The Tree of Azathoth, page 14
Which was no choice at all.
“Yes,” I belatedly answered her. “I’m going to make a distraction. I need you to go out the back and try to use the catwalk to get away.”
“I can’t,” Annie whispered. “It’s too high.”
“Do it,” I whispered, knowing I had seconds before the LAPD arrived in the room. “It’s the only way to survive.”
Something about my voice—I did have an impressive baritone—or that I was over six feet tall and made of mostly muscle was enough to convince her to run. I’d never know if she survived or not because I pulled out my gun and prepared to hold off the police if I could. Not even kill them, just delay them.
I managed to last about twenty minutes before I ran out of ammunition and they brought the helicopter around with a mounted machine gun that tore the entirety of the rooftop up, myself included.
“John?” Jessica’s voice woke me up from the memories of a man that had died, and I had not experienced myself but had just lived as if they were my own.
His death.
My death.
Both our deaths.
Increasingly, I was starting to lose myself in this surreal city and I wasn’t sure I entirely cared. If nothing else, I found myself relieved I hadn’t died a coward. In the grand scheme of things, whether you die on your knees or on your feet didn’t matter to the cosmic uncaring universe, but the answer to that was always whether it mattered to you. We were each god of our own little respective universes and had absolute dominion only over how we reacted to events.
At least in theory.
“I was just reliving another man’s life,” I said, noticing only seconds had passed.
“Fine, don’t tell me,” Jessica said.
“I signed off on the mission to kill you, yes,” Martha said.
Jessica looked ready to gun her down and I wasn’t inclined to stop her.
“But…” I trailed off, hoping she’d explain.
“I didn’t think you would die,” Martha said. “You have survived immensely more dangerous people than the police officers sent to kill you. I assumed you would either kill them all or would otherwise escape.”
“And the little girl?” I asked.
“If you believe one more dead child would excessively trouble my conscience then you do not know me as well as you think,” Martha replied, reminding me she was still someone with blood like ice water.
“You’re really not helping your case here,” Jessica said, keeping the gun fixed on her.
“I never quite understood why children were so valued by society,” Martha said, taking a seat by Blackman. “It seems that whenever they are threatened, people utterly lose their minds. Yet the only difference between them and adults is a matter of time.”
“And if it were your child?” I stared at her.
Martha conspicuously took her time to answer. “You are not as strong as you used to be, John. You’re more human.”
“You sound disappointed,” I replied.
“I’ve never felt being human was particularly admirable,” Martha replied.
“A strange sentiment for a human supremacist,” Blackman said, changing the documentary to one about baking.
Martha rubbed the back of the cat’s neck. “To paraphrase the words of the Pre-Rising philosopher, Vladimir Lenin, the Knights of Arkham are useful fools. The New Arkhamites had no ideology or cultural identity to preserve upon their arrival here but our humanity. Hatred became our guiding force and a misattributed sense of superiority. Human supremacy is a philosophy that can be flexible as well as effective in a city of monsters.”
“Until it gets me killed,” I replied.
Martha stared at me. “Yes.”
I took a deep breath. I shouldn’t have expected more from Martha, but here we were. “Why have you come?”
“I assumed you were the one to kill those two police officers this morning,” Martha said.
“How did you figure that out?” I asked.
“Psychometry,” Martha said, lifting her gloved hands. “Object reading. I admit, I was surprised to see a vision of you killing two police officers sent to guard your grave, but not that much.”
And yet, they hadn’t recognized me and had antagonized me to the point of getting themselves killed. It occurred to me—not with too long of a period to think about it either—that Martha had expected that sort of result as well. Her vision of me was a kind of unthinking monster that would violently destroy anything in its way. Perhaps she was right, but that had been a long time ago and that was a creature I’d put in the past.
Hopefully.
“That must cut down on detective work considerably,” I replied, trying to keep my expression even.
“It allows me to know who is guilty and innocent, but that has absolutely nothing to do with who is chosen to be prosecuted and punished,” Martha said. “The law is as great a lie as the gods caring about our well-being and a moral life being worth living.”
“Depends on your morals,” Jessica said, not at all mollified.
“You still haven’t answered my question,” I said, keeping my gaze focused on her.
Martha frowned. “Forgive me, it is difficult dealing with you. I figured with your ensuing humanity that your mind would be easier to read. Instead, it remains as blank and unreadable as ever. I believe that was part of our issues while married. Even at your most apparent mortal, you were surface thoughts only.”
“You would have trusted me more if you could read my mind?” I asked.
“I could have manipulated you better,” Martha said. “We have an enemy in the White Gorilla.”
“Franz Jermyn,” I said, saying the name I only knew from Detective Booth’s memories.
“Yes,” Martha said. “The albino man-ape is a merchant of great wealth in addition to his power as a dreamer. He is also the High Priest of the Great Destroyer in the City. That provides him much influence over the Knights of Arkham that he likes to exert. They are his catspaws to try to take the City from his rivals in the occult and finance.”
“He sounds like a lovely fellow,” I replied. “Why does he hate us?”
I was skeptical of her claims that this man was her enemy, even if I believed he was mine, because Martha had never had difficulty disposing of her enemies. Furthermore, if Franz Jermyn was the head of the Knights of Arkham and as powerful as she said, then why was she not in danger? How was she able to maintain her position as Chief of Police and a leader among the human supremacist group? There was an answer, but I didn’t want to contemplate it: she’d given me up as a way of demonstrating her loyalty.
“He doesn’t hate us,” Martha said. “He hates our son.”
Chapter Fifteen
* * *
“Gabriel,” I said, grunting.
“The richest man in the city is scared of a movie producer?” Jessica asked, choosing to stress his wealth over his control of sorcery. That told me a great deal about how power was measured in this place.
“Stories have power in the Dreamlands, Copy Jessica,” Martha said, staring. “A good half of this city is made up of stories given life and human form by my son’s will. Randolph Carter laid the groundwork, but it was the harvesting of dreams from other worlds that populated it. Franz Jermyn and other wizards among the city fathers populated this place to build themselves a kingdom. They did not expect a rival to come from a dead Earth and start weaving his own dreams, let alone invite in tens of thousands of demihumans to wear human skins and pretend at being people.”
“Gabriel did all of that?” I asked, stunned. “He was a boy when I left him.”
“That was a long time ago, John,” Martha said. “Longer than you’d imagine. He is also not a human being but a Kastro’vaal like yourself, even if you hide it. When the change overtook him, he embraced it and became capable of doing things the city fathers had to make unholy pacts and sacrifice their humanity to achieve.”
I tried—this time deliberately—to think of Detective Booth’s memories, to invoke what had previously been accidental and seemingly more curse than blessing. To my surprise, it seemed to work, at least partially. I could see in my mind’s eye a collection of five figures and their extended family of gods, corpse-mages, and horrors that had once been people. The city fathers had fled here from my world, or someplace so similar as to not matter, before turning the City into their private kingdom. One threatened by my son’s ability to weave dreams like a storyteller wove words.
I could not see them clearly enough in my borrowed memories to be able to know their identities beyond that of Franz Jermyn. I did, however, know that they weren’t friends with one another. Their alliance was a shaky one, with none of them willing to lift a finger—or tendril—to help the other. That was, at least, something of a relief.
“I see,” I replied. “And Anita? What happened to her?”
Martha’s expression dropped. It was one of the rare displays of emotion I’d seen.
“I fear she did not take the transformation as well as you did, John. When the change into your species started to overtake her, she killed her paramour and fled into the Wasteland. I do not know what happened to her thereafter. I assume she either killed herself, was killed, or tried to find you.”
Her words were sharp knife that slashed across my face and chest before plunging themselves into my heart. Toward the end of my treks throughout the Wasteland, I had kept telling myself that everyone I’d known as dead. However, each hour I had spent in the Dreaming City had been an embarrassment of riches. People I’d long given up for dead had turned up alive and restored to health.
I did not believe in Heaven, or at least I did not believe in one for people like myself. Certainly, any paradise I would envision would be a gritty, grimy, and violent place where monsters lived among people. As much a Hell as Heaven. Yet, I’d allowed myself to believe I would be able to see my children again.
“I know what that look means,” Martha said, looking at me.
“Which is?” I asked.
“You wish I had died instead of her,” Martha said.
I stared at her.
“I do not believe in equitable exchange regarding death. There is no such animal.”
“Tell that to the Great Old Ones,” Jessica said.
“Tell that to you,” Martha said. “My son’s world has you in it, but not his sister. A toy for his father—”
Jessica shot the couch cushion beside Martha’s head. The noise was surprisingly subdued, and I noted her pistol had some sort of air device built into the side of it to muffle the noise. A silencer. It was still loud but more like a firecracker than a gunshot.
Blackman looked up, annoyed.
“Please watch where you’re firing that thing. Also, that’s my couch.”
“It’s my couch,” Jessica said.
“If you believe humans can own property, perhaps,” Blackman replied.
Martha cast a sideways glance to the bullet beside her head before turning back to face Jessica. “I’ll refrain from making insults towards your existence, Jessica.”
“Thank you,” Jessica replied. “Besides, how do you know you’re the real Martha? Maybe your kid dreamed you up as well.”
Martha blinked. “You raise a valid point. I have no way to verify whether or not I am a product of my son’s dreams.”
“Freud would have a field day,” Jessica said.
“More like Jung,” Martha retorted. “But John can’t prove he is the real thing either.”
She had me there. I remembered the corpse next to Mister Death’s body in my vision of the dead world consumed by Yog-Sothoth. Was that just another hallucination, a vision of another world, or an actual glimpse into reality that said I had transcended my physical flesh to become a dreamwalker? In what way was that distinguishable from death? At least as most afterlife possessing religions described the undiscovered country?
I need to stop thinking about such nonsense and focus on this case.
The case.
I was already starting to think like Detective Booth. Was I sharing his memories? Merging with him somehow? Or was the fact I was standing here in his clothing, having fucked his wife, and taken over his office simply enough to make me start becoming my doppelganger? Yeah, this was definitely an existential crisis.
“Is my son linked to the Dreaming King?” I asked, wondering if this was yet another clue on my strange path. Solving the mystery given to me by the Tree of Azathoth might not keep me from going mad, but at least it would keep me from thinking about how fucking weird this all was.
“I have no idea,” Martha said. “The Dreaming King is a legend in the City. Most people—who I point out believe in almost anything—do not believe it exists. It is a legend in a world where the outside is literally a product of imagination.”
It was a hard concept to grasp and probably beyond the comprehension of even an immortal being like a Kastro’vaal: the idea that the City was an island of stability in a vast swirling sea of chaos. Or perhaps it was an island of sanity in an ocean of madness. And if the sane were vastly outnumbered by the mad, did that make the sane the madmen?
Yep, I was not getting anywhere avoiding philosophical gibberish.
“I see,” I replied. “That would indicate that my next stop should be Gabriel’s film studio. My son may have insights that I’ve yet to discern.”
Martha snorted. “You have the most appalling habit of hearing but not listening. You go to Yellow King Studios, and you will be gunned down like a dog. The White Gorilla’s men watch that place like no other.”
“And what would you suggest?” I asked.
“Don’t let her manipulate you, John,” Jessica said, keeping her gun aimed at Martha.
“I’m not,” I said, dryly. “I don’t suppose you have anything stronger than water or milk here?”
“There’s beer in the fridge,” Jessica said.
“Thank you, gods,” I muttered. At this point, I needed something significantly harder, but I hadn’t been able to properly digest alcohol for decades. I wanted to move up slowly while keeping my wits about me. Heading to the fridge, I pulled out a brown glass bottle and twisted off the cap before drinking it. It had a warm, earthy, mushroom-like taste that made me believe it was made from more than hops. It didn’t matter, because it was welcomed by my stomach.
“I need you to kill Franz Jermyn,” Martha said, as if asking for the last slice of cheese. “Once he’s dead, his control over the Knights of Arkham will collapse and I will be able to move in to take over from his lieutenants. From there, I will be able to pardon you and keep them out of your business.”
“Bullshit,” Jessica said, shaking her head. “Even if John did kill Jermyn, you’d just toss him to the wolves so you could solidify your place.”
“That would be the most logical course of action,” Blackman said, looking up at Martha.
“Except I wouldn’t,” Martha said, looking down.
“You’ll have to explain your reasoning,” Blackman said, his gaze penetrating in the way only a cat’s can be.
“Booth has already come back from the dead once,” Martha replied. “Jessica is also resurrected, though in a kind of caricature-esque way. As if someone polished her like a gemstone and smoothed away the rough interesting bits.”
I had no idea what was going on in Jessica’s head as her expression remained even, but I imagined it was how much she’d have to apologize if she ventilated my ex-wife’s head here and now. Possibly wondering whether I’d thank her. Which I would not. Despite all the miseries she’d caused me—and apparently my doppelganger here—she was still the mother of my children.
“I’m not sure I buy such a flattering explanation,” I replied. “Even I feel that killing the most powerful man in the City is actually a way to secure my future here.”
“You’re a killer, John,” Martha said, as if she was describing a fact as obvious as the rain. “No matter what reality you come from, you are one. It is an inborn quality like Gabriel’s capacity for making film or Anita’s skill at shooting, little good as that quality did her in the end. You can get past the White Gorilla’s guards and eliminate him as you did Doctor Ward.”
“Doctor Ward got a good chunk of my squad killed and also took an army,” I replied.
“Be better this time,” Martha said, dismissing my concerns. “But I can give you the reasons you should do this.”
“Which are?” Jessica asked.
“One, this is your only lifeline,” Martha said. “If you don’t have me as a friend then you have no friends whatsoever. The Knights of Arkham will eventually learn you are still alive and send assassins after you until you are dead. They’re already targeting Jessica and will soon move onto Jackie. They would have moved onto her already if not for the fact that as a ghoul, she has her own protections. The flesh-eaters have their own power in the city and do not hesitate to protect their own with violence.”
“Do not use that slur in this apartment,” Jessica said.
Martha shook her head, dismissively as if calling Jackie a racial epithet was the least of our worries right now.
“As you wish.”
“You were almost assassinated tonight,” I replied. “Three dead knights in the sewers.”
“I was there, John,” Jessica said. “I’m happy to make it twenty or fifty.”
“You will die long before then,” Martha said. “They’re not going to face you in trial by combat. It will be a car bomb, a sniper, or perhaps even a drive by shooting. Things against which you cannot face. It might be best that you go into hiding.”
“Or perhaps they’ll hire you to rescue a kid and ambush you,” I muttered.
“Whose side are you on?” Jessica asked, finally putting away her gun. Given she was still wearing a bedsheet, she placed it on the kitchenette counter.
