The Tree of Azathoth, page 15
“Right now?” I asked. “Mine. What are the other two reasons?”
“The second is that the White Gorilla is an existential threat to the people of this city,” Martha said. “Franz doesn’t believe in our son’s vision. He wants to fill this city with nothing but his fellow humans.”
“He’s not human, though,” I replied, remembering the look of the man.
“He’s close enough,” Martha said. “He already eliminated all of the zoogs and recruits more disadvantaged humans every day.”
“Recruiting humans to hunt monsters is like recruiting lambs to hunt the wolves,” I replied.
“This is the Dreamlands,” Martha said. “All he has to do is get enough to believe and perhaps he’ll just wish them away. After all, there are nine humans of pure blood for every demihuman of mixed or pure strains. Of course, at the end of the day, the big difference is mostly cosmetic. Red ants versus black ants, with this little spot of cityscape being the leftover detritus of a human who became a god. There are plateaus, kingdoms, and realms in the Dreamlands where man would be as unimportant as the gum on a movie theater floor. R’lyeh is on the far shores of explored territory and is populated by mile tall Cthulhuoids that pay homage to the god of the Deep Ones.”
“I’ll make a note to avoid that place,” I replied. “You mentioned three reasons, though.”
“I’ll pay you twenty thousand dollars,” Martha said.
I snorted. “Money?”
“Spoken with the disdain of someone who has never had to live in a society based around it,” Martha said. “Yes, money. I think you’ll find it quite useful in this world.”
“There were mediums of exchange in the Wasteland,” I replied.
Martha smiled at my ignorance.
“How much?” Jessica asked, surprising me.
Jessica’s reaction surprised me, but perhaps not as much as it might have before recent events. I was getting used to the rules that governed this strange place and that included the little pieces of cloth in my wallet which were stronger than most bullets.
“Twenty thousand,” Martha replied.
“An interesting blood price for your dead husband,” Jessica said.
“He was yours too,” Martha said, smirking. “I’m surprised you didn’t think lower would be fair.”
I’d be insulted, but that was a fair cop. “You think I should take this, Jessica?”
“We should take this,” Jessica said. “The White Gorilla is after me too. He has his fingers in many pies and if we don’t take him down before he realizes you’re still alive, he’ll bring his whole army down on us.”
“It may be too late for that,” Martha said. “The body count is already rising, and the omens are poor for him. That’s another reason I’ve chosen you to be my champions.”
“Because you wouldn’t side with us if the omens favored him?” I asked.
Martha smirked, not giving an answer. I hoped it was her idea of a joke, but the question was whether or not the punchline was on me. It was nicely illustrative of our relationship that I knew she’d set me up to be ambushed—using a kidnapped little girl no less—and yet I still couldn’t bring myself to fully distrust her.
That was when Martha’s coat pocket made an odd buzzing noise. She reached into it, Jessica looking at her gun before she removed one of those strange crystal phones that I’d seen so many of the citizens using.
“Yes?” Martha asked.
“I don’t like you taking calls in my house,” Jessica said.
Martha made a dismissive gesture that would have been offensive but for the fact it would probably be a bad idea for any of her subordinates to hear Jessica’s distinctive voice. That was another thing that had changed: Jessica once had a Texas drawl that she’d created as an affectation from old movies and books. This Jessica spoke very much like a city girl and with the accent she’d possessed in those rare unguarded moments where she wasn’t using her Texas drawl like a shield.
“I see,” Martha said, her voice lowering. “No, thank you for informing me. Yes, I’ll show up there tomorrow. No, I don’t think I’ll be needed to do the identification. He was one of the most famous citizens of the City.”
My blood ran cold.
“Goodnight,” Martha said, hanging up her crystal phone.
“What happened?” I asked, not wanting the answer.”
Martha stared down as if taking the moment to decide on her answer. “I fear we may be too late in our desire to eliminate Franz Jermyn, John.”
She never called me John.
“Why?” I asked.
“Our son has been murdered.”
Chapter Sixteen
* * *
“This is a bad idea,” Martha said, sitting in the passenger side of Jessica’s car. Jessica was sitting in the back, wearing a blue coat, white-shirt, blue jeans, and a man’s hat. Blackman was sitting with us, seemingly accompanying us for boredom more than anything else.
I was driving even though I barely remembered how to after so many years since the last motor vehicles had broken down in the aftermath of the Rising. The Blue Meanie had probably been the last car in the world and had given up the ghost ten or fifteen years before due to the hard conditions it had been forced through.
The storm from earlier had continued beating down, but the sun was about to rise in the east or perhaps it was the west. Did such directions have any real meaning when you were probably on a floating island rather than a planet?
I wasn’t familiar with the City’s layout, Byzantine as it might be, nor was I aware of what were the various traffic laws that guided matters. I was the one forcing us all to go to the Yellow King Studios, though, so I kept control over the wheel. Besides, it wasn’t especially difficult to figure out them all. Just do what every other car in the area was doing.
“I believe you,” I replied, slowly getting the hang of the militaristic formation in which the cars moved. Honestly, they were a waste of the city’s efforts as there wasn’t that much of a place to move them about before you reached the endless black ocean or the wild Dreamland beyond.
The City was perhaps the size of Old New York or maybe the New England Wasteland, including all the land outside it that provided most of the city’s food. Few would ever drive outside the City limits proper and public transit would have been a better use of everyone’s resources.
“Then why are we going?” Martha asked. “You will be announcing yourself to the world, and my own protection of you.”
I tried not to react to the word protection as, even sarcastically, it was a ridiculous use of the term.
“We are going because my son’s body is there, and I have to look upon it with my own two eyes before it is disposed of.”
I’d borrowed a fresh load of fire glyph bullets from Jessica’s drawer—creations of Detective Booth—and now had six more to fire at my enemies. If I’d had more time, I would have crafted a variety of them, but these magical objects were usually enough to deal with my problems. I didn’t know if I’d have to kill anyone when I arrived at the studio but, given my son had been murdered, I hoped to do so.
Martha crossed her arms. “Madness.”
“Forget it, John, it’s Angelwood,” Jessica said in the back. “You’re not going to find any answers there.”
“Angelwood?” I asked.
“A big bunch of ranches in the hills that our son bought and turned into his film studios,” Martha replied. “The dreams of the Pre-Rising Earth allowed it to be molded into a place for the country gentry and fame hungry.”
Which was a polite way of saying it was a replica of Hollywood that my son had created with manipulation of reality and others wanting to have such a place exist in the Dreaming City. I didn’t know much about the Old World, but I’d seen enough surviving movies to know the general gist of the place—so had Gabriel. Randolph Carter had created this place, but it seemed increasingly likely that my son had shaped it.
“This place seems more and more like a playset for someone enjoying the Old Word,” I muttered, taking a turn and heading onto a massive, mile-long bridge across the bay toward the exterior of the City. It ran right past a view of the statue of the Dreaming King in the harbor and I couldn’t shake the feeling that it was watching me.
“That’s what happens when you live in a place where thought becomes reality,” Martha said. “I’m honestly surprised that it has worked out as well for as it has. I expected the Dreamlands to be innately hostile to human life the way our world became. Well, before it was destroyed.”
“You seem awfully okay with that,” Jessica said.
“One must accept realities, no matter how unpleasant,” Martha said. “Abraham Lincoln said that it was possible for every man to overcome adversity. He also said that if you want to find the true measure of a man’s character then you should give him power.”
“I don’t care about Abraham Lincoln,” I said, gritting my teeth. One of my white ancestors (through my mother’s lineage) had rescued the Great Emancipator’s son from a train hitting him but that was unimportant trivia. “My son is dead. You told them to keep the body where it is, right?”
“Yes, John,” Martha said. “For the third and hopefully final time. Though I don’t understand your distress.”
“You are a heartless bitch,” Jessica said. “Has anyone ever told you that?”
“Every day of my life,” Martha said, sounding bored. “It is apparently a cultural stereotype that women are meant to be warm and nurturing, especially toward children. Even if they did not make the choice to procreate of their own volition.”
“I can assure you, I’d still think of you as an ice-cold piece of shit if you were a man,” Jessica reassured you.
“Thank you,” Martha replied. “But yes, I am distressed about Gabriel’s murder. He was a powerful ally, a good friend, and one of my few intellectual peers in the city. I was simply noting that he could very well be a parallel universe’s Gabriel, Booth, and completely unrelated to your child. You could also be a dream creature like the Jessica and the relationship between you entirely meaningless.”
It was an uncomfortable but entirely accurate statement. “Meaning exists entirely within our heads, Martha. What is important to me is beyond my control. Whether Gabriel is or is not my son in this reality doesn’t matter because I believe him to be. You just can’t change the way you feel because of facts. Feelings transcend them.”
“How revolting a concept,” Martha replied. “Mind you, I note that you didn’t think to visit your son in twenty years of being an exile. Your relationship with your son didn’t seem to matter much to you then.”
“You’re right,” I conceded. “I was a coward.”
“That wasn’t what I meant,” Martha said. “I was merely expressing that you seem to be more determined to care about Gabriel now that he’s dead than you were while he was alive.”
“We’re still on the bridge, John,” Jessica said. “I can shove her out the door into the ocean.”
“No,” I said, only half-certain she was joking.
The thing was that I couldn’t argue with Martha’s reasoning. I’d been an abysmal father and my attempts to bond with my children had been limited by my own all-too-human fears. Even before I’d discovered the horrifying secret about our alien blood, I’d kept my distance from them.
My father, Marcus Booth, had tried to murder me after killing my mother for a combination of her adultery, her alcoholism, and his own inadequacies. The fact she was his cousin only made the entire thing grosser and I was almost glad he’d not provided the seed that spawned me. I’d tried to forgive him, blame PTSD or an addiction to pills, but years in the Wasteland had convinced me I’d been a fool to ever think of him as anything but a human monster. That didn’t exactly leave me with a proper set of role models to model a father-child relationship, and the closest thing I’d ever had was Doctor Alan Ward—and we saw how that ended.
A part of me couldn’t help but wonder how the Kastro’vaal who’d sired me had done so. Had it been some Wasteland traveler she’d met at a bar, a manifestation of Nyarlathotep doing some sort of nightmarish Immaculate Conception, or had Doctor Ward done secret experiments on her as he’d done to so many other patients under his care?
There had been a time I’d thought Doctor Ward might have been my biological father despite the difference in our skin tones—I favored my mother’s Sub-Saharan features—but that seemed irrelevant right now. A question that probably would never have an answer and even if it did, what would be the point of having it?
“I have been a terrible father,” I replied, simply acknowledging the reality behind me. “I was more a father to Anita than Gabriel, and far more of one to Jackie than both of my biological children. But if I can’t make up for my mistakes with him while he was alive, I can certainly avenge them after his death.”
“I’m sure that will be a great comfort to one who is beyond caring,” Martha said. “It does make me curious, though, Jessica what your family is up to.”
Jessica crossed her arms and stared forward. “Robert and Howard joined the Temple of Bast sex cult. I don’t know what happened to their father.”
Blackman snorted. “Humans worshiping cats must make it weird. They should just give us proper veneration like obedience and pets.”
I tried to piece together the ages of everyone here. Robert and Howard were children when they’d died. “How old are they?”
“Old enough,” Jessica replied. “Time works differently here.”
“How differently?” I asked.
“I’ve been here a hundred and eighty years, give or take,” Martha said, stunning me. “The ravages of time seem to have stopped for many and slowed down for the rest. Sometimes it catches up all at once, but I can’t describe how the rules of this fairyland function.”
“One hundred and eighty years.” I was gobsmacked by that little detail and wondered how it had slipped my mind.
“A grain of sand in the hourglass to some of the people who have lived here,” Martha said. “It is also why I am very determined to make sure the bubble of normality we live in isn’t popped.”
“Is it in danger of doing so?” I asked.
“The omens say so,” Martha replied. “The Dreaming King will wake up and doom will come to the City. All of this will vanish along with everyone and everything in this place. Unless…”
“Unless?” Jessica asked.
“Either the Dreaming King’s slumber becomes eternal, or someone takes the mantle from him and dreams in his place,” Martha said. “This is the subject that currently occupies the mind of the city elders. Perhaps the one time their plotting is justified.”
“The Tree of Azathoth said so in as many words,” I muttered.
“Interesting,” Martha said. “It seems you are the Chosen One. Our destined savior sent by the gods to deliver us from evil.”
“You don’t have to sound so mocking,” I muttered.
Martha snorted. “You must have known a very different Martha Booth then.”
No, I hadn’t.
“Too bad we’re past the bridge,” Jessica muttered.
“The best way to deal with the gods is to never attract their attention,” Blackman said. “Like mice with cats.”
“Or hope they’re too lazy to chase you,” Jessica said to the cat.
“That too,” Blackman said.
“The simple fact is if they cared, they would be with you and vice versa,” Martha said.
“Because you were such a good mother,” Jessica said.
“I never claimed to be,” Martha replied. “Nor wanted to be.”
The rest of the car ride was mostly silent as we drove outside the city limits, and it became a much different sort of place. Surrounding the city were countless small farms, ranches, and old decaying mansions that had their own strange lack of consistency.
The forests, plains, and buildings felt less real, as if their creator knew they were necessary for the sustaining of their vision but did not particularly care about their specifics. Instead, they had been popped up by scattered memories and visions of rural bliss. There was something oppressive about the place, far more so than in the city and I could only imagine the countless horrors hidden under floorboards or locked away in attics.
I drove across the single long freeway until it brought us beneath an enormous sign formed from white painted stone: Angelwood. Like a strange mixture of Easter Island with the long capital of the American west coast. A whole valley had been cleared away and fenced off to create its various movie studios for the ten or twenty million people of the City.
From the top of the valley, I could see a smaller city catering to a variety of different environments that seemed conjured from Earth’s long-dead past. There was even a fake pseudo-R’lyeh with fake towers and props visible around a towering statue of Cthulhu.
“This seems excessive,” I replied, noting our car would need its battery charged soon. “Why would you have a mile long land of make believe when you already live in a land formed from imagination?”
“The people need movies to help them dream because they live in the dreams of the powerful,” Blackman said. “Besides, you should be grateful, there’s a Wasteland replicated down there for the Esoteric Easterns that the public loves.”
“I hate those,” Jessica muttered. “They’re so inaccurate.”
“How would know?” Martha asked. “You’ve never been there.”
Jessica didn’t respond, though I was pretty sure Martha would get pistol whipped before this was over. Thankfully, for Jessica’s sake, Martha wasn’t telekinetic. Unfortunately, for Jessica, a telepath had far nastier ways of hurting someone.
“So, Yellow King Studios,” I said, starting the vehicle down the valley.
“You can’t miss it,” Martha said. “It’s the one with the gold sigil over the entrance.”
“I take it was funded by the Yellow Kings?” I asked, remembering the unofficial rulers of Kingsport before its takeover by New Arkham. The gang of Ezekiel King. All of them were worshipers of Hastur.
