The Tree of Azathoth, page 4
Weak.
Vulnerable.
Mortal.
What should have been cause for celebration was instead a cause for concern as I turned up my head to the men who stood above me. Their looks were of murderous contempt, expressions I had witnessed upon countless men in the Wasteland. Bandits, slavers, warlords, and kings had all worn it before inflicting their petty power plays on their fellow humans. When survival of the species had taken precedence, they had killed simply to feel like they were not the weakest things left on Earth.
“You look like a foreigner, stranger,” the first of the cops said. “Sound like one, too.”
“We don’t like foreigners in the City,” the second said, clearly following the first one’s lead. He put away his own pistol while keeping my own trained on me. It was quite annoying to be threatened with my own weapon.
“Especially liars and thieves,” the first of the cops said.
The second raised my gun at my head, which would have taken my life even if I had been at full strength. Prone on the ground without my powers and no easy spell to draw from, I differed to the greatest weapon I still possessed: my mind.
“I can pay,” I replied.
That stopped my execution.
“How much?” asked the first cop.
“Everything I have,” I replied.
“Show us,” The first cop replied.
There was a certain level of grand absurdity to my situation that I was sure warmed the damned, cursed soul of Mister Death in whatever hell, alien dimension, or fearsome nothingness it now inhabited. I had killed a shoggoth with a pair of pistols not unlike Mercury’s Gift. I’d survived an encounter with a Color and left it buried underneath a mountain of rubble. I’d slain Elder Things and spoken with Nyarlathotep multiple times. I’d even seen Great Cthulhu himself and managed to walk away from the experience with my sanity tattered but intact. Yet now, I was being threatened with my final repose by these petty bullies in a world I was not entirely sure really existed.
“I’m getting up,” I said, keeping my hands up and doing my best to suppress my murderous rage. I wanted to tear them limb from limb before biting their torsos in half. It was one of the rawest, most alien, and hate-filled feelings I’d experienced in years, yet was now the product of a decidedly mortal mind. The primal ape and the enlightened soldier agreed with the alien Kastro’vaal that these fools had to die. Yet, one wrong move and there would be two John Henry Booths in this grave.
“How much?” the second of the cops asked, licking his lips. There was a slight oddity to his teeth, less flat for chewing and more like pointed pyramids for grinding. I did not doubt they were human but they were of no tribe I recognized and the difference was comparatively minor versus the Deep Ones or serpent men or ghouls that also had once been of the same evolved primates.
“A lot,” I said, thinking of my stolen wallet’s contents. “Hundreds. Twenties.”
I had no idea the actual value of the denominations within, but could count the numbers on their edges.
“Oh, you’re a rich gwafari are ya?” the first cop said, accenting the foreign word like he was cursing.
I didn’t have to understand the language to know a slur when I heard one. Reaching into my coat, I slowly extended the wallet. “I’m getting it out now.”
The second of the officers reached for it, keeping his gun trained on me, only for me to grab said weapon and aim it at his fellow before forcing the trigger down. Mercury’s Gift cut down the first police officer. His body burst into flames from the unearthly bullet, burning him from the inside out while he gave a tortured but short-lived cry.
The second officer struggled for the weapon only for me to force him to the ground, grabbing the pistol at his belt with my other hand and having two in hand while he was unarmed on the ground.
“Oh God, oh God,” the second officer said, terrified. “I’m sorry! I’m sorry. I didn’t—”
I lifted Mercury’s Gift, aimed it, and shot him in the head. His body, too, became an unrecognizable mass of burnt flesh.
Taking a moment to look at the charred corpses beside me, I proceeded to push both into the open grave site below and looked for a shovel to dump some dirt over them. I couldn’t stay here to bury them, but maybe I could hide the results of the slaughter I’d created long enough to get out of here. I didn’t know how the locals would react to the deaths of their law enforcement personnel, but I doubted it would be grateful.
That was when I noticed the Tree of Azathoth return to its unnatural appearance for a moment.
“BLOOD HAS BEEN OFFERED AND BLOOD WILL BE PAID. YOU WILL CREATE MANY MORE DEATHS BEFORE THIS DAY IS DONE. YOU WILL SEE FACES YOU KNOW BUT KNOW THEM NOT. YOUR ENEMY IS WATCHING.”
I wondered if it was being literal or not. “Who is my enemy?”
Much to my horror and disgust, a face identical to my son Gabriel appeared out of the trunk of the tree before speaking in a single solitary voice. It recited lines from War of the Worlds, like I’d used to do so as a child and had just been thinking about.
“Yet across the gulf of space, minds that are to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts that perish, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded this earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew their plans against us.”
The Tree of Azathoth was struck by a bolt of lightning that seemingly appeared from nowhere, causing its branches to burst into flames that turned several noxious colors not found in the natural world before consuming the immortal being utterly. Whether it had chosen suicide over continued existence or had been struck down by this alien world for revealing its secret was unclear. When the flames died down, only a burned-out, withered husk of a tree remained and no sign of its mystical nature. Its secrets had died with it and whatever legacy it had left with me.
“Well, that was fucking weird,” I muttered, turning around to leave for the city.
Chapter Four
* * *
The Dreaming City really was nameless as every pedestrian I asked just referred to it as “The City,” and was a place that I struggled very hard to adapt to. I’d been to large urban areas before, but the largest had been Kingsport and it had been only a shadow of the size of this place. The people gathered in the remnants of mankind’s former communities had put on the dress of city dwellers. These were the real thing, not inhabiting the burned-out remnants of the past, but living in the heart of a growing, thriving municipality.
Still, I was painfully aware that I was a fish out of water as I walked through the crowds of people moving to and fro along the streets filled with automobiles. Hell, maybe even worse since I knew Deep Ones existed. I stood out with my clothes, accent, and the fact I was bewildered by the sights around me. It was doubly frustrating because I’d always considered myself a cosmopolitan as well as well-traveled being. However, it seemed like a man capable of navigating Wastelands where mile tall statues of K’tullu and Hastur existed was not quite able to deal with the complexities of streetlights.
Seriously, I was almost struck by cars twice.
To my credit, I was adapting and the fact that I was wandering aimlessly didn’t mean I was lost. One was never lost when one was taking in one’s environment and learning from observation. If you did that, you were exploring and every bit of information was a potential clue to new revelations.
By the time I was leaning up against a streetlight with a strange crystal top in front of a movie theater—something I was basically familiar with the concept of from old pictures—I’d learned several interesting tidbits about the Dreaming City:
1. We were in the Dreamlands, and this was an island of sorts in the middle of them that held perhaps a few million inhabitants. The locals knew of such dream cities as Celephais, the original Ulthar, and Dulan-Leen. They even traded with them if some sailors I’d met were to be believed.
2. There was no set time period of fashion, technology, or architecture. It seemed roughly 1930s or 1940s to the final years of Pre-Rising Era. People wore fedoras, trench coats, and long dresses while holding holographic handheld crystalline computers. Most of the buildings were an Art Deco style, however.
3. It seemed to be mostly North American influenced but there were occasional bursts of far different culture. I’d passed a Greek Orthodox style church that, nevertheless, seemed devoted to Egyptian gods.
4. I believed the brief vision I’d had of the more alien part of the city was its true appearance and I was surrounded by inhuman things and objects, but they were covered in some sort of illusion. Why the more monstrous beings would consent to such a thing was anyone’s guess, though, but no one seemed to be acknowledging it either.
5. Everyone here was a completely rude asshole. I’d been bumped into, sworn at, and pushed aside a dozen times. Personally, I blamed it on the fact that I seemed to be the only person who was armed except for the unfortunate two police I’d encountered. It was my opinion that a well-armed society might not be a safer society—quite the opposite if the number of bodies I’d had to bury in New Ulthar were any indication—but it was certainly a polite society.
After hours of wandering, I had to admit I was no closer to figuring out what I was supposed to do here if anything. The Tree of Azathoth—before its unexpected and wholly unnecessary self-immolation (if self-immolation it was)—had been maddeningly vague. I also had no idea if I even wanted to follow up on its commands.
“What am I doing here?” I muttered, rubbing the bridge of my nose. Maybe I was looking at it all wrong and the journey was more important than the destination. I’d come here seeking a place to escape the inevitable final death of the last humans on my world. I’d certainly found it. Maybe instead of trying to seek clues to a quixotic quest, I should be focusing on finding a place to stay and a source of income.
Or food.
I was hungry.
Ravenously so, in fact.
It was a strange experience and I wondered if I’d needed to eat after my transformation to full Kastro’vaal form. I’d certainly done it, but it made me wonder if that had been more habit than necessity and my source of nourishment had come from another source like the sun or cosmic radiation. It didn’t matter, though, because I certainly needed it now. I also needed a set of facilities since it seemed relieving myself in an alley would be considered rude around here.
Seeing two young women leave the theater, both with yellow-green skin, jewels in their teeth, and wearing all-black clothing, I approached them with my hat over my chest.
“Pardon me, madams, but do you know where I might find an establishment to dine?”
Both looked at me in disdain. The one on the left was the first to respond.
“Back off, gwafari. Go rifle through a dumpster if you’re hungry.”
Seriously, everyone in this town was an asshole.
“Try a diner,” the one on the right was marginally more polite. “There’s one at the end of the block.”
“Thank you, madame,” I said, feeling like I should have just wandered some more instead.
The pair went back to their conversation while I turned around to get some lunch. That was when I heard my first clue.
Or perhaps it was a miracle.
Or curse.
Mister Death had sent me here for a reason after all and the Tree knew exactly which way to manipulate me.
“I loved this movie. I know it’s an older one, but I think it’s his best work,” the left girl said.
“Yes, he’s working on a new one now,” the right girl said. “Another Gabriel Booth original.”
I turned around and stared at them both, struggling to keep the intensity of my interest from my stare and failing.
“Gabriel Booth?”
The left girl rolled her eyes and pointed at one of the posters on the side of the movie theater’s stone walls. It depicted a portrait of a barrel-chested, bronze-skinned man with an open shirt facing a sinister-looking black-skinned pharaoh. To be frank, I found it vaguely offensive. The title of the movie was The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath.
At the bottom of the poster, it listed a bunch of names ranging from G’mnarl’ash as Richard Pickman, Abdul Al-Ackbar as Atal, Vincent Keaton as Randolph Carter to A Silver Key Production. It also said that it was directed and written by Gabriel Booth.
I immediately bought a ticket to the next showing.
I shall spare you the details of my attendance of the performance as they were not particularly of note. I barely understood the currency but could tell I was being overcharged, the drink was more syrup than water, and they served bags of sunflower seeds as concessions. The seats were dirty, the floor sticky, and barely anyone was attending this showing despite the praise of the two young women. The production, though, was a thing of beauty.
The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath was the story of a mortal dreamer, Randolph Carter, who could not get the image of a beautiful sunset city from his dreams. Deciding to seek the puny gods of Earth for knowledge of where this city was, he went on a fantastic adventure through the Dreamlands to find it. In the end, he found the home of the Earth’s gods, Kadath, empty and was confronted by none other than Nyarlathotep.
Seeing the black-skinned Pharoah depicted on screen was something of a shock since occultists had done their best to suppress the name of the true gods from the public until the subject had no longer mattered with the Rising. Even then, almost no one I’d ever met muttered the Crawling Chaos’ name without terror or reverence. Here, he was depicted as nothing more than a stock villain menacing our hero.
But it was the ending of the movie that shocked me. Nyarlathotep revealed that Kadath was empty because the tiny gods of Earth had fled their celestial domicile in order to inhabit the sunset city that Randolph Carter was seeking—which he had dreamed into existence from his childhood memories of Boston, Massachusetts. The final shot of the film panned over the dream city and the strong implications were that the Dreaming City was, indeed, the place created from Randolph Carter’s dreams—grown exponentially over the centuries from the 1920s or so when he’d first made it a reality.
When the film ended on its credits, I couldn’t help but wonder about this providential revelation. If this was the origin of the Dreaming City, it certainly explained a great deal. It also might have provided me a tantalizing clue as to what the Tree had been speaking about during its bizarre mad ramblings. The Dreaming King was almost certainly this Randolph Carter, choosing whether to awaken him or not was perhaps related to this strange city, and the threat was to the society that I had found myself trapped in.
A part of me pondered, for the second time, Alice in Wonderland or, more precisely, Through the Looking Glass. It seemed to be a day for contemplating long dead writers and their fictions, but we were in a universe shaped by the subconsciousness of both humanity as well as the Great Old Ones. Alice had encountered the Red King who had dreamt of her just as she had dreamt of him.
One of the curiouser—or perhaps curiouser and curiouser if I were to engage in uncharacteristic whimsy—notions of the book had been that if the Red King had awoken, Alice would disappear. “Out like a candle.” That she, a free-thinking, and sentient being, only existed so long as the Red King continued to think of her. I’d always found that a disquieting notion and been nonplussed to note that several religions had similar ideas about creation. Some of which had been proven correct when the Great Old Ones had awakened to shape our reality with the strength of their thoughts.
It was far too early to contemplate such a thing, but perhaps that was the threat the Tree of Azathoth had forewarned me about? That it had led me to this place because its existence was commensurate upon dreams feeding it? A place where millions of people might exist, free from the Great Old Ones’ destructive power, but only survived if there was a dreamer at the center of it? The late Alan Ward had planned to evacuate children of the Wasteland to the Dreamland, perhaps to this place, and it had involved their pagan sacrifice.
If so. did I want to save this place? If this was just an illusion, it was a false paradise—or some definition of the word paradise—and it’d be better to find the real people of this place before leading them to a true salvation in another universe. I knew the latter existed because Marcus Whateley had spoken of them. Places where the Great Old Ones remained asleep or might not even exist at all. Perhaps it was my job to find the Dreaming King and awaken them rather than keep them asleep.
“Perhaps you are presently lying on the ground of the tent of Mister Death’s, choking to death on your own vomit while high as a nightgaunt flying the cosmic rays,” a voice identical to my own spoke from the chair beside me.
I bolted from my chair and fell to the ground, stumbling and moving across the sticky surface. This time I was not upset about my skittishness nor being taken by surprise since the voice belonged to someone who could not be defied. He simply was, is, and shall be: Nyarlathotep the God with a Thousand Faces. Presently, he was sitting in the chair next to me, wearing my face, a trench coat, and a fedora.
“You,” I said, standing up. Strangely, I was inclined to ask a question far different from the ones a normal man might ask in my place. “Where the hell have you been?”
Nyarlathotep blinked, which was a rarity. “Oh, I do love when you zig instead of zag. What do you mean?”
“It’s been twenty years,” I said. I expected him to say such was an eyeblink for him or something similar, but I’d honestly felt abandoned by the Other God—a sentiment that showed just how insanely desperate my situation had grown. The last I’d seen of the Crawling Chaos had been him leading a siege on New Ulthar for seemingly no other reason than the dreadful being’s amusement.
“Would you prefer I go back to that time and speak with you then?” Nyarlathotep asked instead. “I could go further and upend your life by making you a girl, never born, or a shade of the spectrum visible only to ants.”
