I slowly climbed to my feet, struggling with the vision I’d seen. I wasn’t human, had never been human, and my children were an unholy mixture of this world and other.
Oh John, Nyarlathotep’s voice echoed through my mind. Your race was never pure of such things. Apes evolved thanks to the Elder Things’ tampering and their dreams were warped by Cthulhu to create your race. Even the primordial slime which all life on this planet comes from came from another world as part of the body of a Great Old One.
I tried to force Nyarlathotep from my mind but found only echoes and shadows. I wasn’t sure he even existed as anything other than a reflection of my own insecurities and suspicions. This world was a nightmare which humans couldn’t wake up from.
Perhaps literally.
Once I stood, I saw Jessica, Mercury, and Katryn were twitching on the ground around me even as the children’s bodies lay still. They were still caught in the same dream I’d unwittingly plunged myself into and had not yet awoken—if they ever would.
Looking down at my gun, I considered putting it underneath my chin and pulling the trigger. It was a simple enough choice: life as a monster or merciful death as a man. Even that choice was an illusion as I wasn’t sure I could die. Glancing over at the Hand of Nyarlathotep, I saw it had already started to sport chitin patches which I knew would eventually spread to form an unnatural carapace. I clenched my right fist and concentrated, causing the chitin to sink into the folds of my skin and be replaced with the appearance of human flesh. It was a disguise, but wasn’t that what monsters did? We cloaked ourselves in the appearance of normal humanity in order to pretend we were still people. It didn’t matter anymore.
I’d made my choice.
I took my heavy assault rifle and placed the butt against the floor before resting my chin against its muzzle. Reaching down, I closed my eyes and prepared to end my existence. I had no idea what sort of afterlife awaited monsters or whether there would simply be cold oblivion, but it was a better choice than becoming the thing in my vision.
That was when Katryn stirred on the ground and climbed to her feet, lifting her spear and offering a better alternative than suicide. “Monster. You’re a monster. A filthy alien creature from another world.”
I let the heavy assault rifle drop to the ground. “Yes, yes I am.”
I didn’t want to commit suicide but the thought of living further was unbearable. Death at the hands of Katryn was perhaps not my preferred method of death, but it would at least be a warrior’s end.
“I saw what you were in my vision,” Katryn said, a look of disgust on her face. “I cannot believe I let you touch me.”
“Don’t flatter yourself,” I said, tossing the gun to one side. “You imagined yourself as the great warrior race that would redeem this world with your knowledge of the Old Ones, but your people are being massacred out there the same as the rest of humanity.”
“Fuck you!” Katryn hissed, assuming a battle stance with her spear.
“Oh, and I was kept a slave. I was never anything to you but a tool and I despise you for it. I just needed your help. Which I don’t anymore.”
Katryn launched herself at me, charging with her spear. I positioned myself to move out of the way then held myself still and waited for the inevitable. I just hoped her blessed spear was capable of killing me. I never got the chance to find out because Katryn was shot three times in the back. Katryn fell to her knees and collapsed, face forward on the ground, her spear falling out of her hand.
Mercury was behind her, still on the ground, holding her pistol and breathing short, quick breaths. “You’re welcome.”
I stared down at where Katryn was lying, watching a pool of inky-black blood pour from her body. It was proof Mister Death’s claims she was not entirely human were true, but, whatever her inhuman ancestry was, it hadn’t done much to save her. Mercury climbed to her feet and then walked over Katryn’s corpse before emptying the rest of the magazine into her.
“That wasn’t necessary,” I said, looking between them.
“Better to be safe than sorry,” Mercury said, her hands trembling.
“First time you’ve killed someone?” I asked, holding my hand out. I wasn’t sure how to react having my attempt at suicide interrupted by someone shooting the weapon.
“Second,” Mercury said. “Not counting those I gave a lethal injection.”
I took the gun, pulled out a magazine from my belt, and reloaded it before I handed it back. “I forgot your husband.”
“I won’t, as much as I want to.”
My emotions were a whirlwind as I struggled with how I felt about Katryn’s death. She’d never been my friend, only my enemy, but I still felt pain at her loss. I also didn’t know how I was going to continue knowing what I did now. The moment to kill myself had passed, though, and I suddenly felt an overwhelming urge to live.
It was a qualified emotion, though, because of what I had to say next. “New Arkham is gone, Mercury.”
Mercury blinked. “What?”
“Ward destroyed it,” I said, swallowing my next breath. “The orb showed it to me. I don’t know how I know it’s true, that it’s not a hallucination, but I do. The only survivors are a few evacuees and whoever came to take over Kingsport.”
Mercury took a step back, holding her face.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered, unsure what else I could say.
“Why be sorry?” Ward’s voice echoed through the chamber. “You didn’t choose to free their souls from this miserable decaying mess of a world.”
I looked around the chamber, too exhausted to hate him. “Spare us the theatrics, Ward. If you’re here to kill us, then go ahead, but I refuse to indulge your fantasies any further.”
Mercury snorted. “Screw that, I intend to kill this child-killing bastard.”
“You wound me,” Ward said, stepping out from behind Cthulhu’s effigy. He had his staff in hand and his eyes were completely blackened. The Doctor had cast aside his shirt and the monstrous mouths were in full display as a set of hideous new insect-like legs were growing out of his back.
“Only if I miss.”
Mercury proceeded to start shooting at Ward, firing just as many shots as she put into Katryn, only with much more force. All of them went into the monstrous wizard’s chest but he barely seemed to acknowledge them. Finally, after the last of her bullets left the pistol, Ward extended his hand and drew her gun from her hands.
“Shit,” Mercury muttered, almost tripping over the corpse of a child.
Ward crushed the gun in his hand, dropping its useless fragments and pieces from between his hands. “You’ve killed my servants, destroyed my shoggoth, brought an army to my doorstep, and have come to kill me. In the shadow of Great Cthulhu’s idol, though, Father of the Elder Gods and First of the Great Old Ones, you can walk away.”
I stared at him, incredulous. “Walk away?”
“You murdered all these children!” Mercury said, stepping toward Katryn’s body.
“Murdered? What does that word even mean,” Ward said, scratching at his skin and pulling away a large chunk of it to reveal an armored surface underneath. “The world as we knew it was destroyed with the Rising and we are trapped merely in the shattered remnants of its dream. I set them free and placed them in a paradise. To live wondrous and free beyond the nightmare of this world.”
I stared at him. “They’re still dead.”
“And what about you, John?” Ward said, his face starting to crack. It looked like he was wearing a mask now and the horrible thing beneath him was starting to poke through. “Isn’t death preferable to what you are? Or is life, any kind of life, better? Humanity has had its day and now we both move onto the next stage of it.”
Mercury was hunched over Katryn’s body with my copy of the Necronomicon in her hands. It was a rather desperate ploy, especially with Ward standing right there, but I couldn’t blame for her for trying to do something.
“Mercury, throw me the spear.”
She didn’t even look up, tossing me Katryn’s weapon as I took it hand. It felt wrong, as if I was defiling her body to take it in hand. Still, if her angry ghost hated me for killing her, then I suspected she’d tolerate me taking revenge on her behalf.
“We are nothing alike,” I said, growling.
Ward’s body looked ready to fall apart, literally, and an extra set of arms burst out of his side, turning him into something I didn’t recognize. It was yet another alien creature, from Earth’s distant past or future, transforming what little human remained of the old wizard into something else.
“Are we?” Ward said, his voice becoming a guttural and monstrous thing which could barely produce human vocals. “We are both products of the magic we have worked, robbing us of what we treasured most to make ourselves something more. The only difference is I was born human while you were always a thing impersonating one of us. No different from that ghoul who desperately wanted to live among the apes his kind were born to feed upon.”
The last of Ward’s human body exploded to water, muscle, and flesh on the ground. The creature which stood in its place was almost twelve feet tall with a dozen spider-like legs sticking up from the main part of its body as the chestful of tongues transformed into a disgusting set of tubes on the bottom of its belly. The creature’s head emerged from the top of its shoulders, looking like some hideous combination of an ant’s with a crustacean’s. There was something still undeniably human about it, though.
Which made it all the more horrifying.
In the dismal, dark, alien portion of my mind I recognized the creature as the Zglaoth which existed on the surface of a world which had worshiped a Great Old One known as the Living Sun, a creature which had made a million-year pilgrimage to consume its world before setting itself toward other intelligent life-bearing worlds. This one, somehow, had been plucked from its extinct race’s fate before being physically, as well as mentally, bonded to Ward.
I almost pitied him.
Almost.
Hefting Katryn’s spear, I charged at the alien abomination only for the creature to send me flying across the room with a burst of kinetic force it generated through will alone. In my mind, I heard Ward’s mocking laughter and realized it was still him.
Mercury was struggling with the Necronomicon but another surge of alien energies flowed from Ward, and the corpses around her, hundreds of children murdered before their time, began to rise.
Fuck.
Ward’s mocking laughter filled my mind. “This is a pointless display. None of what you have done this day or before has mattered in the slightest. We dwell in a cosmic void stretching across infinity, full of terrible things which care nothing for humankind’s existence. When our former race perishes in the next six decades, there will be no one who remembers us with anything more than a passing interest. The Deep Ones, Ghouls, and Dreamwalkers will look back upon humanity as nothing more than an ugly, ill-formed race of weaklings. Like Homo sapiens did the Neanderthal, they will congratulate themselves on how well-evolved they were and never think it could happen to them.”
I knocked away three of the Reanimated children who caught fire once touched by Katryn’s spear and then a half-dozen others even as they huddled around Mercury but could not reach her, the doctor having used Katryn’s blood to draw a circle around herself. Somehow, she’d learned that bit of sorcery in the time it had taken to get the book and a few moments glancing at it. I would not have thought human blood would be able to hold the horde of Reanimated back but Katryn hadn’t been any more human than me.
Not really.
A berserk killing frenzy consumed me as I struck at the hundreds of attacking Reanimated around me. They were soulless, mindless, and empty. Whatever had been inside them had been ripped away, only to be replaced with fragments of Ward’s malignant will and hatred, but their state only fueled my fury. The spear staff functioned like a ball of fire which consumed the magic within them, seemingly strengthening it with every hit.
The chants of Azathoth once more filled my head as well as the haunting alien music existing at the heart of the universe. One of the older-looking Reanimated grabbed hold of my right arm before being joined by a half-dozen others, pulling on it with the strength only one of the dead could muster before ripping it clean away.
The blood poured out, only for it to turn into a hideous whip-like tentacle. I ignored my horrific transformation to begin swinging the spear with my left hand while slashing with my tentacle into the crowd of monstrous children.
“What …” Ward’s voice echoed in my mind, “are you?”
“Death!” I shouted, my voice sounding almost like Ward’s before I charged at him with spear and inhuman appendage … only for a flaming Elder Sign to appear in front of him, the hideous star causing me to back away as an irrational fear of its power filled my veins. The Elder Sign had been created by the Elder Things thousands of years ago, infused with the psychic power of their race, and then had been appropriated by those who worshiped the Great Old Ones as the Elder Gods. Ironically, a weapon formed to fight them.
It was now working on me and not Ward.
“Damn …” I said, feeling blood start to form in my mouth before I began throwing it up onto the ground as it poured out of my eyes, ears, and other orifices.
“I banish you creature of Nyarlathotep,” Ward said, chuckling. “You, spawn of the Great Old Ones, I shall send to the farthest reaches of the universe. You will dwell in the darkness and void forever alone until even insanity will be a welcome friend.”
That was when Ward’s psychic presence disappeared and there was only a terrible blankness around us. It was as if the room had been a terrible fire of light and energy, only to have that smothered in a wet blanket of some other force. The blood ceased to pour from my body even as the tentacle receded into my shoulder and human flesh grew over it.
Several feet away was Mercury, on her knees, reading from the Necronomicon as the remaining Reanimated struggled fruitlessly against her barrier. She was reciting a spell I did not recognize but was filled with a force which was every bit as powerful, if not more so, than Ward himself.
Hers was a bloodline which contained some ancient Atlantean, Mu, or Stygian which could channel magic every bit as much as a creature from another world. Even so, I could tell how the action was straining her. Her body was covered in sweat and the words she was forming with her mouth were obviously difficult. A single syllable misspoken could bring about her death.
Ward made a hideous series of noises which were nothing approaching English but whose intent was clear as he roared then skittered across the ground toward her. While Mercury’s barrier kept away the Reanimated, I somehow doubted it would be able to hold against the several tons of monster which was presently barreling down on her.
Spitting the last of the blood in my mouth to one side, I lifted up Katryn’s spear one last time and charged through the crowd of Reanimated children which made a few scattered attempts to claw at me. The spear slammed through the side of Ward, pushing out the other side, even as his entire body caught fire. A blue-white flame of other-dimensional energies exploded across the Zglaoth and it made noises enough to drive a man insane. Thankfully, I was well past the point of insanity and only cared that it killed him.
Which it did.
Several long seconds after the spear had been plunged into the monster’s heart, Ward’s frame collapsed to the ground and melted into an inky-black goo which I would not touch for all the food rations in New Arkham. Well, New Arkham before my enemy had destroyed it. The Reanimated collapsed to the ground around me, grabbing their heads and convulsing while Ward burned, only returning to death with his final demise. It was almost comical, some of the moves they made.
And then, finally, there was silence.
The Necromancer was dead.
Mercury ceased her chant and collapsed, dropping the book on the ground. “Okay, remind me never to do magic again.”
“I don’t think that will be a problem,” I whispered.
Mercury slowly crawled to her feet, clutching the Necronomicon against her chest. “John, the things I saw you do—”
“I’m sorry.”
Mercury said, “I don’t care.”
“What?” I asked.
She walked over and dropped the book before clutching me. “Just promise me we’ll pretend to be human from now on.”
“I promise.”
I looked over at the glowing white orb in the Cthulhu idol’s hands. It was glowing even brighter now and I saw Ward’s soul was now imprisoned within. He was living the life of a human scientist in the 19th century. He had a wife, children, and an entire circle of friends all conjured from his dreams. The perfect heaven for a man who wanted nothing more than to be in absolute control of his destiny—it was close to my hell.
Oh and Katryn’s body was missing now.
Lovely.
“What do we do about Jessica?” Mercury said, looking over at Jessica’s fallen form. She still hadn’t awakened from her dream.
I looked down at her and found myself staring into her blank, expressionless eyes. Her face, however, was covered in a beatific smile. My mind had opened to new possibilities with the awareness of its inhuman nature, so I attempted to look inside her mind. It opened up for me like a flower to the sun.
Inside, I saw her with her husband and children. They were in a still-standing New Arkham, living a life where peace and democracy had been restored by the General’s ascension to President. The R&E Rangers went out on missions but no one died, and it was the beginning of a new age for humanity. I was there, with Anita, Martha, Mercury, Stephens, Parker, Garcia, and others.
An impossible dream.
But a beautiful one.
“Take her with us,” I said. “We’ll keep her until she wakes up.”
“And if she doesn’t?”
I closed my eyes. “We let her dream.”
To be continued in:
THE TOWER OF ZHAAL
The Cthulhu Armageddon Series, Book Two