Goat Mother and Others: The Collected Mythos Fiction of Pierre Comtois (28 page)

As the aged medicine man alternately chanted and sang to his god, Kent, clutching a ceremonial robe about his shoulders, seemed to be entering a trance of some sort. He swayed back and forth with his eyes closed, his silver hair seeming almost to glow beneath the dancing torchlight. A drummer and a flute player were suddenly up on the platform with Kent and the shaman, although how they had arrived there Rowan couldn’t have said. Their strangely cadenced music, added to by the shaman’s gourd rattles, seemed to have a powerful effect on Kent, who began swaying more violently with the beat of the drum, his eyes now open but rolled upwards so that only their whites showed in the firelight. Then, his arms suddenly went limp and the robe fell from his shoulders, leaving him naked. His movements became increasingly sinuous, and Rowan wondered how the man could move that way without breaking his spine. The music increased in tempo and Kent’s graceful oscillations gave way to a series of spasmodic twitches and jerks. His head flopped from one side to the other as though his neck had been broken and his arms dangled uselessly at his sides. It looked to Rowan as though Kent had been poisoned with some evil drug, and he considered a mercy-killing and a quick escape. The crowd of worshippers before the mound looked half mesmerized themselves, and it might be possible, the marshal thought, to pull off such a plan. He brought his revolver up and sighted at a spot directly over Kent’s heart. Without warning, Kent dropped as though pole-axed and continued his twitchings and writhings on the floor of the mound. Rowan cursed again and lowered his weapon, hoping for another clear shot.

Kent was now kneeling, shaking violently as though in the grip of a raging fever. He opened his mouth as though to scream but no sound came forth. While the shaman and worshippers kept up their chants and prayers, Kent began scraping his forehead back and forth upon the mound’s dirt floor and succeeded in tearing a great gash in the flesh above his left eye. The lawman stared at the wound, amazed that such an injury yielded no more than a drop or two of blood. And then that wound began to split and spread as though pushed open from the inside. Rowan’s eyes widened and his mouth hung open as he watched Kent’s physiognomy go through impossible alterations. His skull flattened and broadened itself, horribly opening the skin wound so that it continued splitting the left side of the face and on down to the oddly lengthening torso. Kent again opened his mouth as if to scream, but this time the jaw had taken on new proportions and opened so widely that the skin of his cheeks was ripped apart nearly to the back of his head. Huge viper’s fangs descended from an unmistakably ophidian mouth as the creature continued to writhe its way free of its encumbering envelope of human skin. Its shoulders seemed to collapse in upon themselves and disappeared, allowing Kent’s skin to further slough off to reveal row after row of glistening white belly scales. The worshipers, far from horror-struck, continued their chanted devotions in adoring ecstacy, urging, it seemed to Rowan, that completion of Kent’s abominable metamorphosis. The lawman felt as though he was paralyzed, not only with fear of the impossible event he was witnessing, but of its implications. If this was true, then what about the visions he had seen…what Tanat-Sha had called the “dreams of Yig?” There flashed through his mind all the fearful images he had seen in those dreams…the titanic lizards and fish, the race of serpent-men and their world-spanning civilizations, the hideous star-headed creatures, the gigantic insects which spoke to one another with their thoughts and, most repellently, the unseen Dweller in that impossible city under the sea. If that writhing, hissing atrocity upon the mound was a living reality, then what about those others? A piercing ululation from the cluster of women snapped Rowan’s attention back to the immediacy of his peril, and he saw that the creature’s transformation was nearly complete. With a final thrash of its powerful tail, it threw off the restrictive weight of Kent’s empty skin and raised fully half its colossal length above the crowd, towering over its prostrate worshippers in lordly majesty. Tanat-Sha stepped from the rear of the mound to its front and stood beside the swaying monstrosity with his arms upraised over the crowd.

“Once in every generation,” the shaman declared, “the Son of Yig is given to us for a sign and a seal of the covenant which our people have had with Father Yig from the first days of our race. Always has the Son been chosen from among our own clan. But a new day dawns for the people of Yig, and he chooses a new way. An outsider has become a Son of Yig as a sign to us that the Father’s dominion is soon to include all the outsiders of this land. One thing is yet required: that an emissary prepare his way before him and show the white-eyes of the Dreams and Blessings of Yig. As he has chosen his Son, so also has Yig chosen his emissary.”

As the words of Tanat-Sha droned on, Rowan found himself becoming less alarmed at what he had seen and heard, and more accepting that these things were as they should be. His fear of the tremendous serpent, the Son of Yig, became vague and unimportant as a dream. The creature’s eyes, once so filled with the threat of unnatural menace, now seemed to hold promise of wonderful knowledge. It seemed the most natural thing in the world for Rowan to stare deeply into those golden, unblinking orbs, and he seemed to feel in his own body the gentle swaying to and fro of that sinuous form. As from a great distance, he seemed to hear his name being called by one whom he could not refuse, and he arose from his hiding place and approached the earthen mound on legs which felt as though they were no longer under his own control or direction. The warriors and then the women parted to let him pass, forming an aisle which led to the spot just below the shaman’s position at the front of the mound. He felt himself lifted to the mound’s platform by men and women whose presence he barely noted, and found himself standing between Tanat-Sha and the great serpent. Although he still held the six-gun in his hand, he had no thought of using it. He merely listened, knowing that this was what he was now called upon to do. Again he seemed to be looking upward into the face of the old medicine man, and he gave his full attention to the words that were spoken to him.

“John Rowan, lawman of the white eyes,” the spirit-talker intoned, “Yig has honored you greatly. You are to be his emissary to your people, to tell them of the Ending of Ages and of the safety to be had in Father Yig. The Father of Serpents grants refuge from the destruction of this world to those who will own him as Master and live in peace with his children. Yig serves They Who Come, and They will not rend the souls of his servants.”

Rowan, uncomprehending, merely nodded acquiescence. The shaman continued.

“The stars are the keys to many doors. Behind those doors are They who have waited long for release, and for the devouring of a world. Their freedom is almost at hand, John Rowan. You have seen the face of Yig in that of his Son. Now turn and see the face of One Who Comes.”

Rowan, obeyed, and his eyes were caught and held by those of the huge serpent. The creature’s eyes seemed to grow, spreading outward into a golden void in which, slowly, another scene resolved itself.

Rowan stared out over a vast expanse of open ocean that glittered beneath the sun as with millions of floating diamonds. Although there was nothing in view to cause the slightest concern, a familiar sense of unease began to intrude itself into his befuddled mind. Then, the sunlight began to dim somehow, and the flashing diamonds winked out of existence. He sensed tremendous upheavals beneath the darkened waves, and saw titanic bubbles of some black, noxious gas burst upon the surface of the water, creating hundreds of swirling clouds of oily, poisonous effluvium. And then, amid a rumbling which sounded in his ears like the warning growl of an angered planet, he beheld a dark, weed-festooned tower rise up from the roiling waters. His unease now took on the character of a definite growing fear as more and more of that ebon spire appeared above the waves. He tried to move, to run, to make some sound in response to his increasing dread, but found that he could do nothing but watch in petrified revulsion as that repellent monolith was lifted clear of the water, followed by the gay-green masonry of the edifice upon which it stood. Much too large to have been reared by human hands, the structure exuded an all but palpable aura of deliberate, joyful torment to the human body, soul, and spirit. And then, in a searing flash of agonized recognition, Rowan knew why his fear had seemed familiar. This was the same abhorrent undersea city, with its weed-flagged pinnacles and absurd geometries that he had seen while under the influence of the Dreams of Yig. He tried once again to move, to speak, to scream, but could find no sense of even possessing a physical body. It was as though he was merely a sentient presence, with power to do nothing but watch…watch and fear.

Thousands of gigantic bubbles continued to burst on the ocean’s surface, forming a vast ring of black, obscuring effluvia about the widening base of the still rising mountain. Shadows crept over the unearthly structure where shadows should not have been. Sunlight, which should have been reflected, was swallowed up and absorbed by impossible surfaces that seemed to be concave and convex at the same time. Even though fettered by the will of Yig, Rowan knew that this towering abomination obeyed far different laws of space and matter than those of his own world, for angles ought not to intersect one another in empty space, and cubic shapes should never cast round shadows. As he watched in fearful fascination, he saw strange creatures crawling about the thing, some appearing to be merely balls of whipping tentacles, and others of no shape recognizable to his human brain.

The rising seemed finally to stop, and a subtle shifting of planes and angles occurred such that Rowan was now able to detect something which appeared to be a set of double doors of staggeringly colossal size. At the sight of those doors, the rapidly growing fear in his mind penetrated slightly the hypnotic fog in which he was suspended. A vague memory of the power of will and self-determination asserted itself, but the memory served only to heighten his sense of utter helplessness. Then he noticed that more of the tentacled and amorphous creatures were appearing from a variety of improbable locations about the dripping pile and moving toward the immense doors as though drawn by some unguessable attraction. More and more of the things emerged, and soon the great doors were ringed, hundreds deep, with a squirming, undulating mass of tens of thousands of them, and he received the distinct impression of a frenzied anticipation on the part of the abhorrent beasts. And then…dear God…those tremendous doors began to open.

At first, he detected only darkness within, but a darkness which seemed, somehow, to feed upon and extinguish the dull sunlight which might otherwise have illumined at least a portion of the interior of the foul structure. Never a praying man, Rowan now begged the God of his fathers to spare him the sight of whatever it was that lived in so unholy a place but the great portals continued to open…whether outward or inward he could not determine…and a roiling cloud of purulent yellow vapor slid forth from the lightless interior, spilling down over the roofs and towers of the black city thousands of feet below. And then Rowan detected, with some sense beyond sight, the movement of something staggeringly huge within. His already near-panicked state was intensified as he felt an abominable invasion of his mind by another…a soul-rending violation of his deepest sense of self by an intelligence unthinkably vast and unimaginably alien. As his mind writhed under the unbearably vile touch of that joyously malevolent intellect, he saw two points of light flash into existence within the cavern’s deep recesses, red-rimmed and yellow as Hell’s purest sulphur. This…even this inconceivable horror he might have withstood had he not then seen that green, gelatinous tentacle snake forth from the black aperture. It appeared to move slowly, lazily through the intervening space, drifting, seeking, almost reaching him…just a few feet…

Then, from somewhere deep inside him, his subconscious must have tapped into deep reserves of will power he’d never suspected was there because he suddenly felt his consciousness being pulled back from the brink of ultimate madness. Somewhere in space and time, he thought he heard an agonized scream and knew, despite its strange remoteness, that it was his own. Then, just as that tortured scream trailed off, he heard the sound of an explosion followed quickly by a second. Snapped from his imposed reverie and the oceanic horror that had nearly robbed him of his sanity, Rowan suddenly found himself back on the tribal ceremonial mound a smoking .45 in his hand. Some reflex, some twitch of the muscles in his arm maybe, must have caused him to squeeze the trigger. Dimly, he remembered the desperate prayer he had offered on the threshold of that yawning pit and had no doubt that it had been answered somehow. Before him, the giant serpent that had once been Johnson Kent but lately transformed into a so-called Son of Yig, was down amongst its worshippers, its torso smeared with blood. A bullet buried deep in its scaly body, it thrashed madly about, its tail and head wreaking crushing destruction on those unable to avoid their random, whipping blows. Adding to the chaos caused by the dying creature was Tanat-Sha as he screeched and gesticulated to the frantic mob, trying to restore order and regain control of events. Still shaken by his experience, Rowan leaped from the mound and dashed toward the Indian village, heedless of the scattering worshippers. With a sigh of relief, he found his horse still-saddled where it had been left by the hut. Grasping the reins, he mounted up and, wheeling about, found the old shaman still atop the mound, wailing at the pale snake thing whose movements had slowed almost to a halt. Taking careful aim, Rowan felt no remorse as he put a bullet in the Indian’s brain. Then, digging his spurs deep into his horse’s flanks, he dashed from the village leaving behind him the pandemonium of reality gone mad and nightmares come to life.