The Tree of Azathoth, page 5
“No thank you,” I said, knowing there was absolutely nothing I could do to stop him if he chose to do anything to me.
“No, there is not,” Nyarlathotep said, responding to my thoughts. “You are a favorite book of mine, John, or at least this avatar’s. I sometimes enjoy returning to you and scribbling in the margins. However, never forget that you are unable to see beyond the confines of your dimensions to the universe beyond.”
I stared at him. “Why are you here?”
“I’m in the movie,” Nyarlathotep said, gesturing. “Why wouldn’t I be here?”
That was one of the great frustrations of dealing with the Black Soldier. He was just human enough to have a twisted sense of humor. Of course, according to Nyarlathotep, he was every god simultaneously and the reason he had the attributes that he did was because we mortals—and some immortals—assigned our personality traits to him. Nyarlathotep was an answer to the problem of evil: why did it exist? Because God was an asshole.
Nyarlathotep laughed at my thoughts, responding to them as if they were spoken aloud. “That I am.”
“Why am I here?” I asked, hoping Nyarlathotep would explain.
“Because you wanted to be here,” Nyarlathotep replied. “You prayed in the emptiness of the wastes for salvation and had the misfortune of having me listen. The Tree was my voice and prophet, and now you are caught in my story to play out until the final film reel rolls.”
“Is my son here?” I asked.
“Yes,” Nyarlathotep said. “So is your daughter or one of them at least. So are many other familiar faces. But are the people who wear them real? Are you?”
“Am I?” I asked.
“Why don’t you ask yourself,” Nyarlathotep said. “If you mean the dead John, he was a John and there are other Johns and we are all John together.”
“Where do I go next?” I asked.
“Outside,” Nyarlathotep said. “So many questions. You get one more.”
I contemplated my choice of options before deciding on the best one. “How is this going to end?”
“There is no ending,” Nyarlathotep said. “When you finish the story, it will still be there to be read again if you like. However, the ending doesn’t change unless you rip out the pages. Randolph Carter dreamed he could get the better of me and managed to do so as a result. I eventually paid him back for it by appealing to his greed, lust for knowledge, and idolatrous belief in his own enlightenment. I trapped him with one of his past lives in the same body and watched him tear his mind apart in the struggle for supremacy. Much the same as you. Except, somehow, you just became…you.”
I wasn’t stupid enough to ask another question. “Bully for me.”
“Solve this mystery for me,” Nyarlathotep said, conjuring a snow globe that said THE CITY in big white letters over an eldritch skyline. It was undoubtedly a reference to an earlier thought I’d had about this place. “In it there will be blood, scares, excitement, and a girl for you. If you like that sort of thing still. Maybe even a city to call your own.”
“And if not…” I trailed off rather than making it a question.
“There are always other Johns. Hopefully, you’ll be luckier than the ones I’ve already broken.”
With that, Nyarlathotep disappeared.
I shook my head and went to the theater lobby, still hungry and now more confused than ever. Much to my irritation, it was snowing outside the theater now. A further sign of how far Nyarlathotep’s influence extended as well as how random his whimsies were. The lobby was notably empty, and no one was attending the concession stand.
That was when someone clicked a gun’s hammer behind the back of my head.
A female voice spoke, “Don’t move or you’re dead.”
Seriously, I really needed to work on my situational awareness. This was just embarrassing now.
Then I recognized the voice.
Chapter Five
* * *
“Jessica?” I asked, aloud.
No.
It was not possible. I was dreaming. Which, ironically, was a thought that shook me out of my state of disbelief and back to reality because, yes, I was dreaming. I was in a city that had been conjured out of the ether of a dimension created by thought by an overly imaginative Bostonian from the 1920s.
Jessica O’Reilly had been one of Gamma Squadron, my best friend, and a woman I had been more than a little in love with. The pretty, brown-haired girl had defied expectations and become harder than most men as well someone who managed to pull herself from most encounters with things that would break even the hardiest minds, including the complete loss of her family.
Jessica was also, not to put too fine a point on it, dead. Which wasn’t something that necessarily meant a great deal in my time in the Wasteland. There were magics of resurrection, reducing a human to essential salts or conjuring a simulacrum from memories among other powers, but these were always a gateway to even further heartbreak.
“Turn around,” the voice spoke.
I lifted my hands in the air and did so, wondering if it was going to become a habit of my getting captured while I was in this city. I would not trade my humanity for anything in the world but if weakness was the price of mortality, perhaps it was not quite such a sublime treasure as I’d been giving it credit for.
The sight that greeted me when I turned around was heartbreaking. It was, indeed, Jessica with short brown hair cut into a bob. She was wearing a men’s button-down shirt with a holster visible on the side and a pair of blue jeans. Her face was also subtly different in a way that was only noticeable if you were looking very intently at someone while comparing them to someone whose visage was burned into your mind.
Jessica’s—this Jessica—face was possessed of slightly softer features. The Wasteland aged you, at least if you weren’t a humanoid abomination conceived by a creature that had infected your mother at some point in the past. There was none of the scarring and weathered decay that left her looking like a woman of forty when she was in her thirties. Now, I’d put her at her forties, and she looked closer to her early thirties.
I feel like this might come off the wrong way, but Jessica had slightly rounder features as well. Which I understand is a deadly insult among certain families in more civilized territories but when dealing with people who are very often near starvation is hardly a displeasing look. This woman, identical in so many other respects, had not lived in the Wasteland.
“I’m unarmed,” I said, keeping my hands in the air.
“That’s a fucking lie,” Jessica said, taking the gun from my pocket.
I sighed. “I should probably stop repeating it.”
“Especially when a grave digger found two dead cops in your grave an hour ago,” Jessica said. “Your doing?”
“I feel answering that question is inherently prejudicial,” I replied.
Jessica rolled her eyes. “You look like him, you sound like him, and you even move like him. Except, you’re not him.”
“The him, I presume, being the late John Henry Booth who was a detective?” I asked.
A flash of anger passed across her face. “I fucking hate this town. It’s bad enough I’m getting used to all the weird shit left and right, but just when I think I’ve got a handle on things, people get gunned down and then walk right back into your life.”
“Believe me when I say this is equally disconcerting,” I replied.
“I find that hard to believe,” Jessica said.
“I saw you ripped apart,” I replied, leaving the part out about the fact I was almost certainly the person who’d done it. It had been the early days in my transformation into a monster and I’d not yet mastered control over the horrific rages within. The blessings in my life could be counted on two hands, but surely the greatest one was I could not remember specifics.
Jessica paused in her examination of my gun, not taking her gun off me. “Okay, yeah, that would do it.”
Jessica proceeded to hand me back my weapon, much to my surprise.
I took it. “You seem awfully trusting.”
“Are you a shapeshifter?” Jessica asked.
“Not anymore,” I replied.
“Evil wizard?” Jessica asked.
“Define evil,” I replied, not helping my case. “Any decent Wasteland mystic knows a few spells here and there. Really, I feel like a wizard should require more accreditation than that.”
“Body stealing parasite?” Jessica asked.
“Do you know any bodies worth stealing?” I asked.
“Nyarlathotep?” Jessica finished off her line of questioning.
“I have no way of confirming or denying,” I replied, honestly not sure some days. “Though if I am, I have serious issues with self-loathing.”
I was still getting used to the casual way people threw around the name of the Crawling Chaos. I shouldn’t have been: Nyarlathotep was but one name of his in a billion and no more likely to conjure him than the Haunter in the Dark, the Black Soldier, or Flagg. Yet, the sheer lack of fear when invoking him surprised me.
“Yeah, you’re John,” Jessica nodded. “You’re the only guy I know who looks like an Arkham tank and talks like a snooty Miskatonic intellectual. What’s with the cowboy get up?”
I didn’t miss a beat. “I’m a cowboy.”
Jessica blinked then hugged me.
I didn’t know how to immediately respond because someone who I had lost who was back from the dead was a gift beyond value, but I was afraid of accepting it for fear of it just being a prelude to something much more horrifying happening. There was also the fact it was very unlikely this was my Jessica.
No, in an infinite multiverse of possibilities, each existing for both an eternity and an instant before vanishing, this was just someone eerily similar to my Jessica. Indeed, it was possible she was nothing more than a chimera, a phantasm, or delusion of this place that may well not even exist outside of my own mind. This could well be my dying dream as I writhed my last breaths upon Mister Death’s poisonous ichor.
If so, then no reason not to lean into it. I responded to her hug by kissing her passionately on the lips and feeling her return the favor. It was an awkward moment as both of us realized we were kissing someone else, someone long and not so long gone. We pulled back from each other, each of us parting our lips and taking a breath to steady ourselves.
“I take it your John hasn’t been gone long,” I replied before looking around the lobby. “Where did everyone go?”
“Three days,” Jessica replied. “As for everyone in the lobby, they cleaned out when I showed them my fake badge and said there was a dangerous criminal on the loose.”
“That seems like it’d get you in trouble with the law,” I replied.
“No more than usual,” Jessica narrowed her eyes. “And less than I probably should be. The cops were the ones who killed you.”
I stared at her. “I see. An ignominious end for a John Booth, no matter what the reality.”
“More so when you know who ordered it,” Jessica said, clenching her teeth. “We need to get you out of those clothes.”
“I’d prefer if you bought me lunch first,” I replied. “The only thing I’ve had since coming to this place is sunflower seeds and carbonated sugar water with ice.”
“A weird way to say cola but sure,” Jessica muttered. “What I mean to say is it didn’t take long for me to track down a six-foot-two Black man dressed like a cowboy. It won’t take long for the Knights of Arkham.”
“The who?” I asked.
“Out the door,” Jessica said, gesturing to the theater’s fire exit back where I came from. “We’ll take my car.”
I wasn’t sure about the urgency given I’d been here watching a motion picture this entire time, but I wasn’t about to question a Roman about Rome, nor a R’lyehian about R’lyeh. I followed her closely until the two of us were in a seedy alley where there was a strange metal automobile that was difficult to describe the make or model of. I was familiar with cars, but all of the ones left over after the Pre-Rising Era, with the exception of the Blue Meanie, were hodgepodge Frankenstein’s monsters made from whatever parts still in working order after a century of decay.
This one seemed vaguely 1940s-ish? 1950s? It had four doors, fishy-colored scale leather seats, and a pentagram with an eye hood ornament. Honestly, my knowledge of Pre-Rising technology was a bit spotty, but it had an electrical engine and other strange machinery that kept reminding me this was not Earth, nor were its people Earthlings. Though the idea of the Mi-Go or Great Race sitting down in an auto plant, dictating the latest designs was something too humorous to contemplate seriously.
“Nice ride,” I replied.
“I got for saving a man from a bad marriage,” Jessica replied, entering the driver’s side, and sitting down. It was notably on the right side of the car. “His bride tried to eat him on their wedding night.”
“Ah,” I said, going around to the passenger door and sliding on in. “Still better than my marriage.”
Jessica paused at the wheel as if I’d said something troublesome. “You should get rid of the hat.”
“The hat stays,” I replied.
Jessica glared at me. “Because you want to be even more recognizable as an outsider.”
“Fine,” I muttered, taking off the hat and putting it in the backseat. “I want it back, though.”
Jessica started up the car and pulled out into the city streets. “Honestly, I’m not sure how we’re going to keep a lid on this. The police are going to be howling for blood due to those cops you killed.”
“I didn’t say I’d killed them,” I pointed out.
“You didn’t deny it either,” Jessica replied. “It’s no skin off my back. This city is a wretched hive of sin, lies, hookers, and thieves. And those are the good parts.”
“What are the bad parts?” I asked.
“Religious fanatics, fascists, cops, crooked politicians, and the Knights of Arkham,” Jessica replied.
“You mentioned the Knights earlier,” I said, frowning. “May I ask who they are and why they want me dead?”
“A while ago—not sure how long, time is funny here—there was a flood of immigrants,” Jessica said, frowning. “People from a town called Kingsport. Among them were a lot of soldiers and crazy people that swore they were Arkhamites. Not that I could tell the difference. Either way, they’ve taken a lot of positions in power in the city. They hate anyone who isn’t pure 100% human and have very specific ideas about what that means. They worship Randolph Carter as a god and make it their goal to keep Arkham secure. Which means driving out everybody else, I guess.”
I almost laughed at the absurdity. “New Arkham was where I was born. The people there drove me out because I was a monster.”
“Yeah, that’s what the other John said,” Jessica replied. “Apparently, he came from a New Arkham too. I don’t know if you’re from two identical realities or you split or what.”
“I’m going to pretend it makes sense and ignore the larger philosophical implications,” I said, leaning down in the passenger’s side as we pulled to a stop next to a black and white police vehicle. We were stopped at a sort of automated light-based navigation system, relying on different colors to direct traffic.
“Probably a smart idea,” Jessica said, sucking in her breath. “You know your other wife is the Chief of Police, right?”
I blinked, pondering that. “You mean Martha Booth?”
“She goes by Martha Peasley now,” Jessica replied, pulling away from the police car. “And yeah.”
“So, she’s the one who had me killed,” I replied, sitting back up. At this point, it didn’t matter if it was my Martha or not. It seemed this Booth and I were close enough to be identical.
“Yeah, I’m afraid so,” Jessica said. “Maybe she didn’t know bullets would kill you, but there’s something about New Arkham that makes some of the monsters more human and some of the humans—”
“More monstrous?” I asked.
“Yeah,” Jessica replied.
“The cops I killed weren’t Arkhamites,” I said, finally admitting it. “But they were no more friendly. I also wouldn’t put it past Martha to kill me whether it was with a heavy heart or a glad one. Ours was always a marriage of convenience and she was ever more ruthless than I was.”
Jessica snorted.
“Have you met any other of my…uh, the other Booth’s associates?” I asked, wondering if the Tree of Azathoth had been speaking literally about knowing people and yet not knowing them. Certainly, it seemed to be the case with Jessica.
“A few,” Jessica said, giving me both hope and fear. “Gabriel, your daughter, Mercury—”
“Mercury is here?” I asked.
“No,” Jessica said, “She went off with another Booth. Apparently, they were seeking another Promised Land.”
“I’m losing track,” I replied.
Jessica smirked. “Well, there are plenty of people from the Wasteland. Too many for the locals, who are good at tolerating things I can’t stand to be in the presence of and freak me the hell out. But something about Arkhamites freaks them out. Oh, right, it’s the fact they’re all enormous assholes.”
“So, the newcomers are in charge and racist against the nonhumans and the locals hate the newcomers but are reasonably tolerant to the nonhumans.”
“That’s about the size of it,” Jessica said.
“But you’re not an Arkhamite,” I replied, pointing out the not-insignificant detail that my Jessica had grown up in New Arkham beside me.
“No,” Jessica admitted. “The other Booths had the same reaction. Curiosity, disappointment, despair.”
“Where are you from?” I asked, trying—and failing—not to go through those exact emotions.
“I don’t know,” Jessica replied.
I blinked. “You don’t know.”
“I just woke up in your office one day,” Jessica shook her head, “knowing everything about who I was and where I came from. I had a whole backstory of a husband who left with the kids, skills in shooting as well as tracking, and a wallet full of cash. But I can’t describe where I’m from, what my parents looked like, or even who my children were.”
