For a brief moment, I was aware of my present state in my flashback. The discovery that Peter Goodhill was a servant of Ward made me think about my encounter with him in Richard’s garage. Peter working for “The Necromancer” explained a great deal, from his unusual friendliness to why he’d suddenly decided to join the Dunwych after a post-desertion career of self-serving behavior. Peter was nothing more than a plant by the old sorcerer-scientist.
Peter was a means for Ward to gain information on any plots the Dunwych might be formulating against him. Any guilt I felt towards nearly beating Peter to death evaporated, replaced only by the regret that I did not finish the job. I had precious little time to think on the revelation because my memories resumed with a feverish dream-like quality.
I remembered being punished for my almost successful assassination of the insane scientist. Doctor Ward was a master of inflicting ungodly pain upon a human body. When he was not doing so, bizarre medical tests involving injections and spellwork were performed.
I had read of encounters with “Grays” and the Plutonian Mi-Go species, where men were abducted and subjected to traumatizing scientific experiments. Those stories were the closest thing I could think of to compare my experience to. Blessedly, Ward feared me so much that he kept me doped up on a cocktail of drugs so strong I could barely feel much of what I endured.
There were other things too, things I could barely recall because Ward began to experiment with possession. Scattered images filled my head of elaborate gladiator contests. Battles where he wore my body like a suit, using golden revolvers to fight various monsters of his own creation.
I vaguely recalled Jessica fighting in these contests as well, something which only increased my hatred of Ward. I took no pleasure in the victories I remembered; each one signaled the doctor gaining a greater control over my form. It was close to eight days before I regained control of my body. It took that long for the drugs to pass from my system and to recover enough mental strength to drive Ward’s presence from my mind.
I could not say for certain what gave me the willpower to perform this feat. I believe, in part, it had to do with my desire to protect my family and see again those I loved. Also was my care for my surviving squad mate, Jessica, and the knowledge a terrible fate awaited her were I not to break free.
When it finally happened, a primordial scream escaped my lungs, filling the room. “Ahhhhhh!”
A female voice whispered in my ear, “It’s alright, John. I’m here.”
I did not immediately look to the source, instead taking in the chamber around me. I was in a dungeon, a genuine one unlike the laboratory I’d been imprisoned in before. The room was surprisingly spacious, albeit filthy. I was in a single large chamber with a row of iron bars separating it from rows of similar chambers outside.
Surrounding me were several ancient corpses, fossilized by the epochs of time and magical radiation. Given the Elder Things had no reason to keep human prisoners, this place had probably once housed slaves.
There was a single guard standing in front of the bars, a debased-looking Cthulhu cultist who had tattooed himself with hundreds of Elder Signs. He was not a particularly formidable-looking fellow, looking somewhat diseased and wretched. Given Ward had spent the past week brainwashing and drugging me, he’d probably thought it unnecessary to provide someone more skilled.
Fool.
I shook my head and turned to look at the woman behind me. “Jessica?”
“Yes, Captain, it’s me.” I saw she was dressed in rather ridiculous attire. Covering her form was tight-fitting cowgirl attire. It was like none of the practical clothing worn by the Wastelanders outside of New Arkham but more like something you’d see in Pre-Rising art.
“Jessica, why are you dressed like … that?”
“Ward made us dress in these outfits when he had us fight for his cultists’ amusement.” She looked as disgusted as I felt confused. “I’m just glad he hasn’t forced us to do anything else.”
“Us?” I noticed I was wearing a male variant of the exact same thing. “I don’t believe it.”
“I wish I still had this option,” Jessica huffed before slowly helping me to my feet. “Did you actually know this guy?”
“He was my mentor for a few years, back when I thought I still might be a scientist.”
“Damn,” Jessica replied, patting me on the back. “I take it your course wasn’t Crazy-Ass Experiments?”
“No.” I leaned up to whisper in her ear. “Have you any idea how to get out of this place?”
“There’s a transport garage nearby,” Jessica whispered back. “The problem is this place is crawling with cultists and weird-ass monsters. I swear, I think Ward’s inner circle is composed of vampires.”
I bit my lip, looking at her skeptically. “Vampires don’t exist, Jessica.”
“Have you seen any?” she asked, raising an eyebrow.
“No,” I sighed. “I haven’t.”
“Then don’t contradict me.” Jessica wrinkled her nose, smiling. It was a sad smile, though. “I miss Jimmy, Garcia, and Parker. Stephens, too.”
“I miss them all as well.” I took a deep breath, then stood up. I looked at her, taking in her soft features and missing my wife more than ever. Though we were estranged, I still thought of her every day. “Is there anything else I should worry about?”
“Ward has a dragon?”
I said, speaking a little louder than I should have been, “Jessica, you know how much I hate to agree with Stephens, but that’s just ridiculous. There’s no such thing.”
“I’ve heard it, John,” Jessica hissed under her breath. “It doesn’t roar, so much as make a thousand terrible noises all at once. The thing sounds like the pipe organ from hell, but it’s real. It’s big, nasty, and slithering down beneath us. A few times, I’ve felt the whole cathedral shake.”
I knew better than to contradict Jessica; she might be prone to the occasional flight of fancy but if she said she heard something then I believed her. I didn’t believe in dragons but there were aliens undoubtedly as large and dangerous. “Alright, there’s a dragon.”
“Thank you.” Jessica breathed a sigh of relief. “I’m glad you believe me. There were times I was sure I was going mad. The sounds it makes, they scare me in ways that Doctor Ward and his experiments can’t even begin to compare to.”
I placed my hand on Jessica’s arm, barely resisting the urge to embrace her. Right now, we needed to work together to get out of this. Years of training together had made us like a pair of twins, in tune and aware of each other’s surroundings. We could get through this. “I think we need to use Plan 23 to get out of here.”
She nodded and asked, “What’s Plan 23?”
“You’ll figure it out when you see it,” I said, giving her a halfhearted smile. Clutching my stomach, I raised a hand, “Guard … I think I’m sick. Oh God, I’m going to throw up!”
The guard turned to look at me. “Idiot. I don’t think anyone has ever fallen for that in their …”
That was when Jessica broke a leg bone across her knee and jabbed the jagged edge of the larger piece into the left eye of the Cthulhu cultist. He was dead before he hit the ground.
“Is this what you had in mind?” Jessica said, walking over to the corpse. “’Cause if you actually intended him to come in to help, I’ve lost all respect for you.”
“It proceeded more or less how I pictured it in my head. Never underestimate the power of a good distraction.” I smiled, waiting for her to unlock the door. “Our other option was for you to try and seduce our guard before I overpowered him.”
Jessica snorted, shaking her head. “That plan is only slightly better than the stomach virus one.”
“We could have done it the other way if he was so inclined,” I said, searching the body of the deceased cultist. There I found a crude powder pistol. It was better than nothing, though not by much. “We now have to proceed to that transport garage, hopefully arming ourselves. We’ll go in silently and deadly. Hopefully, we can convince the Council of Leaders this place is a threat.”
“Oh, they’ll bomb the place to the ground, I’m sure of that. Never have I been more grateful the Council is a bunch of paranoid old egomaniacs,” Jessica said, laughing. “Let’s go, Captain.”
“Affirmative.”
The interior of the Black Cathedral was still stunning to travel through, even with the sense of fear and unnaturalness that clung to its alien architecture. The Elder Things, who I knew almost nothing of back then, didn’t strike me as the most religious of people, but they had constructed a vast temple to their otherworldly gods.
Everything was built to many times the size of humans, despite the Elder Things being only twice their size. There was a sense of grandiosity largely lacking from human design. I had to admire them, even knowing what sort of cruel logic-driven beings they were.
“I’m not seeing much of the locals,” Jessica said, clinging close as we moved from hallway to hallway. “Do you think it’s a trap?”
“Traps are for people who are not completely in your power,” I said.
Jessica grimaced. “Right.”
I gestured for her to be quiet and moved into a nearby passageway as a group of Cthulhu cultists came around the corner. They were, like the others we’d killed, dressed in scavenged attire and outlandish tattoos. It made me wonder what Doctor Ward had been thinking recruiting them. All of them were carrying small arms, however, which made their elimination vital.
Signaling Jessica to stay quiet, I counted down from three as they passed by. When we hit zero, the both of us moved behind the two closest to snap their necks. Jessica had difficulty with hers but still disabled him within seconds. It left only a single short red-haired cultist wearing a pair of glasses; he was also conspicuously wearing a set of flamethrower canisters on his back.
“For Great Cth—” a battle cry he started, before I stabbed him in the eye with the same bone Jessica had used to kill our jailer.
“Why do they always shout before they fire?” Jessica said, arming herself with the guns on the ground. “The whole point of a good battle cry is that it should be done while you’re attacking.”
“I don’t think logic is the main concern of these people. Make sure to stab each of the heads, just in case. We don’t want any more Reanimated coming after us.” I started removing the flamethrower from the deceased cultist’s back.
“You’re actually going to use a flamethrower? You do realize those are horribly impractical weapons, right? Flamer ammunition is much superior.” Jessica’s Southern drawl slipped for a bit, revealing the New Arkham accent we all shared.
“You make do with what you have, Corporal,” I said, checking the weapon for leaks. “Are we close to where you saw the motor pool?”
“Motor pool may be giving it too much credit. These cultists don’t seem to have too much in the way of vehicles. Still, we’re not far. Only about two or three hallways, I think.” Jessica checked the magazines of both the semi-automatic pistols now in her hands. She then added, “Captain, I want to thank you.”
“Thank me?” I asked, wondering if now was really the right time to get sentimental.
“For distracting Doctor Ward; the entire time he was focused on torturing you, he wasn’t able to do anything to me. I know that was your doing.” Jessica patted me on the arm, giving me a look of deep gratitude.
“I’m pretty sure that’s not what happened, Corporal.” I took a deep breath, testing the flamethrower by launching a brief burst of flame in front of us. “I think I just annoyed him more than you. Nothing deliberate about it.”
“Well, I owe you one.”
“We owe each other. More times than I can count.”
“How about you let me buy you twenty or so rounds at The Radioactive Cowboy, anyway? I’m starting to warm to Scrapyard’s mud beer.”
“That makes one of us, but I’ll take you up on your offer anyway. I’m sorry I got you into this.”
“You didn’t.”
“I’m pretty sure I did.”
“If you’re going to blame anyone, blame the Council of Leaders.” Jessica spit on the ground. “They’re the ones who let Ward loose in the desert. They’re the ones who got my husband killed fighting a giant evil Crayola. Hell, they’re the guys who keep sending us out against situations we have no idea how to handle.”
“We can’t choose our leaders,” I said.
“So much for democracy, eh?” Jessica snorted.
“Yeah. I suppose so,” I replied, realizing what I’d said. “Just note, I’ve always got your back.”
“Always.”
Jessica shook her head, unconsciously reaching for her hat that was no longer there. “God dammit, if I wasn’t going to kill him for wasting Jimmy and Stephens, I’d kill him for taking my hat.”
I was about to say we had bigger things to worry about when a noise threatened to split our eardrums. It was an explosion of noise so loud it echoed throughout the halls around us several times over. If this was the thing Jessica described as “a thousand terrible noises,” then she was a master of understatement.
“The dragon!” Jessica shouted, grabbing my arm. “John, we need to make a break for it!”
“I …” I hesitated for a second, processing the sound. “I think you’re right, Corporal.”
At the end of the hall we’d just come from, I caught the sight of what was coming after us. If it didn’t resemble a dragon, then it certainly possessed all of its intimidation value. I had never seen such a malevolent looking thing in my entire life. If I lived a thousand years, I’d probably never see its like again.
It was death incarnate.
Rolling down from an archway on the floor above us, seeping over balconies and hallways, was a shapeless black creature composed of amorphous bio-mass. Much like the growths on Doctor Ward’s chest, it was covered in mouths and eyes that had no business belonging on anything but a face.
Its thousands of mouths spoke together, shouting nonsensical alien words in a mind-blasting chorus of pipe organ-like voices. Its protoplasmic body slithered and moved in ways no oozing thing should have been able to, smashing aside stone columns in its path as if they were a child’s building blocks.
One moment it moved like an amoeba, the next it possessed all the fluidity of water, and then it became solid as steel. The gigantic thing had not even begun to finish its entrance by the time it filled the entirety of the Black Cathedral halls behind us. I could see it was hundreds of feet long, more vast than any subway train or building I’d encountered in the Wasteland’s ruins.
Given we had no idea how far the Black Cathedral really extended given its space-bending properties, the creature could have well been a mile in length or longer. Though I did not have a name for it on the day I first encountered it, Abdul Alhazred had written of the dreadful entity in the Necronomicon a thousand years prior. He had given it the name shoggoth.
Eons ago, they had been creations of the Elder Things, only to destroy their vast supernatural kingdom, destroying all of the ancient beings’ advanced technology and devouring the majority of them. They were made of matter culled from multiple dimensions and were immune to nearly all weapons.
Had the shoggoths been so inclined, ages ago, they could have annihilated all other life-forms on Earth. Instead, they’d just kept to the ruins of the Elder Things’ once grand empire, gurgling obscene blasphemies and thinking whatever twisted thoughts shoggoths did.
“Run!” I shouted to Jessica, firing the flamethrower’s juices onto the creature’s form. The fire seemed to only tickle it, dancing melodically alongside its tar-like form before being absorbed into its greater frame.
Jessica didn’t bother to run behind me, instead only tugging on the back of my shoulders before the shoggoth formed a hammer-like shape within the folds of one of its tendrils, bringing it down towards me. Only Jessica’s movement saved me from being crushed as the Elder Things’ treated stone shattered like thin glass before the force of its blow.
“How about you take your own advice!” Jessica shouted in my ear, pulling on my arm.
I ignored her insubordination again and took off running. Pulling off my shoulder straps, I tossed the useless flamethrower behind me, only to have it consumed by the hungry shoggoth trailing behind me.
The monstrous creature extended hundreds of tendrils forward, their movement almost like little baby chicks gestating within the folds of the monstrosity, ready to be fed by their mother. I could not help but think if Doctor Ward was nursing this creature to birth more of its kind, that he was even madder than I thought.
Running as fast as our legs would allow, we were still only able to barely keep ahead of the seemingly endless tidal wave of blackness rushing behind us. When we arrived at the transport garage of the Black Cathedral, we were already beginning to feel winded, while our pursuer was only picking up speed.
Unfortunately, the transport garage was no refuge. The place definitely had the transportation necessary to escape the cathedral. There was a vast collection of rebuilt cars, rusted oil drums containing probably the last substantive stockpile of oil left in the world, and a surprising number of weapon stockpiles. The exit, however, was sealed over with a huge pair of stone doors that would prevent any escape. There was also a collection of two dozen cultists, all heavily armed, looking toward us as we ran in.
The universe was mocking us.
“Shit!” Jessica shouted.
The shoggoth poured into the chamber as I threw her to the ground, rolling across the floor, out of the way of the cultists’ line of fire.
“Truer words have never been spoken,” I spoke to her as the creature let forth another alien cry.