I walked down the halls of Miskatonic University’s lone functioning above-ground building, which was primarily a garage and storage area from what I could observe. The windows were all boarded up and there was electrical lighting spread throughout, but I could sense an air of apprehension as I passed by rooms where people worked on assembling machine parts for their transports.
It might have been Marcus’s treason or the presence of outsiders, but I suspected there was something else to it. A look at them constantly fidgeting and staring at the windows as well as ceiling, I got the impression they were upset about being above ground. They’d become used to the claustrophobic environment below.
I wasn’t interested in them, though. Instead I focused on finding Jackie to explain my reasoning for wanting her to be here. Truth be told, I wasn’t sure why I’d been so insistent on getting her a life here given that I trusted the University’s residents about as far as I could throw them. Actually, depending on which arm I used, I could probably throw them pretty far, so I trusted them much less.
I forced those thoughts away and continued onward after Jackie and Jessica. I confess, it surprised me that Mercury didn’t follow, but it was probably a good thing she was distracting Professor Armitage and the others. This entire venture, which had begun with murder and would almost certainly end with it, was getting worse every minute.
I didn’t know if our ragtag band of outlaws was supposed to succeed in finding Marcus Whateley, but I intended to make a game effort of it. If nothing else, I wanted to know whether or not the scattered few survivors of the Earth’s races were really in danger or if it was just an extra means of motivating us.
I could tell you, I heard the distant whisper of Nyarlathotep in my ear. You’d have to believe I’m always with you, though.
I’m hallucinating you, nothing more, I said. The gods of the Dreamlands have better things to do than harass mere mortals.
That’s the benefit of being infinite, John, Nyarlathotep chuckled. I can be with everyone and everything.
Lies.
If you wish.
My denial was a weak defense, and I thought about how Mercury might react to the knowledge that not only was I transforming in terms of my physical body, but also mentally. I was haunted by visions of Azathoth’s court, the strange creatures that existed beyond the paper-thin walls of reality, and occasionally the words of the Other Gods’ messenger. Nyarlathotep was the Son to Azathoth’s Father and Yog-Sothoth’s Holy Spirit. Ever since my branding with his sign and my summoning him in the Dreamlands, I was linked to him, and he seemed all too eager to comment on my accursed situation. Assuming any of it was real at all and not just my hallucinating.
Everything you can dream is real. It is the belief you can escape those dreams to reality that is the illusion.
Then Nyarlathotep’s voice was gone and I was once more alone with my thoughts.
For the moment.
I found Jackie and Jessica in a room full of old boxes, scrap, and machinery a few minutes later. Jackie was sitting in a corner talking to the woman I had once called friend and was doing my very best to hate. Jessica had her arm around Jackie and I was reminded of better times, times when our artificial family wasn’t at each other’s throats.
As if to underscore my weakening sanity, I was no longer inside Miskatonic University’s crumbling ruins. Instead, I found myself under the blazing blue sun of the Earth as a dozen tents and stands stood around me. I had stepped several months into the past, when the Carnevil had shown up outside of the Kingsport.
The Carnevil was perhaps the world’s last circus and contained performers, captured monsters, gladiators, and games for those who were willing to indulge them. For a populace jaded by causal horrors and monsters, it was a source of unusual horrors and creatures. Mutants, obscenities, and farces all for a piece of copper or steel. I’d heard some nasty rumors about the strange collection of entertainers from witch-haunted Salem, but if I believed every sordid tale of missing children or murder then no one would be innocent.
Besides, Jackie had wanted to go.
Stunned by my sudden change of circumstances, I saw the quartet of myself, Jackie, Jessica, and Mercury moving down the path between two shooting galleries and the haunted house. Ducking behind a booth where one bobbed for apples in exchange for five pieces, I tried to guess whether or not this was a hallucination.
And failed.
The memory I saw from an outsider’s perspective was as crisp and perfect as if it were really happening, but that meant nothing from an alien mind that was somehow linked to the ups and downs of time. Was I simply looking back on my past, or was I able to move, like Yog-Sothoth, back and forth through time? I suspected the answer, like so much in this world, was whatever was most horrifying.
Still, I watched.
“I remember this day,” I muttered.
The quartet were in front of a plastic duck pond and I got a good look at them. I wore a duster and Stetson, so did Jessica, while Mercury wore a white dress and headscarf with shaded glasses. Jackie had on a pair of faded shorts, a patched t-shirt, and a headband. She was reading a nearly pristine comic book I’d recovered from a Boston ruin. It depicted a black-robed wizard of some kind and a vampiress fighting a gigantic eye with multiple tentacles. The comic was called MERCILESS: THE SUPERVILLAIN WITHOUT MERCY and had been published sometime in the 1960s.
“Enjoying your book?” my other self asked, uninterested in the sequential art.
“Yeah,” Jackie said. “Though I was wondering why all of the aliens look human.”
“Humanity didn’t know what aliens looked like back then,” Mercury said. “Real aliens have nothing in common with people from Earth.”
Jackie blinked. “Then how do so many alien-human hybrids exist? I mean, John has child—”
My other self coughed. “Perhaps you shouldn’t bring that up.”
Jackie frowned and looked at her comic. “People were a lot more tolerant in the old days. The guy in the comics had an alien ex-girlfriend.”
Mercury and I exchanged a look before I looked away. I still had faith my human side would triumph back then. It was still months of failure and increasing growth from the horror bound to me. Months that would slowly wear away any hope I had of being anything other than another creature preying on mankind.
I still had hope then.
“So, you want to get some cotton candy?” my other self asked.
“You shouldn’t give her anything but a bullet to the head,” a gruff growling voice spoke nearby.
My family turned to address the voice. It came from a thick, square Caucasian man with most of his hair lost from M-Rads in the Wasteland. He was dressed in a thick coat, ammo belt, and two large pistols by his side. Beside him was a lanky tall man of Indian descent who was carrying a rifle. The latter had his cheeks badly deformed from a bullet that had luckily passed through the sides of his mouth, hitting nothing important.
“Excuse me, sir?” my other self asked.
“I can smell the monster on her,” the Caucasian man said. “She has no place here among human children.”
Jessica’s hand moved down to her pistol while I could tell Mercury had a spell on her lips. My other self placed my hands in front of both and shook his head. “Not here.”
“You are mistaken, sir,” my other self said. The other John did not want a fight and was trying to avoid killing more people. It was a way to keep a hold on his humanity. A noble but futile endeavor. There was a practical element to it, too, though. None of us wanted to offend the Carnevil’s owners or disrupt Jackie’s day.
“I know monsters,” the Caucasian man said. “I know those who bring them here are monsters.”
“Do you want us to leave?” Jessica asked.
“I want you to—” the Caucasian man started to say, reaching for his gun.
“How much?” my other self asked, the threat of murdering my daughter obliterating any of my earlier hesitation about killing them.
“What?” the Caucasian man stopped.
“How much to just go?” I said. “We have gold.”
The Caucasian man and his Indian friend exchanged a glance. “Everything you got.”
My other self nodded and gestured to a nearby tent.
They followed.
He nodded to Jessica.
I remembered we’d murdered them there, stored the bodies, and paid a price to a ghoul who was working behind the scenes.
Jackie hadn’t felt like playing at the carnival afterward.
A second later and I was once more in the present, staring down at those two. It was a reminder of just how far I’d fallen. I didn’t regret having murdered the two weasels, but I knew it had been my own self-hatred that had driven Jessica to do what she’d done. Jessica would have stood by me through the change even if it had gotten her killed. Instead, she’d thought she’d been doing me a favor by trying to give me the mercy kill I wanted but stubborn pride kept me from asking for. Walking down the basement steps, I approached them both.
“John, this—” Jessica started to say.
“Give me a moment with her,” I said.
“John—” Jessica said.
“Please.” I closed my eyes. “We’ll talk later.”
I remembered her soft touch and the feel of her body against mine. Jessica and I had been friends for a very long time, almost siblings, but I’d always wondered what it would be like to be with her. Now our friendship was as much ruined by that as by her betrayal. I hated her, wanted her, resented her, and missed her all in one go. There was also the fact that the monster inside me was like much of the Mythos and craved physical contact. I feared it wanted to take her and Mercury to sire a host of monsters. I feared it had done the same with my children back in New Arkham whom I had never contacted to inform of their dark true nature. Maybe the transformation wouldn’t affect them without the Hand of Nyarlathotep branded to their shoulders, or maybe it would skip a few generations.
Either way, I was a coward.
Jessica looked down, then exchanged a look with Jackie. “All right.”
My ex-partner walked past me and I didn’t have the decency to look her in the eye.
When she’d left the room, Jackie looked up to me. “You should really forgive her, Pa.”
“It’s complicated, Jackie,” I said.
“You mean because you fucked her and she tried to kill you?” Jackie asked.
I frowned, noting she was a more observant girl than I’d given her credit for. “You shouldn’t use that sort of language, Jackie. Your Old Pa wouldn’t have approved.”
“My Old Pa also said not to whore, drink, or kill people, which you and Mercury do all the time. I have dog ears; I’m always hearing things from your bedroom which would make the people of my hometown blush.”
I grimaced. “I actually don’t drink anymore. I can drink paint thinner without being poisoned.”
“Not really a defense, Pa.”
She had a point there.
I looked away. “I don’t forgive easily.”
“Is it so bad being a monster?” Jackie asked. “You always tell me not to be ashamed, but I know you hate what you are.”
I grimaced, knowing how hypocritical I was being. “It’s not the physical changes I fear, Jackie. It’s the mental. I know ghouls and they are a decent, if slightly peculiar, race. I do not know what I am becoming, but it terrifies me it is not the kind of thing that would recognize you and the others of my family.”
I was lying about the physical changes not frightening me, but that didn’t make the rest of my statement untrue. I had a hideous vision in my head of metamorphosing into something horrifying that would kill those I loved.
“Maybe you won’t,” Jackie said. “Maybe you won’t randomly start worshiping Azathoth and Nyarlathotep or Yoggy-Sathoth. Maybe you’ll just be you.”
I was tempted to tell her that I already heard from Nyarlathotep on a regular basis. That he was the angel and demon on my shoulder. That I did worship that Dark Trinity, Cthulhu, and other gods in my dreams even as I held to the Old Gods of Earth in my waking hours.
“Maybe I would be,” I lied.
“Why are you abandoning me here, Pa?” Jackie said. “What did I do?”
“We’re not abandoning you,” I said. “We would never abandon you.”
“You leave me alone in the city when you go caravanning now. I run the shop just fine.”
I grimaced, really disliking how this conversation kept turning against me. The truth was we’d only just started leaving Jackie alone after her latest growth spurt. Some of the men in the caravan had determined she was old enough to lie with and either wanted to buy or take her. “It was complicated.”
“You decided I was safer back in a city of horse thieves and murderers versus with you, two people who’d kill anyone who touched me.”
I frowned. “You’re really highlighting that I’m a shit parent.”
“Not a shit parent, but a bit challenged.”
I gave short chuckle. “The answer is I didn’t want you to see me when I finally became the creature that might not recognize you. I feel like I’m dying, Jackie, a little at a time. I want you taken care of. They’d accept Mercury here as well.”
I wasn’t actually sure of that but as today had established, I was a horrible liar and a craven.
Jackie stared. “It all comes back to that, doesn’t it?”
“Not entirely,” I said, thinking about what was to come. “Mercury and I are going on a very dangerous journey. One that is probably going to get us killed. We have a chance of doing something great, though, and maybe saving a lot of lives.”
“You’ve said any person who tries to be a hero in this hellhole of a world is a damned fool.”
“You pay way too much attention,” I said.
“Dog ears,” Jackie said, giving her right one a tug.
I snorted. “Either way, I want you to be safe while we’re gone and there to be someone who takes care of you if we’re not there.”
“What about Jessica?”
“She’s going too.”
Jackie seemed to accept that. “All right, I understand.”
“Thank you.”
“You should still forgive Jessica, though.”
I didn’t answer as we walked back to prepare for our trip.
We had a lot of miles to cover and precious little time to tread them.