The Tree of Azathoth, page 18
Of course, real wizards didn’t stand face-to-face and throw spells at one another like a boxing arena. The first thing most non-hedge mages did was figure out a way to make themselves immortal and then spend the rest of their lives wrapping themselves in protective spells. Wars against others of their kind were decades- and even centuries-long affairs where the slightest bit of risk had to be balanced against immense rewards.
I had to wonder how many other Pre-Rising mages had fled to the Dreamlands with the Rising. I’d known some cult leaders and mages had welcomed the dawn of the new era, only to be cruelly disabused of anything resembling a reward by the Great Old Ones’ indifference. Others had desperately struggled to stave it off, only to find themselves destroyed. Alan Ward had been circumspect with his tales of the occult world Pre-Rising and while it had taken years to discover he’d apparently been a puritan sorcerer before his incarnation among the people of New Arkham, I still welcomed those secrets. Little good as they’d done him in the end.
Malcolm Jones stood beside his master and smiled at me, letting me know he’d summoned the throwback to a less evolved primate form of humanity. The smile reminded me of a child calling the teacher to intervene and made me think even less of the crooked police detective.
Neither, of course, predicted that I would just pull-out Mercury’s Gift and fire it into Franz’s face.
Chapter Nineteen
* * *
One might argue that straight up murdering a man in the middle of a public place, especially surrounded by police, was not the most conducive to survival reflex I had exercised. Which was verbose even my standards but, nevertheless, a very good observation. However, my attitude toward the White Gorilla was influenced by the fact that not only had he murdered my son, but I remembered his part in killing me.
Unfortunately, for me, the bullet struck a shimmering field that seemed to suck all the momentum out of the warded magical strike. It didn’t even ricochet but instead just collapsed into itself and fell like a stone to the ground. Franz Jermyn, clearly unimpressed with my impromptu assassination attempt, simply stared at me with his cold simian eyes.
“Really?” Franz asked.
“Want to me arrest him, sir?” Malcolm Jones asked, clearly a great deal more shocked than his boss.
The general shock at my presence had given away to surprise at my attempted murder and its utter failure, leaving people to scramble to what they might do next. A few of the police officers had pulled their own guns, or were attempting to. They were silenced by Franz lifting his ugly, long-fingered left hand.
“No,” Franz said, his voice a deep baritone. “Mr. Booth was simply performing a party trick. Weren’t you, Mr. Booth?”
“No, I was trying to kill you,” I said, dryly.
“Ha-ha!” Franz said, letting out a belly laugh. “Ah, I do regret how circumstances have resulted in the two of us becoming enemies.”
“Mmm-hmm,” I said, having overwhelming dislike and disgust for the man well up from the interior of my soul. I had no idea where it came from, save the generality of the late Detective Booth’s memories, but it went beyond Jermyn killing me. There was a deep and visceral loathing inside me for this man that I’d rarely experienced before. Something generally reserved for child killers and slavers.
“Would you so kindly do me the favor of accompanying me, Mr. Booth?” Franz gestured away from the crowd. “I believe there are some matters for us to discuss and I would prefer if they were to be done semi-privately.”
“I’d sooner be fed on by barracuda,” I said, twisting my lip in disgust.
All that did was amuse Franz more.
“Good, good. I like a man who speaks his mind. Too many flatterers and toadies in my line of business. People willing to debase themselves in order to join the Knights of Arkham or seek my favor as the High Priest of Azathoth.”
“Azathoth is a blind idiot god, mindless and churning madness at the heart of the universe,” I said, speaking automatically. “It’s like worshiping gravity.”
There were plenty of beings that could be classified as gods. Really, all that made a god was someone worshiping it and there were cults to endless numbers of things throughout the Wasteland. Presumably the same held true on other worlds. My opinion of religion was neither positive nor negative. Unlike the materialists of New Arkham, I did not dismiss it as mere superstition, nor did I believe religion was as some inherent good like some who clung to the faiths of their Pre-Rising forebearers.
No, instead, I viewed religion as something fundamental to the human condition as a form of pattern recognition. Evolved through chance or genetic tinkering by Elder Things, human beings collated facts about the universe into a singular coherent narrative about the way things worked. Whether you worshiped Jehovah, Buddha, or Yog-Sothoth, humans needed a sense of the way reality functioned as well as their place in relationship to such.
Traditions, taboos, and mind-images formed from this were as fundamental as breathing. Which, for better or worse, was a substantial reason why humanity was fucked. Then I found out the Mi-Go, Yithians, and other races also did it. If you believed the Dagonites, even Cthulhu itself was supposedly a High Priest of Azathoth.
So, I believed religion was a part of reality it was useless to disregard. However, it was sadly my experience most priests I’d met were more like men such as Franz Jermyn. Azathoth was the rolling chaos that had spawned Yog-Sothoth and Nyarlathotep, possibly other gods, and from it all things were derived. But that meant nothing.
“It’s more like worshiping chaos,” Franz said. “Which makes him the perfect god to worship. Real except utterly uninterested in interfering with your manipulation of the gullible. Which gets me to the next point, don’t accompany me and I will gun down your associates.”
“I’d like to see you try, asshole,” Jackie said, glaring.
The White Gorilla smiled. “Charming.”
I noticed Martha had disappeared from the crowd and I wondered if she’d taken the time to make her escape from his influence or if this had somehow been a carefully baited trap from the very beginning.
“You’re not going to go with this guy, are you?” Jessica asked, looking ready to start something. Something I couldn’t exactly blame her for given I’d attempted to gun down Franz in the middle of the studio lot.
“I’ll be fine,” I lied.
“Given you have rather healthily recovered from death, I don’t doubt that,” Franz Jermyn said.
“You have more allies than you believe, Booth,” the Baroness spoke. “Ones who would be very eager to take a shot at those who believe themselves to be the masters of this City.”
It was awkward getting such a bold declaration of loyalty from someone I only barely knew of from the whispers of a dead man’s thoughts.
“I’ll be fine,” I replied, knowing there were answers I could only get from the White Gorilla. “Provided your minions decide to behave themselves.”
“Minions?” Franz said, chuckling. “Ah, how droll. It makes me sound like some sort of supervillain.”
“I don’t worry about good or evil,” I replied. “Hero or villain.”
“What do you worry about then?” Franz asked, sounding genuinely curious.
“With me or against me,” I replied.
Franz narrowed his beady little eyes. “You have my word that I won’t do any harm to them for the time being.”
“And why should I believe that?” I asked.
Franz smiled. “Because I need you for something, hence why I haven’t killed you again already.”
I nodded and departed from the group, aware that while I didn’t believe the man had anything resembling a code of honor, I did believe him when he said there was some sort of purpose that now required me alive versus dead. Either that or he believed, despite my failed assassination attempt, that I might be a danger to him.
“Tell me, Mr. Booth, are you aware of the difference between a religion and a cult?” Franz asked.
“One is open and public, sharing its secrets freely, the other is a mystery religion that shares its secrets only with the higher ranks,” I replied.
“One is large, and one is small,” Franz said, walking to another movie set and standing in the middle of a disturbingly accurate open-air reproduction of New Ulthar’s main street (only street, really). I saw the Wages of Sin brothel, the Sheriff’s office, and the Church of Small Gods.
“Uh huh,” I replied.
“Religions may spend years debating nonsensical questions like how Azathoth can be the center of the universe when the universe is infinite,” Franz said. “Or whether Azathoth is simply the black hole at the center of the galaxy.”
“The universe is expanding so it has to have a center,” I replied. “At least if you’re defining the Big Bang as the beginning of the universe versus whatever was outside of the universe, blank void or not.”
“Not my point, Booth,” Franz said. “Mind you, I’ve heard from your wife that despite your rough and tumble appearance, you were more philosopher than warrior.”
“I’m both I can assure you,” I replied. “My wife wanted me to kill you, you know.”
“I know,” Franz said. “I considered briefly making her my consort but determined I could do better than a filthy Wasteland mutant.”
I raised an eyebrow. “Throwing stones in glass houses, are we?”
“Clearly you are unfamiliar with my true parentage. Are you familiar with the Nazis, Mister Booth?” Franz asked.
“I’ve had the misfortune of becoming familiar with their ideology,” I replied. I’d found a priceless Encyclopedia Britannica in the ruins of New Ulthar’s previous inhabitants and learned a great deal about Pre-Rising history from its secrets. Even more than I had learned from the many books of New Arkham’s libraries.
“Horrid little men but useful fools,” Franz said. “My family were supporters of the Bund and exporters of early computational machines and hardware to the Third Reich when America was still neutral in the burgeoning European conflict. Not that much of this will have meaning to you. I, unlike my family, was not interested in mere wealth and political power. My great uncle had committed suicide when he’d discovered a terrible secret about our family, but when I pieced together what he’d found I discovered far greater possibilities.”
I stared at him. “I assume you mean that your family had inhuman ancestry if we’re being perfectly candid.”
Franz smirked his horrid ape-like face. “Not inhuman, Mister Booth, superhuman. One of my ancestors had been an explorer of Africa and during his travels there had found a lost kingdom between the non-Euclidean dimensional paths along the Earth’s ley lines.”
“The ghoul paths,” I replied.
“Far older than them,” Franz said. “This kingdom, Ultima Thule, was populated by descendants of the original uplifted ape-like strain that the Elder Things had experimented on. The primordial root species from which all the loathsome trash like the Deep Ones, serpent men, Faceless Ones, and ghouls sprang from. Let alone the fragile slave race of homo sapiens.”
“I’ll try not to take your opinion personally,” I replied.
Franz snorted. “You are Kastro’vaal and are as close to a racial equal as I’m likely to find among these things.”
I didn’t share his opinion. “What does this have to do with a short-lived fascist movement from the Pre-Rising Era?”
“The Thule had taken over the cities of the Elder Things and lived together in harmony with shoggoths,” Franz said. “But they grew decadent and indolent on their own unlimited power. Nyarlathotep gave them the tools to destroy themselves and destroy themselves they did until the great realms of old were no more in the Great Extinctions. Only a single city, the capital from which the kingdom took its name, remained by the 1940s.”
“And you found this Ultima Thule using your ancestors’ notes,” I replied, jumping ahead in what I expected to be a very long and boring story full of self-congratulations.
Franz nodded.
“I required the funding and tools of the National Socialists to find it. They hoped to find their Aryan ancestral home. Unfortunately, their small-mindedness meant that what they discovered was not the white Adonises they desired. I, however, recognized the power of Ultima Thule and was welcomed as a prodigal son. They gave me powers over the mind and taught me how to dream in such a way as to be considered magic. I made the Nazis my slaves and prepared to go forth as a new Alexander, Caesar, or—”
“Hitler,” I replied, interrupting him. “So why did you not end up as ruler of the world if your Thule race was so superior.”
Franz gave a dismissive wave. “A man named Andrew Doran interfered in the most short-sighted and stupid manner possible. There is nothing worse than a man with a little knowledge. Thule was destroyed and I became the last of our glorious legacy.”
I tried to imagine the kind of mindset where the half-breed by-blow of a dead race of ape-men believed himself to be the true Master Race. I also became disinclined to accept Franz’s statement about not being a supervillain since an ape-man Nazi sorcerer sounded like something from one of Jackie’s comic books. “And instead, you became a sorcerer.”
“Yes,” Franz said. “Enough of their knowledge remained on the psionic crystals which I stole that I was able to be at the front of humanity’s Information Age. I gathered vast amounts of knowledge from the cults of Cthulhu, Hastur, Yog-Sothoth, Shub-Niggurath, and others. I plundered the US government’s archives and made contact with Mi-Go and spirits like Hypnos.”
“And Nyarlathotep?” I asked.
Franz’s smile left his face as a look of discontent passed across his deformed, lipless mouth. “That entity and I have never had contact. It ignored all my pleas to summon it. Apparently, it has poorer taste in priests.”
Given that Nyarlathotep was willing to appear as all gods depending on his mood, I actually found a bit of amusement in Franz’s snubbing. He truly must have been a boring individual to be rejected by the God of a Thousand Faces. Still, I rejected one element of his statement. “I am not his priest.”
“If you say so,” Franz said, clearly not believing me. “All priests are his priests, and you’re the only true one left. At least from our world. Nevertheless, to make a long story short—”
“Too late,” I quoted a comedic movie called Clue that had been in the New Arkham library. One of perhaps a hundred or so left.
Franz narrowed his eyes.
“My vast power allowed me to survive the destruction of our shared origin world. Still, I was trapped in the Dreamlands. It was a long and difficult search for safe harbor. However, I did find the Dreaming City and set myself up here.”
“Until my son turned it from a mid-sized city into a massive metropolis,” I replied.
“Yes,” Franz said.
“Which is why you killed him,” I replied.
Franz chuckled. It was an inhuman gibbering thing. “Oh, John, no. I would never harm your son.”
“Oh?” I asked, not believing him.
“Your son is a filthy degenerate,” Franz said, speaking of him in the present tense. “He worships at the altar of Hastur and that is a worse Great Old One to follow than Cthulhu or Shub-Niggurath. At least the former only has you fuck fish and pray for the end of the world. The latter one is ruled by females and nature but at least it’s harmless. The cult of Hastur is just wrong.”
I had to wonder what he meant but wasn’t sure I wanted to. “I see.”
“No, you don’t,” Franz said. “Your son’s ability to dream is greater than any other sorcerer or mystic I have encountered since the Old Days. Having it touched by the diseased minds of the Yellow Sign cult is horrifying. It was why I had you killed, or tried to, since I wanted to shape and mold his ability. Gabriel, stupidly, rejected my guidance.”
“I can see how that would displease you,” I replied, sarcastically.
Franz snorted, clearly unimpressed. “I did not kill your son, John. We also both know he has transcended death or is someone that can be brought back. I’d happily teach you how to bring back the dead from essential salts if I had an extra thirty years to do so. No, he is the goose that lays the golden egg.”
“The what in the how?” I asked.
“Never mind,” Franz sighed. “What I mean to say is that we’re in this together. We need to find out who killed your son. If you do, I will call off my dogs. The Knights of Arkham will no longer hunt you, and you can go back to helping cats and the trash of the city. We don’t have to be friends, but we don’t have to be enemies.”
“Your offer is wonderfully tempting,” I said. “But I have no interest in your support. Nothing you could say would make me think we aren’t going to be enemies.”
Franz stared at me. “I believe that with your son’s help, we can dream back the Earth and its peoples. Except without the Great Old Ones.”
I stared at him. “Goddammit.”
Chapter Twenty
* * *
“You want to recreate the world?” I asked, staring at him.
Every instinct in my body and soul told me that this was a bad idea. Franz Jermyn had in the span of a half-dozen minutes established himself as an unrepentant monster of the human kind. Not only were his politics deranged but he had also proven himself a coward, fleeing to the Dreamlands when the rest of the world burned.
However, I’d worked with monsters before and, while I had no doubt that he would betray then murder me even if I did agree to cooperate, the same would be the case with myself. It would perhaps also give me the chance to find the kind of magic necessary to pierce his defenses and kill him permanently.
“I can see you’re already working out the angles,” Franz said. “Either that or you’re having another memory download.”
“Memory download?” I asked.
