The Tree of Azathoth, page 23
In a way, it was karmic that I felt the spells of control bouncing against my brain and forcing me to my knees. The spell caused my stomach to twist and my flesh to slide down across my face, but it wasn’t painful. I was a more malleable creature now. The magic of the Elder Things struggled to take hold of me, though, because they were words made to control a race cloned from R’thugh’cruan.
Still, it was a nightmare to watch my arms elongate and my face to slide across my bones that were themselves becoming soft but feel every part of myself. I was now more akin to modelling clay than a person and able to see out of eyes that began forming alongside tendrils shooting from my form. It was proof positive that any claim to humanity I had now was nothing more than a delusion.
“Give me the key,” Franz said, holding up his staff. “Give me the key!”
Martha looked on my transformation with a twisted amusement. “Finally, John, I get to see you as you really are: a monster.”
Every movement of my body was a struggle, especially as it was ceasing to exist as an organized body of matter. In other circumstances—like if I was anyone other than myself—I might have been fascinated by the fact that the shape of my body could be determined entirely by will alone. However, I was me and the loss of that was terrifying.
Worse, I could feel my mind disappearing. The human thoughts that came with a body that had limbs, arms, organs, and eyes. No, I started to think shoggoth thoughts. Not even Kastro’vaal but the thoughts of a race that had a lifetime of servitude imprinted into their mind. Beings that were tricked through magic into lives of suffering due to being brainwashed down to their very triple-stranded DNA to obey their masters. It was, as Franz said, a fate worse than death.
So, I made a last-ditch attempt to save myself. “I’ll…give…you…the key.”
My hand, more a tendril, picked up the Silver Key then hurled it at the White Gorilla. Reflexively, the wizard grabbed it.
“Thank you,” Franz said, chuckling. “I think I’ll make you my butler.”
If I was wrong about this, I was fucked.
That was when Franz’s hand around the silver key began to shake before he began to scream. His face melted off his body and the eyes were the last part of the White Gorilla to remain before he turned into a disgusting pile of viscera on the ground. My bullets may not have been able to penetrate his defensive spells, but it seems my son’s curse was.
The death of the White Gorilla—almost anticlimactic as it might have been—freed me from the malfunctioning spell with which he’d been reducing me to a shoggoth’s form. I felt control of my body, strange and alien as it now was, return to me. I pulled myself back together before covering my body in an armored exoskeleton and extending claws from my hands. This was the form of a creature from Carcosa that had become part of the Kastro’vaal race. I had no idea how I knew how to assume the form, but it was instinctual.
Most useful from this was the fact that it possessed two whip like tendrils that shot forth, one of which knocked away Martha’s gun, sending it spiraling across the ground. I did not want to harm her, and disarming seemed the best way to start a dialogue--however unlikely that would prove to be productive.
Martha stared at me as I advanced on her. “Well, shit.”
“Stand down,” I said, my voice coming out with a guttural, almost echoing quality.
“I think not,” Martha said, raising her hands like a conductor with a symphony. She proceeded to then lift me off the ground with an invisible force before hurling me across the room, smashing me into one of the pillars of the now burned and ruined temple set. I crashed through its wooden frame and out the other side before rolling on the ground like a child’s ball.
“Well, that’s new,” I muttered, feeling only the dim echo of pain through my new body. My wife had always been a telepath rather than a telekinetic. Also, the telekinetics of New Arkham tended to be able to move coins, not throw around people like toys.
“I’ve had two hundred years to increase my connection to the Dream,” Martha said. “I could never master magic, but the raw connection of the Dreamlands? Yes, I can master that just fine.”
It was interesting that it had taken thirty to two hundred years for me to finally get some insight into the sociopathic nuttiness that was my wife’s psyche. It turned out that old saying was correct: you can know a person a dozen years and only know their true character when you point a gun at them.
“You don’t have to do this, Martha,” I muttered, climbing to my feet as my exoskeleton repelled everything from metal braziers to prop stone. She was hurling everything in the building against me and if they had not primarily been creations for the movies, I might have been more than mildly inconvenienced.
“Don’t have to?” Martha scoffed, staring at me with the first real sign of emotion I’d seen from her in a long time: hatred. “I want to do this! You have been an eternal weight on my life, John! You stole my father’s love from me, saddled me with your disgusting spawn, and undermined my position at every turn!”
“You’d be dead if not for Gabriel leading you here!” I snapped, thinking of our dying world.
“Ha!” Martha laughed. “You have no idea what this place really is! We are in the gullet of the Leviathan! I would prefer to be dead, but he won’t let me die! Die, shoggoth!”
Martha successfully hurled me again with telekinetic force against the back of the studio wall but with much greater force than before. My body was pressed against the brick that comprised the foundation of the building and held in place. It was impossible to move, and I found myself once more overwhelmed.
“I am not a shoggoth,” I muttered growling. “I am the King Shoggoth!”
The mass that formed a Kastro’vaal or shoggoth’s body was not like a human being’s. They were not made of pure matter as physical reality defined, but of things that existed in both this world and the next.
They could shrink or compress themselves to levels that could not be quantified and in that moment, I took advantage of that ability, reaching out with a whiplike tendril that reached across half the temple before wrapping around the crystal rod by the now bloody mess of Vincent Sage’s bones. It turned out I could do it once I set my mind to it. My arm retracted like a rubber band and the rod placed itself in my hand. I had no idea how to use the alien technology but so I simply aimed it at Martha before willing it to fire with a single thought: burn.
The crystal rod shot forth a blast of glowing energy that exploded at Martha’s feet, consuming the mindless form of Malcolm Jones as well as his meal. Martha was sent flying backward, injured but alive, as her telepathic hold on me was dropped. I crashed to the floor where I slowly reverted to my human form.
Much to my surprise, I seemed to be wearing Detective Booth’s clothes and I wondered if they were part of my body, or the Elder Things had given their creations the ability to weave matter. I’d once read a science fiction story about something called nanotechnology in the New Arkham Library. Perhaps the shoggoths were, in part, each a gray goo puddle of that matter: able to weave matter and energy together into whatever forms they wished.
Or maybe it was just magic.
“No, no, no,” Martha repeated on the ground, half of her face ravaged along with her arm. I was surprised she hadn’t gone into shock. “This is not how it is going to be. Not when I was almost rid of you. The Dreamlands will not fill with your vile half-human spawn. You are not a true wizard. You are not a god. That is not yours or Gabriel’s destiny. It is mine!”
I stared at her, surprising myself by not denying my divinity but wondering, instead, what drove her to want it instead.
“What makes a god if not his worshipers, Martha? Who slaughters the fatted calf for you?”
Martha’s response was to curse me and raise her hands to continue fighting, fruitless as it was. She sat up and snarled at me. “If oblivion be the fate of souls after the valley of death, then I send you to it and laugh at your demise!”
That was when a pistol was pointed the back of her head before a female hand pulled its trigger and ended my wife’s—my ex-wife’s—life.
I blinked, looking up to see Jessica holding the weapon. Blackman, Jackie, the Baroness, and Penny were behind her. The last was holding a Tommy gun.
“I thought I’d fetch your friends,” Blackman said. “They were having a spot of trouble.”
“Yeah, there are a lot of dead cops outside,” Penny said.
“Good,” I replied, standing up. I walked over to the bubbling red, black, and pink gore pile that was the White Gorilla’s remains. Half of it had been obliterated by the blast I’d fired at Martha from the crystal rod. That part was burned to powdery ash, absent any sign of its former origin. Resting on the top of the pile of ash, undisturbed, was the Silver Key.
My key to meeting my son.
Chapter Twenty-Five
* * *
“You didn’t have to do that,” the Baroness said, looking at Jessica.
“Yeah, but I wanted to.” Jessica stared down at the splattered brains of Martha Booth.
“She was a product of New Arkham and Doctor Ward’s experiments,” the Baroness said, showing a shocking familiarity with the society I’d come from. “There was no way she could be anything other than what she was.”
“So was Jessica,” Jackie said. “And Booth. They didn’t turn out to be complete assholes.”
“And Mercury?” the Baroness asked, showing that she was apparently a close friend of Detective Booth.
“Ehh,” Jackie said. “I loved Mercury like a mother, and she loved me, but she was an evil bitch.”
The Baroness grimaced.
Penny looked over at me.
“So, Booth, are you okay? I mean, your wife being evil and the fact you’ve become a whatchamacallit.”
“I’m not the Booth you know,” I said, looking down at Martha and trying to figure out what I felt. I tightened my grip around the Silver Key. “I don’t know you.”
“Nice to meet you then,” Penny said.
“I wish it was under better circumstances,” I said, not looking up from Martha’s corpse.
In the end, I decided I mostly felt foolish. For decades, I’d made excuses for Martha and believed she was like me and so many others in the New Arkham hierarchy: people who were trying to survive and doing the best we could. Maybe that was a lie we told ourselves, but the lie had its own value that we knew what we were doing was wrong. Martha, it seemed had fully embraced the rhetoric of the human supremacist city-state. The Knights of Arkham weren’t a thing she’d allied with for power but something she believed in, or maybe she had just joined for the former but that was functionally indistinguishable in the end.
“Well, congratulations,” Blackman said, looking around the location. “You’ve killed the villains, got the MacGuffin, and saved the girl. The story is now over.”
“What girl?” I asked, looking at him.
“Pick one,” Blackman said. “I’m just suggesting you should burn this place to the ground and cover up your involvement.”
I understood what he was saying. If I’d been in trouble before, I was going to be the most wanted man in all of the Dreaming City. The fallout from this massacre would be far reaching and affect everyone from Jessica to, well, Jackie. I didn’t have many acquaintances in the City, but I’d managed to make an enormous mess very rapidly.
“I can fix this,” the Baroness said, surprising me. “The City Council is not made up of the White Gorilla’s friends, only his allies. Any hint that he was trying to ascend himself at their expense is enough to justify his death as well as those of his minions. You may have to take his or your ex-wife’s position, though, to keep order in the city.”
I looked at the Silver Key. “No, that’s not going to happen.”
“Why?” Jessica asked. “We can get the hell out of here. Go to Ulthar, Celephais, Ilek-Vad, or some other part of the Dreamlands. Hell, let’s go to another Earth.”
“Can we do that?” I asked, wondering how Jessica seemed so informed.
“The Silver Key is capable of piercing the mists of not just the Dreamlands but all time, space, and the multiverse,” the Baroness said, once more showing a familiarity I didn’t understand. “It was a gift to Randolph Carter’s uncle from Yog-Sothoth.”
“Yog-Sothoth gives presents?” I asked, confused. The image struck me was strangely funny as if the closest thing the universe had to a capital G god was out there serving as a cosmic Santa. Then again, I struggled with the fact that Yog-Sothoth had sired multiple children with humans—and possibly other races. It made the Kastro’vaal lust for other species look positively pedestrian.
“Randolph Carter used it to construct his Clock of Dreams,” the Baroness said. “The Silver Key is how Gabriel found the Dreaming City.”
“Who are you to me?” I stared at her.
Detective Booth’s memories were of no aid and seemingly absent. It appeared my transition to becoming something more (and less) than human had severed my bond with my doppelganger. He had never been able to accept his suppressed inhuman side. Had I? I wasn’t sure, but I was closer to that than he’d been. It also established the fundamental difference between us: he’d been willing to die nobly, and I wasn’t. I would continue to struggle to survive at all costs. Perhaps there was meaning there, or nothing at all but the will to live.
“I am a friend,” the Baroness said. “Yours.”
“Of the sexy kind!” Penny said, cheerfully. “You have a lot of those. Is that going to be a change now that you’re all shapechange-y and tentacle-y? I mean I’ve read some of the books out of Little Asia but I never thought they were accurate. But you’re not the only half-shoggoth so I guess what I’m saying is that do you create a thing to use, or do you have em naturally?”
“Penny,” Jessica said.
“Yeah?” Penny asked.
“Shut up,” Jessica said.
“Hey, it’s motivated by scientific interest!” Penny said, unconvincingly. “I’ve got a personal connection to matters of magical body transformation! I also only like chicks so it’s not prudent.”
“Prurient,” Blackman corrected.
“Whatever, pussy,” Penny said.
Great, now I was wondering, too. Still, everything seemed to be in place and that was a small mercy in a world of unholy possibilities. “I’m going to find Gabriel.”
“I would not advise that,” Blackman said.
“Why not?” I asked, undeterred as I put the Silver Key back into my pocket. I was still confused how I was wearing clothes but it occurred to me that everything in this place was a dream so what did it matter. The rules of logic and reality were out to lunch and even my status as a Kastro’vaal or shoggoth reflected my self-image.
“Gabriel is in the Deep Dreamlands,” Blackman said.
“The what?” Jessica asked.
“This is the Near Dreaming, centered around Kadath,” Jackie, who had been silent except for her speech regarding my character, explained. “It’s basically the collective unconscious of humanity and near-humanity.”
“You mean cats,” Blackman corrected. “Humans are just squatting.”
Jackie rolled her eyes. “It’s all linked together via the ghoul tunnels: all the Narnias, Olympuses, and Middle Earths. However, the Deep Dreamlands is something else. That’s where the dreamstuff is wild. Where the Great Old Ones—and worse—dream.”
“Worse than the Great Old Ones?” I asked, suffering a failure of imagination there. Surely the only thing more terrifying than them was the Other Gods.
“The Great Old Ones were the most powerful things in your universe,” Blackman said. “However, what about the things that predate your universe?”
I sighed.
“I really didn’t need to know about that.”
“Yes, you do,” Blackman said. “Especially if you’re going into the Deep Dreamlands.”
“Yes,” I replied. “I suppose I do.”
I was ashamed that I was scared to go forward. I looked at my hand and caused it to cycle through a dozen “memories” of other races. An insectoid Yithian claw, a Mi-Go pincer, a squid-like tendril, and more unrecognizable shapes. It made no sense, how these alien biologies could be connected to the rest of me. But, none of this was “real” so what did it matter? Thought was reality here. If I ever returned to the physical world, would I continue to exist or just vanish in a puff of imagination? I had no answer.
I contemplated that going into the Deep Dreaming would be akin continuing on the path of Pre-Rising astronauts into deep space or under the fathoms that had imprisoned Cthulhu, following the path that Randolph Carter had walked past Kadath to ever higher planes of existence, to what I suspected had become his doom rather than ascension. It was probably similar to astral projection, and I would hopefully be protected against environmental hazards. Well, protected against such things as my new alien form may or may not be.
However, something told me the Deep Dreamlands should be feared even by the greatest of warriors. R’thugh’cruan’s people had feared it and they had been accomplished dreamers with vast kingdoms in the mind before their erasure. Yet, there was no real choice here. If Gabriel was there, then I had to go to find my final answers. It would not make up for abandoning him for decades or condemning him to his transformation into a monster without someone to guide him—no matter how good my guidance would have been. It was, however, the least I could do.
Jessica walked up to me and wrapped her arms around me. “Don’t go, John. You don’t need to.”
“I do,” I said, not able to meet her gaze.
All I could think about was the fact I was once more a monster akin to the one that had killed her. Jessica, the real Jessica, or perhaps simply the first, had tried to kill me as a mercy as I was becoming the thing I am.
“Gabriel will return,” Jessica said. “He’s connected to this city, somehow. You don’t need to use the key to visit him. He knows you’re here. If he’s watching you, then he’ll make himself known when he wants to.”
