The Weird Company (28 page)

“I haven’t stepped out of the world since we got here. I’m afraid. The hounds could be waiting. More importantly, I don’t have any desire to either. There is something about this place, something wrong, it makes me want to stay in the real world, or at least out of the in-between.”

Mister Ys took this as his cue to join the conversation. “Mr. Elwood, the time will come when we will need you to step outside, and you will do so without hesitation. Is that understood?” He didn’t wait for a reply. “As for the massive gathering let us see what the markers say.” He drew a deep breath, the first sign of emotion he had ever displayed. “A shoggoth pit. Not entirely unexpected, but the size of it is unprecedented.” He mumbled some numbers out loud, performing calculations at an alarming rate. “Yes, at that density a gestalt is possible, probable even. All they need is a catalyst consciousness and then . . .”

Carter interrupted. “A gestalt, what
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is that?”

Ys looked annoyed, Elwood stepped back and slowly moved away from the center of the conversation. “The Progenitors were at war with those from Xoth. They endowed the shoggoths with the ability to merge themselves together into a single, massive organism. It was a kind of weapon of last resort. Something they created and planned to unleash to battle against Cthulhu and his ilk if needed. I didn’t think . . . my research places this pit somewhere else, not here. He’s supposed to be in Ogasawara.”

Asenath saw an opportunity and took it. “Are you afraid?”

The monstrous Mister Ys stared at Asenath with hate in his eyes. He seemed ready to lash out, but then was able to reassert control. He turned away and walked toward the window and stared out at the landscape beyond the city. It was a bleak, grey expanse made hazy by a wind that had whipped up ice and debris. “You people are so blissfully unaware of what dangers you are treading around. Even this window, if it were facing the other direction, if it were looking out over the city and beyond it . . . what a sight you would behold.”

It was Hartwell’s turn to enter the fray of conversation. “There’s a window like that on the next level, Elwood’s private room so to say.” We all scanned the room for Elwood, who had been present but a moment earlier but now was suddenly dashing up the ramp.

Ys made to follow him. “Have you ever been up there? Have you looked out the window?” There was speed in his step.

“No, just once,” Hartwell stuttered an answer. “Like I said, they’re his private rooms.”

We followed Ys up the ramp and burst onto the second floor like a pack of wolves swarming after a wounded doe. What we found waiting for us was completely unexpected. In the far corner was Elwood, naked and trussed up with some copper wire. By the state of him and his surroundings he had been like this for days. His skin had that thin fragile look that comes from lack of food and water, and the wire had bit into his flesh. He was conscious but his eyes were unfocused and cloudy, like he had been drugged.

In front of the window stood the other Elwood, the one we had been speaking with just moments before, his arms were raised as if in supplication. He was chanting something, something that I couldn’t understand over the howling wind that tore through the massive window. As we raced toward him he turned and began laughing maniacally. Hartwell went to tend to the naked figure on the floor while I and Carter attempted to grab the other one. I am preternaturally strong, as is Carter’s alien body, but the thing we called Elwood shrugged us off like we were rag dolls, and tossed us across the room.

As I recovered I set my sights on the man who was still laughing and then quite by accident caught a glimpse of what hung in the air beyond the window and above the city. It floated there in the sky, a latticework of blue energies that formed a geometric shape, an icosidodecahedron, a polyhedron with pentagonal faces flanked by triangular ones. It was a kind of cage, and what it held inside was enough to bring me to my knees. It was a monstrous thing, cyclopean in size and proportions. There was some semblance to portions of a squid, and an anemone, and a centipede. The tentacles ended in gnashing snapping mouths full of needle-like teeth, but each of these teeth was easily the size of a man. Eyes, multi-faceted things that glinted in the sun ringed the body. Above all this was a head of sorts, a starfish-like thing that seemed as if it had been transplanted from one of the Q’Hrell itself.

There on my knees I fell back on my parochial upbringing and let some words slip through my lips, “My God!”

The cackling thing that was Elwood leered at me and in a malicious tone screamed over the winds. “No Mr. Olmstead this is not your pale, whimpering, crucified Messiah. This is my God!” His mouth opened wide as he began to cackle once more. It opened wide, stretched down past his neck, past his chest. Then he melted. The thing pretending to be Elwood became little more than an amorphous blob whipping tentacles and tendrils like some monstrous jellyfish.

Carter, the alien warlock, was back at the thing before I could even move. He slashed at it with his chitinous claws. Carter was fast, but he was massive and Elwood dodged him easily, and then turned the wizard-warrior’s momentum against him, flinging him back toward the ramp. This time the throw was farther and Carter hit the wall with a sickening thud. I waited and watched but Carter did not get up.

As I watched for some sign that Carter was recovering, I saw Ys back away. I, however, couldn’t move, I was mesmerized by the obscenity that stood imprisoned out there in the sky. It seemed to stare at me, to slice me open with its eyes and crawl inside my very soul. It was a wrong thing, an abomination that didn’t belong in this world or any other. I knew this at a cellular level. Its very presence was a corrupting influence. It needed to be expunged, destroyed and so did all those who followed him. So as Ys stepped to the rear I surged forward. I dodged the flailing tentacles and plunged my claws into the pulpy mass that had once pretended to be Frank Elwood. I tore at the strange flesh, casting great gobs of the stuff behind me.

The shoggoth was letting out a kind of high-pitched keening as I cut into it, and it took me a minute to realize that the creature was screaming. I was hurting it, and it was writhing in agony. It tried to pull away, but I grabbed on to something solid inside with one hand and continued to tear at it with the other. The keening devolved into a whimper, but I could barely hear it. Something had snapped inside my head and I had gone both blind and deaf to anything but the attack itself. I tore and tore and tore until the thing I was tearing into shuddered and collapsed.

It was only then that I backed away. As I did, the globs of material that I had torn apart began to shudder and crawl toward each other. As they reached one another they flowed into each other and merged into even larger pieces. The thing was reassembling itself, slowly but surely the monster was coming back.

Hartwell pushed his way past me and pulled from his pocket a very large makeshift syringe. “I’ve been waiting to try this.” He pushed the plunger and began spraying the shoggoth flesh with a thick, green fluid. “Have you noticed that the shoggoths didn’t touch the dead Q’Hrell? They eat everything else, devour it, and mimic it, except for their masters. I have a theory about that you see? I think they can’t. I think the blood of the master is toxic to the servant. Let us see shall we?”

At his feet the masses of alien tissue began to smoke and bubble. They writhed in agony and squealed like animals being slaughtered. It took a few moments, but the protoplasmic jelly finally deteriorated into little more than sticky, bubbling slime.

Hartwell was smug as he walked back to the real Elwood. “Clever things these Progenitors, clever things.” He cast an eye at Ys. “Cleverer than you I think.”

Mister Ys stormed down the ramp, leaving the Weird Company to tend to the wounded. Asenath hurried us along, making sure that we were no longer under the cyclopean gaze of the thing that stared down at us out of its ancient prison. I could still feel the thing staring at me and trying to get into my mind when Asenath took my hand and put her arm around me. That touch, that human touch was all I needed to block out the crawling, insistent thing that clawed at my mind.

CHAPTER 17

From the Account of Robert Martin Olmstead
“The Weird Reformation”

Down on the lower level out of the horrific gaze of the thing that hung over the city we regrouped and tended to our wounds both physical and psychological. Hartwell was ministering to Elwood using a diluted form of the blood of the Q’Hrell which he said would heal the young man’s wounds. More importantly he was getting some water and a modicum of sustenance which we were all partaking of. It was an oily stew of some kind, and there were chunks of some kind of root and shreds of something that could have been fish or fowl. Hartwell said it was better for us not to know the source of any of the ingredients. Though I was thankful for the chunk of rock salt he offered up to add some flavor to the broth.

While he ate, Elwood explained what had happened. “I had been out hunting. The first pond had been empty, completely devoid of both fish and penguins. That should have been my first clue. While I was making my way to the second pool, I was attacked from behind. A shoggoth, I had no opportunity to fight back. He swallowed me whole and began absorbing me both physically and mentally. I don’t know why he stopped, but he did. It took him hours, but he mimicked me perfectly, well almost. It seems he couldn’t replicate my ability to step in between. I don’t even know how he knew about that, but he was obsessed with it. It is all he talked about. He demanded that I teach him how to do it, tortured me when I refused. I tried to explain that I didn’t understand the process myself, but he didn’t believe me.” He seemed on the verge of panic, but Hartwell seemed to have a way with the young man and quieted him down.

Elwood was not the only one in need of care. My arms and hands, which had been exposed to the strange jellied matter of the shoggoth, and had come back burned from some kind of organic acid. My own inherent healing factor was repairing my body, but I still needed time, several hours, to let that happen. Asenath and Carter helped, they knew some simple cantrips that could speed the healing, at least the physical part. The psychological healing was more difficult, perhaps because it was a deeper kind of pain.

Mister Ys had retreated away from the rest of us. He seemed shattered by what he had seen above the city, which I didn’t fully understand. While Asenath worked her magic I asked her if she could explain what that thing was, and why it was imprisoned above the city. I had other questions as well. It seemed that Ys had known about the thing, but why had seeing it impacted him so much? Why was he impacted to a greater extent than anyone else?

At first Asenath seemed reticent to discuss the issue. “Knowing these things won’t make your life any easier.”

I grinned. “I think it is safe to say that I’ve given up on the easy life.”

She glared at me in amusement, those big eyes growing even bigger. “You’ve been told about the Dunwich Horror, the Whateleys?” She knew I had. “The thing that rampaged through the countryside, Lavinia’s other child, the one that took after the father. That thing out there imprisoned above the city, it’s the same kind of thing. It’s a child of Yog-Sothoth, a Vugg-Shoggog, but in this case the other parent wasn’t human, it was one of the Q’Hrell. As for why, these things are essential to the Q’Hrell way of life. The Vugg-Shoggog is the gate between two universes, ours and the realm of pure chaos where the Lurker at the Threshold originates. One of his followers, a man named Billington, had a theory about the All in One. He thought that it was only in our universe that the god-thing had almost absolute power, he suspected that in its home realm, it was nearly powerless.”

“This Vugg-Shoggog, does it have a name?”

Asenath shook her head. “Would you name an engine, or a furnace? That is all that thing is to the Q’Hrell, a machine and nothing more, but one that can move an entire city from the real world into a realm of their own making, one where the rules of the universe are shaped by their own design, and bend to their own will when need be. It is a universe where they are more than they are here. In our world, they are aliens, powerful, ancient aliens, but in the other world they are more than that, in that world of their making they are gods.”

“I don’t believe it.”

“You should
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Olmstead,” said Carter, still trapped in that massive alien body. “I’ve been there, I’ve seen
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them, seen what they can do. Most of them
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are content being petty, tyrannical things. Some however
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have chosen to be something even greater, they’ve
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found a way to move beyond their manufactured realm, and back
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into our reality. They are titanic, terrible things, equal
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in stature and power to any of the Old Ones. There is a reason the universe
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calls them the Elder Gods.”

“You still haven’t told me why Ys is so upset. Didn’t he know that thing, that Vugg-Shoggog, was going to be here?”

My voice must have been too loud, for Ys overheard my conversation and seemed to have taken some offense. “I am concerned Mr. Olmstead, because I thought I had accounted for this variable. I travelled your world, researched all your libraries, scoured the lonely places, educated myself on the state of this primitive age, and what artifacts and relics remained intact and active. There was no evidence that the Vugg-Shoggog was still here, let alone active.” His manner was suddenly introspective. “Given the weakness between this world and the virtual one, there seems to be no shortage of ways for the inhabitants of one realm to transit to the other, as Mr. Carter is well aware. The prevalence of such points of transit usually implies that the mechanism that keeps the two distinct has fallen into disrepair. The most common of failures is the slow collapse of the energy lattice that imprisons the thing, which eventually results in the creature’s destruction. My assumption that the thing was dead or dying has now been proven incorrect, which means that something else has gone wrong in the mechanism, something catastrophic.” He paused, and I was not sure if it was because he didn’t know what to say, or if it was just for effect, “and yes, for your information that concept does give me pause.”