The Tree of Azathoth, page 17
Either that or somehow becoming even more one with Detective Booth’s persona, a prospect that I was now finding frightening rather than useful. After all, there was a difference between remembering being a daring rescuer of slaves and protector of children versus your son’s pimp and hatchet man.
“Well, the natives are getting restless, and I don’t mean the Dunwych,” Jackie said, stepping aside. “If you’re going to make your dramatic entrance then now’s probably the best time.”
“Are Jermyn’s minions here?” Martha asked Jackie.
“You’re here,” Jackie said, as if that answered the question by itself.
Perhaps it did.
I stepped out of Jessica’s car and started feeling the memories of the Yellow King studio swirl around my consciousness. All of them bad. It was a sleazy, artificial, and corrupt place where countless favors were traded behind closed doors to make their tinsel epics. I knew every inch of the place as if I had walked it a thousand times and they were all filled with stories of blackmail, bribery, lies, murder, sex, and intrigue.
The Baroness, Motoko Hale, wanted an ex-lover killed because they’d sought to sell their private pictures to the smut papers as pornography.
Vincent Keaton kept himself relevant by stealing the faces of younger actors and reinventing himself a dozen times despite always being the same dreadful hack.
Poor Dorothy Kettleman, overdosed on Stygian heroin, trying to cope with the horrific thing that had happened to her.
Dave Gillman selling young men and women seeking to become actors as chattel for the Redemptionist Cult.
Barry Queegeg, who simply set himself on fire one day during the middle of shooting and burned to death before anyone could intervene. No one ever figured out why.
This was an evil place and in a way that was pettier and rawer than the black cathedrals and sinister tombs I’d visited in my years wandering the Wasteland. No number of blood-soaked altars or slaver’s dens had quite the sheer two-facedness of this glittering palace of imagination.
It was with this in mind that I felt no small amount of amusement when I walked up to the crowd of people gathered around Studio Fourteen, the location of my son’s murder, and cleared my throat, drawing the attention of first one and then dozens.
“Hello.”
Chapter Eighteen
* * *
The reaction to my presence was the kind of thing that made one want to open with a line like, “Reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated.” Unfortunately, I could not make levity with my son’s corpse nearby on a gurney and ready to be loaded into a coroner’s truck. The sight of the body under a white sheet was enough to make the whole thing finally sink in as real and I couldn’t help but primarily feel regret.
How much time could I have spent with my son if I’d bothered to seek him out after discovering my status as the last of the Kastro’vaal? Two hundred years and change apparently. It was still hard to parse and my increasingly comingled memories with Detective Booth depicted an increasingly corrupt adult version of my remembered child. Maybe I could have prevented him from becoming so if I’d been there.
The crowd was composed of two groups of people: the studio staff and the police. The studio staff consisted of actors, stars, secretaries, and the various hangers-on that I somehow knew to be inherent to the place. There was also the Yellow King Studio security force, who were far from the night watchmen they purported to be. Most of them were former members of the Yellow Kings gang and seasoned killers.
The police were a collection of detectives, patrolmen, and the coroner’s staff. I recognized some of them, though I’d never met any. Names were on the tip of my tongue but did not immediately come to mind. I knew, instinctively, though, that they were Knights of Arkham members that I’d tangled with in the past. A shame that Detective Booth had not taken more permanent measures against them.
One—a white-skinned man with pencil-thin eyebrows and a poorly healed broken nose wearing the same sort of Fedora and trench coat that seemed to be Detective Booth’s favorite sort of attire—I knew had been involved in “my” death. His name I remembered: Malcolm Jones. He reached for his gun, and I believed in that moment he was fully prepared to kill me.
That was when a small-statured, white-haired person ran up and wrapped their arms around me. It was an unexpected gesture and immediately surprised me as my attention turned down to them. It was Penny Pritchard, “companion” of the Baroness Hale and chauffer. Androgynous in a way that could be attractive to either sex’s preference, they were dressed in overalls and wearing a cap. Penny was an effervescent ball of joy and had once opened fire with a Thompson machine gun on a crowd of bank patrons when they were still a bank robber working for the Yellow Kings.
“Booth!” Penny said, tightening their grip and burying their face in my chest. Which had the benefit of preventing Malcolm Jones from gunning me down where I stood. If he shot Penny, he’d have to answer to the Baroness, and she had her own connections that were more powerful than those of a particularly jaded PI.
“It would seem that death has no hold on you, old friend,” the Baroness Motoko Hale spoke nearby, looking every bit the image of understated Angelwood royalty. She had a kerchief wrapped around her head and wore sunglasses and a heavy woolen trench coat. She was simultaneously covered in enough glamour to make her one of the most beautiful creatures among humanity.
The Eurasian woman and Detective Booth had been through many things together. She was a witch of not inconsiderable power, but there was a dark heart to her, especially when contrasted to Jessica. Numerous murders were to her name and letting me kill some of her ex-boyfriends had been her permitting me to do her a favor rather than something she’d required from me.
“So, it would seem,” I replied.
I surveyed the crowd and picked out Vincent Keaton next, a weaselly looking man presently wearing the body of a handsome Black man with a shaved head. Vincent was doing his best to avoid being seen by me. He wore a fine yellow suit with a white handkerchief in his right front pocket. The arrogant actor went through bodies quickly, able to keep them only a year before they were worn out from the destructiveness of his interior consciousness. Detective Booth had once believed him simply to be a particularly corrupt sorcerer with a simple but practical form of immortality he used in lieu of becoming something inhuman.
Later, sometime shortly before his death, Detective Booth had come to suspect that Keaton was something older and more alien. A body stealing creature from the primordial epoch that he’d once known the name of but had forgotten. Detective Booth had let him do his foul trade of body swapping for reasons I did not understand, but knew related to the fact Vincent was valuable to his/our son.
Damn.
There were more rogues and recognizable faces among the crowd, but I suspected it was these four that were the ones most likely to have killed Gabriel. They were uniquely dangerous among the lesser talents surrounding them and somehow, I believed my son would have required someone like that to put him down. Maybe it was just misplaced arrogance on my part.
“You’ll have to tell me how you survived,” the Baroness said with uncomfortable familiarity. She glanced over at Jackie and Jessica. “Once we’re alone.”
I frowned and gently forced Penny away. I could tell she’d picked my pockets, and either stole my wallet or, more likely, had planted something on me. Practitioners loved to plant talismans. I removed a tiny doll they’d placed there before dropping on the ground, crushing it under foot.
“I’m afraid not,” I replied. “I have more pressing matters to deal with right now.”
The Baroness looked disappointed in a manner that told me I was missing some secret clue or message. Unfortunately, I couldn’t care less about what my doppelganger was up to at this point. Instead, I pushed my way through the crowd—even bumping into Malcolm Jones and giving him a condescending smile—before reaching the gurney bearing my son’s corpse.
“You’re not allow—” One of the patrolmen tried to stand in front of me.
I stared at him and somehow, whether in sympathy for a grieving father or pants-wetting terror of a man known as a killer, it resulted in him stepping aside. The others didn’t attempt to intervene, and I appreciated that small courtesy despite how much I hated the police in my short time as a resident of the City.
I went to the side of my son’s corpse and proceeded to move the sheet aside from his head and stared at his face. It was the first time I had seen my son outside of Detective Booth’s memories and the sight was something that left me unable to move for a moment.
Gabriel Howard Booth was a man of mixed race but bore the same strange albinism as his mother, a condition his sister had not. The right side of his face was deformed from the pistol shot that had destroyed half of his features, but the left side was completely unmarred. He had a kind of angelic beauty far different from my rough and tumble features but there were enough similarities to see myself in him perfected. He looked like a man just turning thirty rather than two hundred or the teenage boy I’d left behind.
Behind.
I realized now why I kept thinking of the Color event as one final transformation of my memory occurred.
“My God,” I said, referring still to the Judeo-Christian deity than the many horrible spirits around it. What I saw before me threatened to steal away my sanity and any lingering faith I possessed in a just world.
Gamma Squad was gathered over the edge of the cliff and forced to serve as witness to the Color’s nightmarish feeding on Blacklung. To look upon the extra-dimensional entity from distant stars was enough to drain away your hope for the future as well as any belief in your own individual importance.
The Color could not be described in mundane language. The best I can describe it is a mere approximation. It resembled nothing so much as a pulsating, scintillating, neon, prismatic rainbow turned into the gaseous form of a cloud. If that sounds beautiful rather than horrifying then you would not be wrong, but that only added to its dreadful existence as its mesmerizing light patterns reached down to pluck screaming men, women, and children up, then crumble them to ashes.
I was reminded of the surreal explanation by Doctor Ward that the color fuchsia or magenta did not actually exist. It was a balance between blue and red that would normally appear as yellow, but since human eyes lacked yellow color receptors—in fact, the color we see as yellow is a mix of green and red—it did not register as such because there was no green. The colors were an illusion that our brain created to make sense of something it did not possess the capacity to perceive.
That sort of thought was an attempt to look away from the horror I’d helped unleash upon the people of Blacklung. When I’d joined the New Arkham military, I’d done so with the perhaps naive idea that I would be helping protect mankind and in my more cynical days, I admitted it was primarily to maintain New Arkham’s feudalist control over its surrounding communities. Never, though, did I expect I would be the kind of person who would be ringing the dinner bell for the monsters. This was not war, it was mass murder. All that kept me from madness was the knowledge that this would work.
“It’s not working,” Jessica said, staring at the sight.
“What?” I asked, feeling the bottom drop out of my stomach.
Jessica’s stare was of Ahab toward his white whale. The hatred in her eyes was all-consuming and I knew she was desperate to detonate the atomic weapon that had been prepared to destroy it.
“The fucking thing isn’t moving toward the cave! It’s not being summoned! Doctor Ward is a moron!”
“Shit,” Stephens said, staring with the first real shame and sickness I’d ever seen on his face.
“We need to call this in,” Garcia said, futilely trying to shift the blame for it.
“The spells lured it here in the first place,” I muttered. “We need to repeat them closer to the mine’s entrance.”
“Fuck that,” Stephens said. “That thing’s already eaten half the town.”
“I will not truck with black magic,” Garcia said.
I could not help but think of my son Gabriel in that moment, strangely not my daughter or wife, and decided to do something immensely foolish. Going back to one of our Jeeps, I grabbed a backpack full of the foul incense sticks that Doctor Ward had prepared extra of. He also had a hand-written copy of the Re’Kithnid’s summoning spell inside it as well.
Al’Kull Al’Zuul Re’Kithnid
Al’Kull Al’Zuul Yog-Sothoth
Maldra Zan-Trivalas
I speak to the spawn of the Unimaginable Horror
I speak to the spawn of the Light Unseen
I speak to the spawn of Dread Who Lies In Water
Zak Maul Tulu
Xoth!
Xoth!
Come forth!
Obey!
It sounded like gibberish and maybe it was, but a small number of humans possessed the power of Dreaming and the will to be able to force their consciousness behind the words to work these heathen sorceries. Doctor Ward had told me that, between us and Doctor Mercury Takahashi, we were perhaps the only humans of New Arkham capable of doing so. His attempts to create sorcerers with his psychic children had failed.
I swiftly memorized the spell, perhaps too easily for the circumstance, and tossed the incense sticks back into the seats behind me. I broke a flare and tossed it on top of the incense, resulting in a large trail of blackish noxious smoke pouring out from the end of the jeep.
“John, what the hell are you doing?” Stephens asked, perhaps thinking I was going to lead the Color right to us.
He was wrong, I was going to lead the Color to the mines.
I climbed into the driver’s seat and started the car.
“I’m going to make this all worth it. Detonate the nuke when its inside.”
Jessica tried to get into the passenger seat, but I drove off as she had her hand on the door, causing in her to fall to the ground. I knew she was ready and willing—eager even—to die in order to get revenge on the Color. She cursed and screamed at me while I drove down the side of the cliff face, beginning the chant and attracting the attention of the Color. The magic I worked at was successful and it abandoned its nightmarish feast to chase after me.
It should have been a one-way trip.
The world would have been better off if I’d died.
I took my hand away from the corpse on the gurney, returning to the present. Well, to whatever qualified as the present in a realm where time did not properly exist. In the corner of my eye, I once more saw the Dreaming King. This time, the figure gave me a short nod as if to confirm my secret suspicions about the malevolent nature of what I’d found myself dealing with.
Gabriel was not dead.
Nor was he alive.
The figure before me was just a shell and not the first or the last of them. My son had transcended, somehow, the need for flesh in a world constructed from imaginations. His death here did not do anything to deter him and he was the one who was communicating Detective Booth’s memories to me while bringing up my past thoughts of the Color incident. He had also shown me the dead world that was now closed off to me. He was making it clear that there was no turning back, like Cortez burning his ships behind him. It was within the power of the being that my son had become.
He was the Dreaming King.
The implications of this were confusing as well as elating. My son was alive, after a fashion, but transformed. He was, perhaps, the architect of this entire journey and had lured me to Mister Death or convinced the mad old shaman to send me to the Dreamlands. But I somehow didn’t believe the voice I’d heard from the Tree of Azathoth, that artificial god, was Gabriel. No, I believed it to be Nyarlathotep again. If my son’s plight had attracted the attention of the Messenger of the Outer Gods enough to carry it to me then there could only truly catastrophic forces at work.
“What are you trying to tell me?” I whispered. Whatever change had happened to my son had rendered him incapable of communicating with mere normal mortals. Gabriel, at least the one I’d known as a boy, was not the kind to engage in needless obfuscation or mind games. He was not like the priests of the Messenger or the Outer Gods or the various Great Old Ones, who attempted to cover up their own ignorance by speaking in riddles.
There was no answer and all I could think was the fact that the Tree of Azathoth had said my choice would be to save or kill the Dreaming King. He was linked to this city somehow, I needed to solve that mystery as well, which wasn’t going to be accomplished by focusing on the death of the body here. Yet, someone clearly had wanted to kill my son and I needed to find out who.
“Such a strange situation, isn’t it, Booth?” A voice spoke behind me. “Though we might be enemies, I give you a certain level of mercy given the tragedy you have suffered today.”
The crowd behind me had parted and I turned to see a man who made me sick to my stomach. The egg-headed, well-muscled but ill-proportioned Franz Jermyn stared at me with his craggy features. He was one of the few individuals that I’d met who exceeded me in height.
He also was at least twice or even three times my weight, though every bit of it as solid as rock despite being impossible for a human frame. I’d met many monstrous and mutated individuals over the years but there was just something subtly off about the White Gorilla—from the swiftness of his movements to his cold, unblinking stare—that set my teeth on edge.
The man’s effect on everyone else with his impeccable manners, custom-tailored suit, and palpable aura of power was enough to intimidate all but the Baroness and Jessica. Even Martha had managed to find a way to make herself scarce in the presence of the archmage. The only other practitioner I’d ever known who had the kind of power I felt from Jermyn was the late Alan Ward, and I wondered which of the two of them would have emerged victorious.
