A Secret Guide to Fighting Elder Gods, page 13
“I’m...having a hard time seeing straight,” I finally told Monique. “Make sure I’m going the right way, okay? If it seems like I’m going to wreck the boat, say something. Please.”
The girl gazed at me, and I flinched. It looked like someone had scraped her face off with a length of razor wire.
“Are you okay?” The part of my head that was buying Yidhra’s illusion marveled at how well Monique could speak without any lips.
I shook my head. “It’s my problem, not yours. Just don’t let me wreck us.”
A little while later, she inhaled sharply.
“What is it?” I couldn’t glimpse anything but the landscape of carnage.
“It’s him. He’s here, I know it.”
“Where?” I strained to see past the bloody veil.
“I dunno, I can’t—”
The girl shrieked as something big and strong rammed the bottom of our boat, knocking it sideways. Suddenly, I was plunging into the warm, sticky gore. I went under completely for a moment, fighting against what felt like a dozen dead hands grasping my arms and clothes, but I managed to surface, spitting foul gore from my mouth.
Monique was still screeching in panic. The girl definitely had a sturdy set of lungs.
“It’ll be okay!” I hollered up at her, part of me wondering if I was telling her a terrible lie. I still couldn’t see the beast, but I could feel the vibrations of something huge pulling itself across the muddy swamp bottom. “You know what to do...sing to it!”
I heard her take a deep breath. I figured she’d just start screaming again—hell, if I’d been in her situation when I was nine they could have strapped me to the roof of a fire truck and used me as a siren. What came out was a beautiful soprano note, a little shaky at first, but it got stronger and stronger and became a sound of such transcendent clarity you could compare it to the purest stream in the mountains above Shangri-la or the gleam of Caladbolg’s steel or the glitter of the Hope Diamond and all those other things would seem mundane and unimpressive. Monique had the kind of voice that could make the most cynical, hard-minded atheist instantly believe in a benevolent higher power, believe in anything.
She held the note a little longer, then took another breath and began to sing an old Spanish Christmas song. I didn’t understand the lyrics, but the words didn’t matter. The power was all in her voice, and as Monique’s music flowed over me, Yidhra’s horrible vision evaporated like fog in sunshine. The gore around me became innocuous swamp water, and what had seemed to be zombie hands grabbing at my legs was just a tangle of common riverweeds.
I looked up and found myself staring up into a set of toothed jaws the size of Madame Caplette’s Volkswagen. I’d have been petrified if the sight of the monster wasn’t such a welcome relief from Yidhra’s visions. It was the skeleton of a dragon reanimated by the swamp. Creaking green vines were muscle and sinew linking the ancient bones. Moss bearded the dragon’s jaw and huge scarlet rose mallow flowers bloomed in caches of muddy debris on its back and sides. I could see between its ribs, and where the dragon’s flesh heart should have been was a knot of dark, shiny vines that pulsed with a faint blue glow.
Monique stood ramrod straight in the boat, giving the song everything she had. I caught her eye and she pointed at the gear bag with a get on with it expression.
I splashed back to the boat for the bag, slung it across my back, and climbed the beast’s slippery vines to reach the heart. The heart was blocked by some stray vegetation; I cut as little of it away as possible, just enough so I could squeeze the jug and funnel into the chest cavity. I positioned the funnel beneath one thin, pulsing black vine, then slit it with the tip of the knife.
Black sap began to ooze from the core of the vine down into the funnel and the jug. The fishy odor was much more pungent in this fresh dragon molasses. My eyes watered. The vine clogged after a little while and I had to make another cut. My thigh muscles began to ache from the effort of clinging to the rib, but I hung on until the jug was full. I carefully corked the jug, slipped it and the knife and funnel back in the gym bag, and slid down to the water.
Once I was back in the boat, Monique continued caroling as I poled us away back toward the stream, avoiding the mossy wrecks of other boats that had ventured into the swamp after Sap Daddy.
“Do you think you can keep singing long enough for us to get home?” I asked. Whatever witchcraft the girl was able to weave in her music, it was doing a fabulous job of keeping Yidhra out of my head. I knew Monique couldn’t keep it up forever, but I’d enjoy what peace I could get while it lasted.
Monique nodded, looking a little mischievous. She took a deep breath and started belting out “99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall.”
I smiled and began to sing along with her.
Madame Caplette was waiting for us on the stream bank, looking impatient. “Why you singing that, girl? I told you not to waste your skills on them silly songs!”
Looking innocent, Monique pointed at me.
I shrugged. “She’s helping me out with a little problem tonight.” I threw the loop of the mooring rope over the tree stump and stepped out of the boat with the gear bag. “We got the sap; you want it?”
The old witch ignored the bag and frowned up at me. “‘A little problem’ my bony posterior! Bend down here so I can take a look at your eyes, girl.”
I did as she asked, and she took off her spectacles and peered into my eye, holding up her kerosene lantern for a better look.
Monique hopped out of the boat and peered at my face. “Ooh, your eyes have gotten all purple! They look like grapes!”
“Well, now, when was you gonna tell me you’re possessed?” Madame Caplette’s sharp tone of disapproval made my innards clench.
“Well, now, since when do you care?” I shot back. “It’s my problem, not yours.”
“It gets to be my problem right quick if your head starts a’ spinnin’ while I’m in the middle of the ritual. If I get distracted, your cousin gets dead. Do you want that?”
I flinched, realizing I’d been an idiot. “No, ma’am. I’m sorry.”
Her expression softened. “Got a notion of who’s in you?”
“Yidhra.” The name tasted like cigarette ash on my tongue.
“And the beast that bit your cousin, was it in thrall to her?”
“Yeah.”
“And you didn’t think to mention that?” She scowled. “You didn’t think that all this would have been a thing I needed to know right when you brung him here?”
Heat rose in my cheeks. “No.”
“Lord Almighty.” She lowered her lantern and sighed at me, shaking her head. “Come on to the house. I got something that’ll keep it from getting any worse. It ain’t a permanent solution, but it’ll work for now. Looks like I gotta rethink everything, because it ain’t just Jake who needs healing.”
She took me to a back bedroom where she unlocked a large mahogany jewelry chest and pulled out a necklace made of blue glass beads with a large round turquoise pendant. When she held the necklace out to me, I realized the beads and stone were carved to look like eyes.
“Wear it close to your heart,” she said.
“Yes ma’am.” I slipped the necklace on over my head and tucked it under my tee shirt. The moment the stone and glass touched my bare skin, I felt the same kind of cool washing-over relief that Monique’s song had given me in the swamp.
I helped Madame Caplette set up a black iron cauldron on a tripod over a pine log fire in the middle of a big circle of packed earth in the back yard. We gathered fresh herbs from her garden then put the dragon molasses, plants, a jug of rum, some silver nitrate powder, and a whole lot of black pepper into the cauldron to boil.
Next, she had me and Monique dig two post holes inside the arcane circle just beyond the worst of the heat from the fire and pound sturdy wooden 6-by-6s into both of them. The posts were standard pressure-treated lumber like you’d use for a deck, but someone had screwed D-rings into the sides. I’d seen the same kind of thing in someone’s bondage dungeon once.
“You’re not gonna tie us up out here, are you?” I joked nervously.
The old witch looked grave. “Matter of fact, I have to. The evil in you ain’t gonna let go without a fight.”
I went back into the house and helped Jake stumble to the arcane circle. Monique was nervously twisting a bundle of hemp rope when I came back out. She helped me tie Jake sitting with his back to his post, and then tied me to mine.
Madame Caplette went back into the house and returned wearing a loose blue caftan. In one hand she carried an oak bucket that held a long-handled steel dipper and an owl-feathered rattle made from a dried gourd lashed to a human radius bone.
She stepped barefoot onto the dirt circle and set the bucket and cooler down just inside the circle’s edge, away from the heat. For the next hour, she got down on her hands and knees inscribing various arcane symbols in the dirt with the ceremonial knife. Some she put around the cauldron’s fire, others she drew around me and Jake.
Monique sat on a log near us, watching her grandmother work with rapt interest. Madame Caplette finished scratching the last symbol into the ground. Her knees and back popped audibly as she got to her feet and stretched, raising the muddy knife toward the still-dark morning sky.
I held my breath and nervously twisted my wrists in their ropes as Madame Caplette started the ritual. The old witch raised the owl-feathered rattle and the ceremonial knife. She began to chant, stomp and dance around the potion bubbling in the cauldron. A bucket of dry ice for cooling the finished potion sent an eerie low fog across the ground beyond the fire. Her motions were practiced and utterly confident. She slashed the air with the knife as if she were cutting down every last one of the forces of evil.
Jake moaned and struggled against his post. I couldn’t understand much of the chant, but I caught enough to know she was calling on the whole guédé loa family to help us fend off Yidhra and her minions. Loas don’t always have good will towards humankind. But they are of the Earth, and Yidhra pretends to be but is not. This was a clear supernatural turf war if ever there was one. Madame Caplette brought all her authority to the chant, and she wielded an ancient, powerful magic that was downright scary. Hairs rose on my arms and the back of my neck, as if a thunderstorm was gathering above us, but the sky was clear.
A shock rocketed through me as if Jake had slammed me with one of his haymaking left hooks. Suddenly there I was, back in the burning warehouse, facing Yidhra in all her terrible beauty.
“I’ve seen into your heart.” She smiled at me. “I know exactly what you want, Pepper. It can all be yours if you give yourself to me.”
She showed a vision of me holding court for socialites and politicians in a grand old house in Lakewood. Everybody knew my name because I’d personally funded all the drug rehab programs, homeless shelters, and job programs. All the misery and poverty in the city was gone because of me. I was smart, respected, cool. Any old thing I decided to wear became that season’s fashion. Pop stars like Beyoncé wanted to meet me. People asked for my autograph at parties. Our city was no longer the punchline of jokes about drunks or hurricanes. New Orleans shone as the brightest diamond in America’s crown, and I was its princess.
I saw it all so clearly, and I wanted it so badly. I just had to let Yidhra devour me, heart and soul, and the dream would come true. But deep down I knew it would be an illusion that only existed inside my own head. Because if the dark goddess could do all that, why hadn’t it been done?
“No,” I said.
“If you refuse me, your family will suffer like none before.”
She showed me visions of Jake screaming, his skin dripping off his body as the shoggoth corruption took hold and crushed his bones to mush before he became a formless, blister-eyed monstrosity. I saw Rudy flayed, his arms and legs smashed with a sledgehammer. I saw his wife Lori chopped to pieces in our basement. I saw myself doing all these terrible things to my aunt and uncle. The goddess would take hold of me and force me to torture them if I refused her. I’d end up locked away in some asylum, mad and savage and hated until I finally died.
I grabbed Yidhra by her long, beautiful hair and dragged her with me into the heart of the warehouse fire. She screamed and clawed at my face as we both burned, our skin blistering and blackening. The agony of it took the air from my lungs, but I had to protect my family. I had to. The pain of immolation was worse than anything I’d ever imagined, but I held the shrieking goddess in the flames. My will was stronger than flesh and bone.
I came back to the real world, gagging as Madame Caplette poured the hot, bitter, tarry potion down my throat.
“You got to swallow it!” she ordered.
I did as she told me. My clothes were soaked through with sweat, and my wrists and arms ached, raw from my fighting against the ropes all night. The eye-stone necklace still hung solid and cool around my neck. Dawn was breaking through the trees, and the early morning sky was lit in delicate reds and purples.
My cousin sat slumped over, still bound to his post. He was breathing. I wasn’t sure, but it seemed like the swelling in his arm had gone down.
“Jake,” I called. “You still with us?”
He slowly raised his head. “That was a real messed-up dream I just had.” His voice was hoarse, but strong.
“I think y’all are both on the mend,” said Madame Caplette.
“You know she’s gonna come back, right?” Jake stared at me, his eyes clear and unafraid. “She got a taste of both our souls, and she ain’t gonna give up so easy.”
“Well, she can’t be more persistent than any of the effin’ narco gangs who keep coming into our neighborhood, can she?” I replied. “If she wants another ass-kicking, by gods we’ll give her one.”
Jake smiled. “That we will, cuz. That we will.”
The Tall Ones
Stephen Ross
I ate a lime. I had a paper bag full of them. Some people chain-smoked cigarettes or chewed gum. I ate limes; a doctor had recommended I do so, and I had done so since I was ten.
“We’re almost there, Nicolas,” my aunt said.
Aunt Augusta was a lousy driver. Five hours on the road, and every ten minutes she’d announce our impending arrival. We headed south, following the eastern shoreline of Lake Michigan, with a destination of Redgrave.
Redgrave. I’d never heard of the place until that day. It was Aunt Augusta’s hometown—a small village on the shore of Lake Michigan. I didn’t know, as we drove into it that afternoon, that I was going to lose my mind there. I didn’t know I was going to hear about the Tall Ones, and I didn’t know I was going to meet a girl (I think).
I didn’t ordinarily meet girls.
“You need a girlfriend, Nicolas,” my aunt would say, at least once a week, whenever she thought I looked glum. I was sixteen. What I needed was privacy. I was a man of science. I intended to go to university and study quantum physics. I didn’t need a girlfriend.
The first thing I learned on arriving in Redgrave was that there was barely any cell phone coverage; I had been hotspotting my phone for my laptop’s internet connection. There was maybe enough signal in town for a short text message.
“It’s the holidays,” said a woman who looked exactly like my aunt. “It happens every first week of July. The internet and the mobility telephones slow down. It’s probably on account of all the holidaymakers who’ve come into town.”
Mobility telephones?
The woman, Agatha, looked exactly like my aunt, because she was my aunt’s twin sister; she owned a little hotel in the middle of town.
Let me describe my aunt—you can cut-n-paste the description for her sister. Five and a half feet tall, seventy years old, thin, dressed in more colors than you could imagine, head of messy blonde hair that looked like a family of birds lived there.
Aunt Augusta really wasn’t my aunt. My parents had both left each other on the same night: my tenth birthday. They each independently packed up a suitcase and walked out—one out the front door, one out the back door—never to be seen again, each of them assuming the other would take care of me. I was left with an old house, a birthday cake, and a brand-new blue bicycle. Aunt Augusta was the kindly old lady who lived across the street; as I had no next of kin, she signed some papers and became my legal guardian.
“What brings you to Redgrave?” asked Agatha.
“I’m going to swim in the lake,” Aunt Augusta said.
“You don’t want to do that,” said Agatha. “You don’t want to swim in the water.”
My aunt screwed up her face in disgust. “Not that again.”
We’d been on the road for three weeks. My aunt had this bucket list of taking a swim in each of the Great Lakes, and Michigan was the last one. Come hell or high water, or low tide, she was going to complete her list.
“Why shouldn’t she swim in the lake?” I asked.
“People disappear,” said Agatha.
“What do you mean?”
“Sometimes, people go out for a swim in the water at Redgrave, and they don’t come back. The Tall Ones get them.”
“The Tall Ones?”
Aunt Augusta had heard enough. She grunted. “I don’t believe in the Tall Ones. I never have, and I never will. It’s just a myth. It’s superstitious nonsense.”
She looked at me. “A dozen or so people have gone missing in the lake over the years. Any rational person will tell you they were simply inexperienced swimmers who got caught up in the lake’s unpredictable currents.”
She looked back at her sister and barked with authority. “I am not an inexperienced swimmer!”
That was the end of the discussion.
Agatha showed us up to our rooms. Mine was on the third floor. There was a view of the lake. Agatha explained there was no in-house Wi-Fi, but there was a network socket on the wall behind the television set, and the bandwidth was complimentary.
