Slapping my fingers against the edge of his weapon, I prevented it from impaling me while he struggled to force it down.
“Not today, Doctor,” I said, hate in my voice.
Doctor Ward stared at me, his eyes boring into mine as he shouted, “You irritating little maggot! I tried to give you immortality and you threw it back in my face! You even killed my shoggoth! Do you have any idea how rare those are?!”
Spinning my leg around, I knocked his legs out from under him and ripped the sword from his hands. The blade spun in the air and landed in the gore nearby. Throwing myself on top of the insane scientist, I proceeded to deliver a repeated series of blows to the madman’s face. Blood poured out from where I struck him, his teeth shattering from a particularly powerful blow.
The brutalized doctor reached up for the Elder Sign amulet hanging around his neck but I grabbed it first and tore it away, tossing the talisman over my shoulder.
“I am going to squeeze the damned life out of you!” I shouted at the top of my lungs, wrapping my fingers around his neck.
Ward’s face was already a blood-stained mess, his nose broken and several teeth missing from the force of my earlier blows. It was my hope to throttle the life out of him, letting him know exactly what was happening to him as he died. The Necromancer was far from helpless, however. He raised his palm, and I was thrown backwards with a blast of telekinetic force that sent me hurtling through the air. I ended up bouncing for ten feet across the muddy, blood-soaked ground.
Ward had a cocksure smile on his face as he said, “John, surely you could have come up with something better than that. They don’t really serve as appropriate famous last words for a man of your caliber.”
Ward walked over to pick up his amulet as I reached into my jacket and pulled out the Dreamlands representation of the golden knife Martha had given me. Hurling the weapon forward, it pierced both the Elder Sign and the hand which held it.
Letting forth a terrible scream, Doctor Ward stared down at the terrible wound he’d suffered. The Elder Sign promptly caught fire before exploding, leaving a burning, flaming stump in place of the man’s hand.
“I prefer to let actions speak louder than words,” I said, barely managing to stand up. Hobbling, I took a deep breath as I prepared to finish off the psychopath, fully intending to kill him. “If you die here, I’m pretty sure you’ll die in the real world. Prepare to meet whatever gods you worship, Doctor.”
Ward just stared at me, biting his lip and saying, “Adieu, John Henry Booth. It has been amusing.”
Rushing at him, I hoped he would be too disorientated to cast any more of his black magic. Unfortunately, I failed. I watched Doctor Ward’s body transform into a flock of deformed crows, the myriad disgusting birds scattering to the four winds. I slid across the mud, watching my quarry escape into the night.
“Ward!” I called out, sinking down into the bloody mud around me. The crimson rain continued to fall upon me, occasionally joined by organs and other disgusting hail from the surreal clouds above me. I could barely breathe, my body injured from the fragments of stone lodged within my knees.
Though I could barely feel it, I also knew the Elder Things had scorched parts of my body with their crystalline rods. The wounds weren’t lethal, yet, but they would kill me without proper medical attention—medical attention which was not exactly available in the Dreamlands.
Knowing what happened to my squadron did nothing to alleviate the pain; it only heightened the outrageousness of the situation. Doctor Ward, my former professor, was going to mutilate hundreds of children to turn them into monsters.
Struggling to get up, I failed, unable to move any farther. My body was battered, exhausted, and spent. I tried to wake up, to end the vision-quest and return to my mortal body, only to find my mind was trapped within the confines of the Dreamlands. The Necronomicon might have contained some spell or ritual to free my mind, but I hadn’t finished reading it. The book also lacked any astral reflection, left in my orange pants back on Earth. Even attempts to will into existence exits failed, leaving me alone in the shadow of the Elder Things’ tower.
If there was a small mercy to the situation, it was that no more Elder Things came out to finish me off. The loss of two more of their brethren probably told them it was suicide to try and risk any more of their lives to retrieve my body. It was ironic, given I couldn’t have resisted them in my present condition.
Instead, I just lay there as minutes turned to hours and I expected to die at any time. In the end, I regained enough force of will to make one last attempt to save my life. Knowing no one else would be able to stop Doctor Ward, I turned to forces I never expected to—sorcery. I had to survive, though, to win justice for Jimmy and Stephens. To protect every single life Doctor Ward would take in his plan to transform the human race.
Sticking the tips of my fingers into the mud, I drew an elaborate circle before surrounding it with crudely drawn arcane runes. Each of the glyphs was dedicated to one the Great Old Ones worshiped by the Dunwych. I didn’t know where the Dunwych had learned of the Other Gods or the Great Old Ones spoken of by the Necronomicon, but for once I allowed myself to believe they were worthy of worship. I wasn’t a psychic, not like Martha, but perhaps in the Dreamlands it was possible for a normal man to work magic. It was ironic that I, who hated magic, desperately hoped now to use it.
The process took over an hour, my body collapsing several times during the procedure. Finally, I drove my fingernails hard into my palm in order to draw blood. Tossing the contents into the central circle, I called out, “Ia Cthulhu! Ia Shub-Niggurath! T’yanna Shub’Niggurath Naw’tecan! Ia Hastur! Uh’ah aja’fyanna Hastur gna Kadath! Yost Nyarlathotep!”
The spell, spoken in an alien language nearly impossible to speak with a human mouth, caused the world around me to shake. Like the tearing of paper, the sky split in half before the ground beneath me shattered into multiple pieces. Both above and below me were starry expanses leading to constellations I did not recognize. The Elder Things’ tower leaned and tottered before falling downwards into the infinite blackness surrounding me. Everything else similarly dissolved, reducing the once vast graveyard to nothingness.
Soon, I found myself standing on a shaft of earth rising out of an alien asteroid belt with naught but floating bits of the tower’s wreckage surrounding me. I imagined I could breathe in space, knowing that if I stopped believing it for a second I would suffocate in the vast blackness around me. I tried desperately to tell myself it was all a trick of the subconscious, but I knew my dream had long since run away from me, becoming something far beyond anything my conscious mind could come up with on its own.
Stepping out of the emptiness of space, walking across the astral infinity as if it were a paved road, was a man in black. Wearing a midnight-colored duster and Stetson identical to my own, he possessed skin as black as coal mixed with features close enough to be my twin’s. He was a being I recognized instantly as the Black Soldier, one of Nyarlathotep’s countless forms. He walked with a kind of otherworldly majesty that was neither good nor evil but terrified me to the bottom of my soul. I was in the presence of a god.
The figure removed his hat and put it over his heart before bowing. “Hello, John. It’s been a long time.”
“I don’t recall meeting you before. You’ve made a strange choice for an avatar,” I said, coughing. Standing upward, I felt strength returning to my limbs. Pulling off my blood-soaked shirt, I saw the scars in the shape of a hand glowing.
“You conjured me this way,” the deity answered. Reaching over, Nyarlathotep placed his hand on my scar, where it fit perfectly. The god’s touch was cold, like ice, but it burned like a branding iron. “There, that should put you to rights. All it required was a dozen or so inconsequential lives to repair you.”
For a second, I felt and knew the names of all of the people across Earth’s ruins who Nyarlathotep killed to heal me. Ruby a shopkeeper, Tom the caravan driver, Eldoc the Deep One, and others whose lives ended in an instant for the purposes of giving me a little more life.
I stared at him, horrified. “I didn’t ask for you to do that.”
“No, but it’s what you think gods do. They strike down the innocent and the guilty alike, never bothering to explain why. Azathoth was born in primordial nuclear chaos, the Big Bang being one of his baby-like belches, but it was sentience which gave birth to gods like me. You wanted a reason for all the horrible things that happen to people, a meaning for your impotent, unimportant little lives to strive towards. So, here I am.”
I looked straight at him, whispering, “Mankind didn’t dream you up.”
“No, of course not. The races older than Cthulhu’s people did. Humans aren’t the only ones to have begged for the Answer.” Nyarlathotep’s voice became mocking, insulting every being of faith throughout history. “I adopt whatever forms are needed though, to give you all the knowledge you mortals beg for, the secrets that will make your dull existence bearable.”
I was tempted to ask, shaking my head. Then I realized that Nyarlathotep was a trickster, a being who could not be trusted, and I guessed what sort of stories he provided to those who saw him in their visions. “The answer is whatever people want it to be.”
“Of course,” Nyarlathotep said, transforming into an Egyptian pharaoh with skin the color of obsidian. “The Answer is always what they want to hear. After all, what else would they dream of a god telling them?”
It wasn’t lost on me this was exactly the kind of thing that I expected Nyarlathotep to say. I could not trust this strange deity, whether he was a product of my dreams or genuinely a god, but I needed him. Hell, it was possible I wasn’t speaking to the real Nyarlathotep, if such a creature existed at all. The Necronomicon’s summoning rituals drew creatures from the Dreamlands into the physical world but gave them shape in accordance to the wishes and prejudices of the wizard casting the spell. That didn’t make them any less powerful and the least of them was powerful beyond imagination.
I shook those thoughts away, lest they lead me to madness. “I summoned you. I need you to take me back to my body. I need to stop Doctor Ward and avenge my squadron.”
Nyarlathotep transformed into a flying wasp-like creature that seemed as much fungus as insect. His next words entered my mind rather than my ears, “You do not have to do anything. It is your choice to be hero or villain or valueless drain on humanity’s resources.”
“I choose to try and do what’s right.” I felt strong again, better than I’d felt in years. It made me sick to my stomach to think it had come at the cost of other people’s lives.
“By whose standard?” Nyarlathotep changed into a black Elder Thing. “And for who?”
“My own and for me,” I said, trying to avoid thinking about the fact I’d long since given up on notions of right and wrong. “I have some things I need to ask …”
Nyarlathotep, however, had already moved on. “I can take you to distant R’lyeh, Kadath, or the very heart of the universe. There you may join the ranks of the many prophets I’ve made immortal. Your race will be dead in three generations, no matter what you do. Life is an insignificant and ephemeral thing. Think carefully before you waste your meager years left on a dying race.”
“Humanity has only three generations left to live?” I asked, stunned.
“Of course.” Nyarlathotep became the image of a man-sized Cthulhu, a cephalopod skull necklace around his neck. “I’m surprised your race is going to last that long. You were always such a self-destructive little species.”
Hearing Nyarlathotep’s words was like a sock in the gut, confirming my worst fears about humanity’s future. Then I remembered my speech to Mercury, telling her the importance was in struggling against death rather than triumphing over it. Taking a deep breath, I recited one of the most famous lines of the Necronomicon: “With strange aeons, even death may die. I will not give up. I will save my race.”
Nyarlathotep assumed the form of my father, his color still darker than black. Grinning broadly, he snapped his fingers. “Very well, soldier, I shall take you back to your body.”
My body caught fire.