reached down and picked up the still bobbing flare on the ground before hoisting it in the air.
“You don’t have a flashlight?” Jackie asked.
“I had a lantern,” Jessica said, sighing. “Unfortunately, it made me a massive target.”
“John had a glowing hand he was using as a torch,” Jessica said. “Can you do that again?”
“No,” I replied.
“Why?” Jackie asked.
“Because it’s magic,” I replied, not exactly happy we were standing there, waiting for some sign to move on.
Probably from me.
Deciding to check the Knights of Arkham’s bodies, I hoped there would be some sign of magic or a weapon capable of cutting into the zoog. There was no such thing as the truly supernatural in certain respects—the true gods like Yog-Sothoth and Nyarlathotep were aliens that simply wielded near omnipotent power to re-arrange reality.
Most other magic was either Dreaming or science so advanced that they could use simply call upon it anytime and anywhere via the “codes” built into the fabric of the universe by infinitely more advanced species. But if it walked like a duck and quacked like a duck, then wasn’t it a duck? Or was that simply an easy excuse to dismiss the occult? Either as ill-understood truths of reality or the truly unfathomable to our elevated ape-like minds?
“Not to make a stupid question, John, but what can you do?” Jessica asked.
“Excuse me?” I asked, finding a knife blessed by Kithnid, the supposed antithesis of Cthulhu. It was moonsilver plated and vibrated with the power of something, but the rest of their weapons were distressingly mundane and certainly hadn’t done them any good against Jessica. That was another sign she was perhaps something other than human.
And I didn’t care.
“Magic,” Jessica said. “Not to put too fine a point, but the John I remember from the Wasteland was more than human.”
That contradicted her earlier statement about waking up in this world.
“In the Wasteland, I wasn’t entirely human.”
“Or at all,” Jackie said, “but being human is overrated.”
I glared at her, not happy at her description.
“But I don’t have access to that part of me anymore. Thank whatever gods truly rule the world. I know a few spells still, though. Things I learned from Mercury or Doctor Ward.”
Or had dreamed of.
“Like what?” Jackie asked. “Sorry, Dad, I just want to know what our options are.”
Dad, was it? How easy it was for them to slip into the idea I was their replacement John. That they’d broken a glass vase and gone to the market to get a replacement. Yet was what I was doing any different? They were sliding into me in the role that I had eagerly embraced. I was wearing the dead man’s clothes for hell’s sake.
There was also a creeping dread in my stomach that this wasn’t their doing or mine either. That I’d been shoved into this role by terrifying forces beyond any of our comprehension as a replacement part in an engine. Detective Booth had died and the show had to go on so I’d been tapped to be his understudy. Okay, I may have lost myself in metaphors there. But how did one grasp with the concept that you were utterly replaceable, and you weren’t sure you truly cared since the alternative was life as the last human-thinking being in a dead world?
“I know fifteen or twenty glyphs,” I replied, answering them. “Mostly, I can sketch them in bullets and on blades.”
“What does that do?” Jessica asked.
“Mostly, it helps me kill things that can’t normally be killed,” I replied. “I also know the Hand of Glory spell, a blood transfer spell, and how to make a true Elder Sign. That’ll bar most things strange from entering its presence but not everything. I can’t tell you the reason, but it didn’t work on me when I was a monster, so it’s got that going for it. Also, I can summon…”
I trailed off, realizing that revelation wouldn’t help matters.
“Summon who?” Jackie asked.
“The Crawling Chaos,” I said.
They stared at me. Even Blackman—who’d been keeping his gaze focused on the tunnel he’d summoned.
“You asked,” I replied.
Chapter Twelve
* * *
“You can summon Nyarlathotep, a genuine god, and you didn’t think to mention that?” Jackie asked. “What’s next, you’re pals with Jesus?”
Jessica looked discomforted.
“It’s not like that. The summoning spell to bring forth Nyarlathotep was something I memorized from the Necronomicon’s English translation.”
“Spoken with the same energy as ‘I went to the market’, not ‘I memorized a spell to summon the God of Evil from the Book of Ultimate Darkness’,” Jackie said.
“Neither of which is an accurate description,” I said, not stopping myself before I defended my tormentor. “Nyarlathotep isn’t evil so much as uncaring about all moral constraints.”
“You know there’s a word for that,” Jessica said.
“Cat?” Jackie suggested.
“Evil,” Jessica said. “Also, cat.”
“We don’t have time for any of this,” I said, turning around and heading down the tunnel. I preferred to face the Napper again rather than deal with these sorts of questions. Jessica jogged up to move by my side, carrying the light that seemed a pitiful defense against the darkness.
The spell to summon Nyarlathotep I’d used only once in the Dreamlands and the consequences of it had been dire. It had brought me to the attention of the Crawling Chaos and established a permanent link between us. One that possibly transcended time as Doctor Alan Ward had put the Other God’s mark on me beforehand. But, had he really done that, or had Nyarlathotep begun interfering in my life retroactively because of what I’d done later? Had my entire existence come to pass because of a being that defied cause and effect? It didn’t help the Messenger of the Other Gods was a compulsive liar.
No matter, the spell was useless now. I couldn’t get Nyarlathotep to not appear to me. Even then, the spell was a trap that had been dictated to Abdul al-Hazred and whoever he had learned it from. It sent out a call to the Black Pharoah but gave no true compulsion to appear, let alone obey. No force in the cosmos could compel Nyarlathotep to obey a mere mortal, though he might pretend if it amused him. These were the things I’d read in Alan Ward’s annotations throughout the Necronomicon’s translation. Before the book had succumbed to weather damage and silverfish in the world’s last days.
It occurred to me that Detective Booth had never shared this information with the others and that gave me some sense of satisfaction. Perhaps he had never known that spell, or maybe he’d simply been smart enough to not be too honest with those he loved most. Then he’d gotten himself killed by his own ex-wife—my ex-wife. I only knew a few things about parallel realities, it wasn’t exactly useful knowledge in the Esoteric East, but I assumed it was the basis for all this strangeness. Any other way led to madness.
That was when a cold and echoing voice spoke through the tunnels. It seemed to come from everywhere at once but was soft and almost soothing, spoken by two sets of vocal cords that were identical like dual recordings played at once.
“You are coming.
Yes, you are.
See me where I star.
Burning bright,
like the night.
Everything a fright.”
“The Napper is close if we can hear him make shit poetry,” I muttered, sloshing my feet through an oily black substance I hoped didn’t suddenly catch fire or turn into a monster trying to swallow me. The light provided barely pierced the abyssal void about us and I was glad that Jackie and Blackman stayed behind us, the latter bundled up in Jackie’s arms as she’d put away her weapon. Correctly, I guessed, she’d decided the cat was more useful than a shotgun.
“I don’t think the Napper is mentally well,” Jessica said.
“You don’t fucking say,” I murmured. “How do you even measure the sanity of a monster?”
“I’ve learned the hard way that monster and man are two sides of the same coin,” Jessica murmured. “If it’s really something that doesn’t even approach a mortal mind then it can’t be considered a monster. It’s just a natural disaster or an animal. Hating either is an exercise in futility.”
I understood why she was talking in such a detached abstract way. It was giving away our position, but the Napper had already demonstrated it knew where we were, that it had some sort of limited control over where we were going or what he perceived. Something I hoped either Blackman could counteract, or it was too wounded to do. No, talking about it, if it felt the need to taunt us, was a way to draw it out. I approved of her psychological tactics even if I didn’t necessarily buy what she was selling. Plenty of humans were alien to me. That didn’t mean I hated them any less when they went after me.
“Like the Color,” I muttered, regretting the words out of my mouth the moment they left them.
The mention of the abominable thing from space that slaughtered her family didn’t have the expected effect on her. Instead, she just sort of nodded and stared forward. Then again, this Jessica had never lost her husband or children to the Color. Instead, she’d amicably parted ways with them after waking up alive. It was a confusing and disturbing sensation, struggling to see someone who was identical to the person I’d cared for most—except for a handful of others—in so many ways yet also be fundamentally different in others. The dissonance caused me distress when I needed all of my wits about me.
“We’re almost there,” Blackman said. “You should be prepared for the fight of your life.”
“I’ve killed a shoggoth,” I said, dryly.
“Yes, and you were something akin to one then even if you didn’t know it,” Blackman said. “Now you are a dream of Booth’s humanity.”
I wasn’t sure if he was being literal or not. Hell, I wasn’t sure if any of that mattered in the Dreamlands. “Sure.”
The tunnels eventually gave way to a large chamber that was as far from what I expected to find underground as anything else I’d encountered so far in the City. It was a temple, hard carved, and looked like it had been the product of a thousand workers, or perhaps just one particularly gifted dreamer.
The chamber was a massive oval one, like being in the interior of the top half of an egg on its side. The walls were encircled by pillars that were decorated in abstract, bizarre, and frankly unsettling art that I hadn’t seen outside my worst nightmare. It was almost pornographic in the depictions of the zoog, ancient humanity, and something else.
The interior of the chamber was empty of furnishings except for a large sacrificial pit that was burning with great green balefire that rose a dozen feet in the air. It produced no smoke but an earthy aroma that smelled of burnt meat and incense. The light produced reached only the edge of the chamber and swirled in strange directions as if it was obeying no known laws of physics. It was a living thing and reminded me, in some terrible way, of the Color.
