Approaching LOAD/EVAC, we could hear the Magnus-thing screeching and breaking things. From time to time, the wall shook and the heavy steel door rattled as the creature threw itself against it.
Magnus had a long and complicated history. If I had it right, he, or it, was actually the Great Old One Nyarlathotep who’d come to Earth decades before in not quite physical form. (Later, Lovecraft explained the “state of supercharged astrophysical metaplasma” to me, which mystified me even more.) In this state, Nyarlathotep had orbited Earth for years, unable to penetrate its gravity field until a hapless Nazi rocket experiment had allowed him to possess its captain – Magnus – and bail out into the ocean when the rocket, the Oberth A-7, crash-landed in a west coast inlet. Free in the ocean, the possessed Magnus/Nyarlathotep made himself at home and, by preying on creatures and people, grew into a sort of crustacean sea monster so big that it took the entire crew of a whaling ship to stop him – by repeatedly harpooning him until, finally, bound to the Mary Maquinna with a network of thick ropes, he was dragged by the scuttled ship into the Pacific abyss called the Medusa Deep.
That was decades ago. But now an expedition led by a group called PIPS – the Pacific Institute for Paranormal Sciences – had freed it, only to have it hunted down by a vengeful Mary Maquinna crew member – my grandfather, once a teenage deckhand on the whaler, now an obsessed octogenarian monster hunter – who harpooned it again, only to have it hauled aboard Sorcerer, where it gradually revived and, using its powers of neural suasion, drove the airship’s second-in-command, Eadric, to throw himself overboard.
To make a long story short, for my own reasons I had encouraged Tobias to fire up the Raumspalter, open a continuum threshold and flee to R’lyhnygoth so we could dump the Magnus-thing back on its home turf.
That had been only this morning, but it had happened light-years away in what seemed like another lifetime.
“It wants out,” Tobias said.
“Uh, yeah.” I watched Tobias speak a few words into the intercom. A rumbling came out of LOAD/EVAC, and Tobias looked through the window and began opening the door.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
Tobias gestured to me. Cautiously I followed him inside. The Magnus-thing was gone; the exit doors were closing to make sure it didn’t come back.
“Agnes opened the doors,” Tobias explained. “Remotely from the bridge. I think it’s gone for good.” We went to the exit doors. Last time I’d looked out these windows I’d seen a rocky, forested coast and, several hundred metres down, sunlight glinting off the Pacific Ocean on a spring morning.
Now I saw a stretch of pavement, strewn with debris and shrouded in fog. A set of steps made for giants faded in and out of view; sometimes there, sometimes not, swallowed in mist.
“We’ll rush them with torches. The moving lights will confuse the horde, and the flames will scare them away. But they’re not completely stupid. We’ve got to move fast.”
“Just a second here,” Leslie said. “What’s going on?”
“This is our chance to save Max,” Tobias answered without looking at her, his eyes fixed on the fog and what it was hiding.
“Horde?” I was getting nervous. “And what about Nyarlathotep?” Couldn’t we just start the engines and go home? Something bellowed in the fog, bellowed and honked like an enormous seal, and a million answers came out of the fog, whispers and whistles in a harsh, discordant birdsong: “Tekeli-li, tekeli-li, tekeli-li.”
“That’s it, can’t you hear it?” Tobias hissed. “Honest, it won’t be a bit too dangerous, if we move fast.”
“‘A bit too dangerous’?” Margrit said. “But Tobias is right. The only way to do it is to do it fast. Fast! Let’s go.”
Tobias brought out a rusty metal jerry can and started soaking the clumped silk at the ends of the poles. The smell reminded me of blue smoke wafting through our neighbourhood’s backyards on summer evenings.
“We having a barbecue?”
“Max is holed up straight across there, injured and being helped, thank goodness, by a couple of friends,” Tobias said. “But something is after them – something in the fog, that’s roused and ready. Releasing the Magnus-thing was just what we needed. The things in the fog will go after it, not after us, and it’s strong enough to keep them busy for a long time. But if we don’t get to Max and his friends soon, they’re goners. The things in the fog – bullets may hurt them, but they won’t scare them off. We need fire. The torches” – he picked up a pole – “might help keep them at bay so Max and the others can get out of their stronghold and over here, to Sorcerer. Nate, you up for this?”
“L-let’s get this over with,” I said.
“Leslie, can you and Nate run as fast as I think you can?”
I looked over at Leslie. She was at least twice my age, but in the black-and-electric-blue wetsuit she’d worn to pilot a mini-sub into the Medusa Deep, she looked as fit and fast as a greyhound.
“I guess,” I said. “I mean, totally.” The stink of kerosene was making my eyes water. I fanned my face with a free hand.
“So, this is a different planet.” Leslie sniffed. “But the air is breathable. Still, I don’t feel so great. Is the gravity different?”
“One point one two Earth gravity,” Tobias said. “You get used to it. At this elevation, there’s more oxygen than Earth. That perks you right up.” He spoke once more into the walkie-talkie, as Gretchen appeared in the corridor and waited next to the door to LOAD/EVAC.
Agnes, from her place on the bridge, reopened the loading door. It gaped into black mist.
“C’mon, people, move!”
Following Tobias, we went through the loading dock and down the ramp, where Gretchen ignited our long silk torches. I hit the pavement, doing my best to balance my heavy steel pole and brandish the flame without scorching myself.
An orange light flared from the torches, smoke slithering against the boiling wall of fog. Outside that wall was the stillness of the plaza, but from within the fog came the animal-voice of Magnus, growling and hissing like an angry semi-trailer, and all around us clicking and clucking sounds, voices like gusts of winter wind, and echoing above them a loud piping call like a huge resentful bird singing an unhappy melody.
“Tekeli-li!”
“Guys when I say schnell I mean SCHNELL!” Tobias shouted.
Leslie took off as if shot out of a cannon. I bolted to keep up with her. If whatever was whistling and drooling in the fog – the horde – was going after Nyarlathotep, I wanted to get this job done before it turned its attention on us.
I just managed to flank Leslie as the four of us crossed the pavement. This was not exactly an Olympic-quality racetrack. We were forced to hop over potholes and scramble around chunks of broken pavement, barely guided around disaster by the uncertain lights of our makeshift torches.
Suddenly, from its mount above the loading door, a spotlight knifed through the mist, slicing a tunnel of white light to our target two hundred metres away. Fanning out as directed, Leslie, some metres to my left, and I scrambled like hell with our awkward firebrands. Behind us, Margrit and Tobias were doing a decent job of keeping up, and the flickering light from the burning silk revealed the crumbling facades of ancient buildings, shattered windows like empty sockets of huge skulls.
Sorcerer had exited the threshold high in the atmosphere, descending thousands of metres through the intense noonday sun of R’lyhnygoth, but here in the valleys of the Great Old Ones, even midday was like a house at midnight, full of shadows, blind corners and hidden obstacles. Around us the chorus of clicks, hoots and whistles got louder, as if an army of huge songbirds was mustering in the shadows. Out of the fog to my right, a whiplash of movement. I brandished the torch, a dark tendril wilted back and I ran on. Again, I felt a puff of wind, cold against my scalp, as something struck at me from close by. I flinched, fearing getting pounced on by the Magnus creature, but there was nothing to see but the wall of fog. I looked back and glimpsed Gretchen, far behind us, stumbling down the gangplank from LOAD/EVAC with some bulky metal apparatus.
There was a wiggle of movement in the black abyss ahead. At the top of those great stairs, something snakelike uncoiled from a doorway, groped along the stone wall and gripped the rim of the door. Another came after it, slithering along the door jambs, then another and then two dark bulks shuddered out of the blackness, walking on things that weren’t quite legs, supporting between them a frail and struggling figure. Just great, I thought, on every side something we couldn’t quite see, grabbing for us out of the mist, hissing and rattling with rage against the flames, and up ahead, whatever these things were, we were heading straight for them.
Then, as the spotlight raked across the wall, I recognized the emerging creatures as lumbering hihyaghi. From straps around their necks hung various tools and containers. The figure between them was a man, his left leg splinted and tied with stained rags.
“Max!” Tobias gasped.
At the brink of the stairs, the hihyaghi helped lower Max onto the first step, but he crumpled face forward and struggled weakly to regain his feet.
In front of us the fog parted and something massive thrust itself into our path, a crab-clawed predator the size of a rhinoceros and built for murder. It was the Magnus-thing. It must have found water, because we were sprayed as it turned toward us. There was nothing between us and it, but something had changed. Before when I met the thing I could feel it, its voice would get in my head, but now behind its staring eyes and dripping mouth was nothing. Then a great tongue of dark stretched out of the fog and swarmed over the Magnus-thing. It roared, and leapt into the darkness to one side of us.
“Don’t stop,” Tobias shouted. “Don’t stop.”
If the things in the dark were enemies, they’d found a worse enemy in Magnus.
As we reached the stairs, something roared right next to my ears, and I was blinded by Leslie’s torch as she waved it like a banner back and forth through the air, reviving the dying flame and illuminating an angry mass of throbbing flesh and fangs. The creatures were on every side, lunging against the defensive firelight of our torches, but now the great wave of them surged toward Magnus. Together with their peeps and twitters, from the empty windows and cracked walls of the buildings around the plaza echoed the snarls of the thing we’d brought with us on this long voyage.
Max was now perched on the next step, his hihyaghi buddies lowering him to the one below, their actions made even clumsier by the clutter of gear hanging off their corpulent bodies.
“Nate!” As the fabric around Leslie’s torch flaked away into ash, something in the fog grabbed it and she was pulled off her feet. Luckier with my torch, I thrust it into the thing’s “face” – if that’s what you might call the dripping aperture, fanged and eyeless, that had clamped onto her torch’s metal shaft.
Max reached the last of the tall stone steps and was just above our head-level. In his late thirties, with untidy blond hair, wearing a frayed khaki jacket over Sorcerer’s standard-issue brown coveralls, he pushed himself upright. I had to admire the guts it took as he leaned off the huge step, grabbed the shaft of Leslie’s torch and, using it as a pole vault, pushed himself off the step, crying out in pain as he landed on the hard ground beside us, cluttered with the broken bits of rock and masonry of the ancient plaza.
Relieved of their burden, the hihyaghi grabbed some kind of handheld weapons with long hooks on one end from the devices that dangled from their torsos. They looked like variations of Delphic scythes, the weapons that Sam and Mehri’s father, Mr. Shirazi, had used to rescue me at the stadium. A scythe can burn normal flesh, Mr. Shirazi had told me, but was cataclysmically damaging to “a creature such as one of the Hounds of Tindalos” that was rooted in another dimension of existence. I couldn’t tell if the beings in the dark were anything like that. The hihyaghi better know what they’re doing.
Gretchen shouted to us. My torch was also guttering low, but I kept it in one arm while I ran to help Max to his feet. With Leslie and I each taking as much weight as we could bear, we started shuffling him back toward Sorcerer.
Something spattered out of the fog onto the stone in front of us, coiling and striking like a frightened snake. I recoiled, almost losing my grip on Max, but he was quick to reassure me. “Don’t stop,” he gasped, despite his obvious distress limping so fast that I had to hustle to keep up. “My friends – they’re protecting us.”
The snake was a limb that had got too close to one of the scythes. We steered around it, almost colliding with a hihyaghi who was sweeping through the fog, its partner flanking us, warding off whatever was in the fog, the devices’ operating lights sketching trajectories of shooting stars against the dark mist. We reached Gretchen and as she lurched out of our way, I saw that the apparatus on her back was the flamethrower that had appeared when I first boarded Sorcerer. As soon as we passed, the eternal night of the plaza floor burst into white fire as Gretchen began sweeping the fog with bursts from the antique weapon, the roar of its flame echoing off the mist-shrouded walls.
Around us the noise level steadily rose, and the eerie bird calls – some of these “birds” had voices like tubas – began to accelerate into articulate sounds. A grunt grumbled out of the bass register and went higher and higher, echoed and magnified by a chorus of hoarse, sputtering voices that called for blood from every side through the fog. “Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!”
Then the light of Gretchen’s flame went out.