“It was just there. Lit up all along its underside by the flames. I’ve never seen anything like it.” A woman’s voice, somewhere behind me.
“I didn’t see nothin’.” A man. It was hard for me to hear them over the clamour of sirens, the gush of flames from the burning tower, the snarling of diesel engines and the squeal of brakes. “But what’s this?”
I’d tumbled onto the pavement half a block away from Oracle on a side street that had been abandoned in this state of emergency. Struggling to my feet, I managed to shrug myself out of the parachute and cast aside the harness. I watched it get caught by the wind around the Tower’s base, sucked along the street and carried by an updraft, higher and higher until it shrivelled and shrank into the smoke and flames bellowing from the Tower’s windows. Which I was lucky hadn’t happened to me.
I wanted to get moving, to put distance between myself and the heat and smoke of the Tower, from the stink of Sorcerer and its dead. For all I knew, every whiff of smoke I breathed could be a little bit of vulsetchi, yuck, of airship, even of Howard. But although I could stand, I now seemed to be mysteriously paralyzed from the waist down. I looked around at two city cops who had come up behind me.
“Whatcha doin’, kid? Move yer ass!” the one cop growled.
“Wait a second, Paul,” the lady cop said. “That looked like a parachute.” She spoke to me. “How’d you get here?”
“Just passing by and I, uh, took a wrong …”
“Did you jump out of that thing I saw?” She turned to her partner. “I told you I saw it!”
“You deaf?” Her partner, Paul, said to me. “Get movin’. This is restricted.”
“I can’t.”
“You say that to me? You can’t? Screw that, you can’t. It’s dangerous here. Whaddya mean you can’t?”
He grabbed my arm and tried to pull me his way. I shook myself from his grasp – I didn’t like being grabbed, but my feet wouldn’t move anyway. Now I was getting worried – had I gotten hurt? Were my feet dead?
Paul grabbed me again and one foot came loose. He pulled and wrapping me in some kind of cop-stranglehold-grip, got both feet loose and started dragging me along the street, oblivious to me yelling stop. Then his partner stepped in. She put a hand on his arm, made him look back.
“Paul, look. It’s his frickin’ shoes.”
“Leggo me.” I ran back in my sock feet and tugged at my shoes. The problem hadn’t been my feet; it was that my shoes were stuck to the pavement as if some smartass had epoxied them. The cops followed me.
“What the hell you doin’ here?”
I pulled out my pocket knife and jammed the blade under the sole of my right running shoe. When it lifted a bit, I grabbed it and pulled. When the plastic came away enough for me to fit both hands, I pulled the shoe up off the pavement. After a few tries, I was able to do the same thing with the left shoe.
The lady cop seemed to be the less clueless of the partners. “It was there,” she said. “You jumped out of it, didn’t you?”
There was no use denying it. “We were right over the Tower. It’s not like I know how to handle a parachute. I couldn’t avoid the flames.” I untied my shoes, slid them on my feet and tied them again. The laces were singed at the ends.
“And it was some blimp/dirigible-thing, wasn’t it? I saw its name on the side. Sorcerer.”
Paul scratched his head. “You’re both frickin’ crazy. Tara, we gotta get his punk ass outta here.”
His anger now cooled, he refrained from grabbing and the two of them hustled me toward the border of yellow tape and orange pylons that had been strung along the next street.
“Get the hell away,” Tara cautioned me. “The whole thing might just topple over.”
“And when that happens,” Paul said, “you won’t wanna …”
Okay, I get it, I get it. I took off and dodged down a side street, checking my phone. The meeting at Meghan’s was tonight. It had probably already started. A council of war, maybe even a last stand, that’s what they’d said.
Even if everything had just suddenly changed, we’d have a lot to talk about. I had just got back from, as far as I knew, the shortest intergalactic space voyage in history. Would everyone be there? Was everyone all right? (I thought about Howard, winced, blocked the thought out.)
I headed away from the Tower, down Jackson, turned onto John, pulled out my phone and called Dad.
“Nate … Nate … Nate. Where are you? Are you okay?”
“I’m fine,” I said. “Don’t worry. I’ll be home tonight.”
Actually, I ached all over, one side of my face felt scalded and my feet felt as melted as my shoes.
“Don’t come home. Sorry, what I mean is, you can if you want to, but we’re not there,” Dad said. “We’re at your buddy Meghan’s house. She’s having a meeting of her group, the …”
“Uh huh. The Furies. Yeah, I know all about them, Dad. I’m on my way over.”
“Can’t you feel it, Nate? Everything’s different. The Church and that thing … that Oracle … they’re gone.”
“Dad, I’m nearby. I’m coming right over.” He urged me to hurry – not because of desperate urgency, but because he didn’t want me to miss out. “It’s turned into kind of a party.”
The wind changed, and a waft of smoke from the Tower made me cough. Something flickered in the air, drifting toward my head like a leaf. I stretched out my hand and caught it. It broke apart under the impact, and I looked at its remnants, sniffed them, brushed them away. They smelled like rubber – it had been a leaf-sized flake of black paint.
I looked up at the Tower. By the light of the flames, I saw a whirl of blackness burst from an upper window. I ran and took shelter under a store’s awning as shards of glass rained onto the street, and from the sky came the chittering and hissing and piping of a flock of frightened thrals. As pests, as predators, as urban myths, they’d become part of the city; now they were once again aliens displaced and forced to find a new home. In this state, they wouldn’t be aggressive; I came out of my shelter and looked up unafraid. They circled and horked and shrieked together, like huge nasty starlings, and dispersed, every thral for itself, heading toward the shelter of the escarpment.
Down the street a team of firefighters, shouting and gesturing, jumped onto a truck and roared away from the Tower’s northeast corner. A section of exterior wall was about to collapse. The air filled with a gush of smoke, ash and burning papers, and the Tower vomited a flow of black smoking bile over the intersection. Like volcanic outflow, the river of black gunk slowed as it hit the street and its tendrils cooled against the pavement. Then something big bounced out of it, a human-sized hunk of flooring or concrete or melted glass. It tumbled into the middle of the street until it hit a curb and sat there, rocking and making little hissing and crackling noises as it cooled.
I approached the thing to see what it was, pulling my T-shirt up over my mouth and nose, and holding my breath whenever a waft of smoke came my way from the building or its smouldering outflow.
The object didn’t look man-made. Up close, in fact, I could tell it was made of some kind of yellowish chitinous material, like the exoskeleton that armours an insect. Although still smoking, parts of it were cool enough to touch. There was some kind of horizontal groove along the side, like the scar of an old wound. I ran my finger along it, trying to understand what this thing was. The groove, a kind of seam, cracked under my touch.
Startled, I backed off and watched. Mucous fibres stretched and snapped, and in the darkness inside I glimpsed movement. Yellowish fluid, streaked with blood, gushed from the opening as a clawed hand emerged to grasp its rim, and I backed away as the hinged lid drew back and fell away, revealing something cocooned within. An antlered head rose as the thing stood. It stretched to its full height and extended bony arms, still webbed with dripping fluid, in front of it, blinking its black slits of eyes as if amazed at its own strength and ugliness.
Then it hopped to the ground, stumbled momentarily on its two segmented legs, coughed blood onto the pavement, hissed and began lumbering toward me in an unsteady crouch.
I bolted along John toward the tracks, formulating a strategy that might help me survive an attack. I had no idea what it was: Some hideous embryo that had been concealed within Sorcerer – perhaps even conjured into life by the fermenting culture of the vulsetchi that I had helped feed? Or some obscene vengeance against humanity that had been bred by Yog-Sothoth and its minions in the recesses of Oracle? Perhaps even (who could tell, with that exoskeleton?) a newer and even nastier permutation of Nyarlathotep itself?
I jogged along Hunter to the Catharine Street underpass. If I could reach Meghan’s house I’d gain reinforcements, but it was on the flank of the escarpment, on the other side of Charlton Street – uphill and a long way to run. Plus, I wasn’t in the best shape. The soles of my shoes had hardened and their traction was rotten. A couple of times I almost lost my balance, as if I was running on ice, and the hard soles made me clatter along the sidewalk as if instead of shoes I was wearing plastic dinner plates. I made the underpass, and felt braver as I ran past a family who were on their way downtown to look at the fire.
“Don’t go that way,” I yelled breathlessly. “Danger!” I pointed. “There’s a monster there!”
They laughed and kept going. I looked where I’d pointed – the thing was gone. What had happened? I stopped and caught my breath, then headed back toward the Tower, trailing the family by a few metres. When one of them looked back curiously, I pulled out my phone and acted as if I was checking my messages. I knew better than to phone 911 and report being chased by a monster: in the past, I’d found it didn’t do any good, and it was certainly useless with the Church in power.
But the Church, I remembered, was not in power anymore, was it? Not with Oracle gone, with Magnus out of the picture.
Back on the corner of Hunter Street, I passed another family. If the first one had been cheerful because Oracle was gone and their freedom was back, these folks were in the dumps because Oracle was gone and their freedom was lost. “This can’t be happening!” the dad wailed. I waited for them to get out of earshot, looking around me cautiously, listening to the night. The creature was nowhere to be seen. Wherever it was rampaging, it was somewhere else. Maybe I’d only imagined it was after me. It would make more sense for it to seek out its own kind; at the very least, there must be surviving Church members who’d be on the lookout for it. Whatever it was.
For a moment, a kind of hush descended on the neighbourhood. The roar of the flames and the sounds of sirens seemed very far off, and I felt eerily safe. I would never live another day on earth like the last one, and I felt a pang of regret for Howard, whose days on earth were over. This earth where, now that I thought of it, he never seemed to feel totally at home anyway.
Home. That was a tempting thought, but far away, a couple of kilometres. I turned and went back under the railway bridge toward Meghan’s, but as I emerged from the other side, I heard a sound from the chain-link fence that guarded the tracks above. It rattled, and something vaulted over it and landed in the bushes just a few metres from me. I quickened my pace and started to run along Augusta Street, hearing laughter to my left (another anti-Oracle faction), past an old warehouse plastered with peeled and faded signs promising new condos. As I ran, I spotted a broken half-brick and leaned over and scooped it up. Just in case.
Looking around, there were no people to be found. Behind me a lumbering figure passed under a street light and hurried back into the darkness, drawing closer. The houses around me were dark, but ahead was Shamrock Park with its little playground and a hill sloping up into a copse of trees around the tracks. The path through the park would take me around back of the Corktown Pub, and on the other side would be more lights, more people. I sped up, and behind me heard a scrabble of bony limbs as the creature did the same, to match my speed and overtake me. This was going to be a hundred-metre dash for my life. But the thing put on a burst of speed and at the park gate, I heard it mount the fence and crash through the trees. It could clearly move much faster than I could. A dog started barking as I ran into the park, and a man in a Ticats baseball cap and nylon jacket cursed under his breath.
“Hey, man,” I gasped, “I need help. There’s …” but he had already glimpsed the thing in the trees and was tugging his barking dog away toward Ferguson. Out of breath, I ran across the sandy play area toward the kids’ slide, climbed the ladder to the top and waited, squinting into the dark and hefting the half-brick in my right hand. From the dark side of Walnut Street, something rustled the branches of the shrubbery. Then the leaves parted and the thing came toward me.
As it walked – on two legs, straighter and steadier than when it first appeared – the sticky slime or bodily emissions that covered it began to dry and flake off its bony form. I prepared to chuck the brick at its head, dive down the slide and make a break for the pub, when the creature did the last thing I expected. Opening its beetle-like mandibles, it gushed forth some kind of milky spittle and blood, spat and coughed, and in the midst of that hoarse, horrible sound spoke my name. It reached the slide, caught the ladder in one bony talon and looked up at me.
“Nate.”
I lowered my arm. That voice.
“What … Who the hell are you?”
The thing looked down at its skeletal body. From the chest down it seemed to be wrapped in some kind of weblike skin or membrane – something that, unlike its bony exterior, showed a delicate grey-violet colour in the dim light, shot through with streaks of darker reds and purples. It stretched out its forearms. “Whatever I am, my friend, look at me.” Its voice was guttural and breathy. “I’m alive.”