Songs_of_the_Satyrs (31 page)

There was a pressure against his back, rough and smooth at the same time. It was warm—no, hot . . . terribly hot. Something wet and agile dabbed the length of his neck and he jerked forward, his shoulder connecting painfully with the doorframe. As he turned, he caught a glimpse of something lithe and feminine dashing past him on ghostly hooves, out into the backyard.

Curiosity warred with other, baser desires; but Carter followed, stepping out into the wet night, trampling ancient wisdom beneath his bare feet. Warren was, of course, already there.

Carter’s friend stood among the sword-bladed palmettos, chest bared to the rain and the dark, arms spread as if in benediction.

“H—Harley?” Carter said.

Warren turned. His eyes were dark slits. “Can you feel it, Carter? The path is opening just for us.”

“Path?” Carter said. “What path?”

A trill of laughter slithered through the rain and rustle of leaves. A shape moved through the shadows between the trees. Carter spun, but for some reason his eyes could not focus on the house only a few feet away. Fingers played in his hair and down his spine, eliciting a shiver from him.

Warren was still speaking. “Horned god, Ms. Murray? No, no I think not,” he said, his words tripping over one another. “Not a god of fertility but a goddess of fecundity, eh Carter?”

“What?”

Warren whirled, grabbing Carter’s face almost tenderly, his fingers caressing the edges of Carter’s eyes. He hauled the other man around and stood close behind him. “Look! Look at her!”

Carter looked. She swayed beneath the trees, balancing on cloven hooves, her fingers trailing across the bark of the palmettos. Lush vines of kudzu slid across her skin as she stepped forward. Rainwater rolled across the smooth curves of her heavy breasts and down the flat pane of her stomach before disappearing into the hairy recesses between her oddly jointed legs. Arms stretched above her horned head, she thrust her hips forward, one leg placed in front of the other.

A sound like music trickled from her full lips, teasing Carter’s ears and sending a pleasant sensation along his spine. Her head nodded in time to some distant harmony and her pearly horns sliced through the rain, the tips catching and flicking drops in a shimmering halo.

“What is she?” Carter whispered.

“I’m not sure,” Warren replied, his voice hoarse. “I hadn’t quite expected to encounter her so soon, but, then, it has been several weeks since . . .”

“Since what, Warren?” Carter asked.

“Since she was last sated,” Warren said, shoving him forward. Carter stumbled to his knees, eyes wide.

“Warren, what—” he began, his fear pulsing through him in quivering spurts.

“Sorry, old boy. I’m not the one she wants. I tried my best, but, well, you know women.”

“No!” Carter said. He tried to get to his feet as the dancing hooves brought the she-thing closer to him.

But Warren’s iron grip held him down on all fours. “No? Then it’s time you learned,” he murmured.

Carter struggled ineffectually as the goat smell washed over him, hot and perfumed. He twisted his head, but slim fingers tangled in his hair and wrenched his face up. Music splashed across the surface of his mind as she spoke and Warren released him, stepping back.

“She’s as old as time, Carter. All sin and fire. She demands nothing that no man is unwilling to give. Life unbridled, unbound. The old woman of Briggs’ Hill was her priestess, her prophetess, and the men of Zoar her secret shameful worshippers, delivering her nightly offerings.”

Warren’s voice faded into silence, and Carter could hear him stepping back and away. Another voice took his place.

It whispered, “
IA
. . . ,” as the she-thing pulled Carter to his feet; her features were blurred, all save for those eyes, eyes that burned into his and filled him with a painful heat. He staggered forward, clutching at the smooth flesh. His fingertips sizzled as he touched her, and she flowed into him, teeth nipping at his earlobe. A twisting, turning tongue squirmed across his bare chest, trailing glistening strands of saliva in strange burning patterns.

“
IA—IA
. . .”

She was known by many names . . . Ishtar and Hathor, Astarte and Cybele, the black she-goat who yearned only for man’s love in the form of seed and blood. Her names skidded across his stumbling mind, insinuating themselves into his consciousness even as her fingers and tongue probed his flesh.

“
IA SHUB-NIGGURATH
. . .”

His breath came in stifled gasps as he reached up and took her horns, yanking her closer. Her pelvis ground into his, and he could feel the coarse brown hair of her lower extremities through his pajamas. The hairs seemed to curl and convulse as they tore his pants like thorns.

Clawed fingers descended, cloth ripped, and he was naked. Head thrown back, he writhed stiffly as she slid down him, her voice drowning out his thoughts, her touch plucking his nerves.

He wanted to pull away, to flee, but neither his mind nor his body was his own. A skirl of distant pipes sounded beneath the rumble of thunder. Her teeth flashed as she dragged them gently across his belly.

Carter gasped as she seized him, and a moan escaped his throat. He felt as if he were burning from within, and his body moved on instinct. She turned, her claws leaving bloody trails across his arms and chest, and sank forward, her horns dipping in readiness.

As the rain pelted down, Carter took her, and her voice changed in pitch, scratching joyfully at his soul. Somewhere, buried beneath the lust and inflamed hormones, his mind shrieked at the obscene nature of the congress.

“Carter . . .” Warren’s voice tugged at him.

What had Warren said before? Was this what had afflicted the men of Zoar in the night?

Hooves dug into the ground as they strained together. Her claws flashed, tearing at him.

“Carter!” Warren said again.

Pain swept over him and his eyes sprang open.

“Carter! Damn it! Carter, WAKE UP!”

Carter tried to focus, but something blocked his vision and bound his limbs. He realized he was still in bed, still fully clothed. Something indescribably foul crouched on his chest. He tried to scream and caught sight of Warren standing over him, face twisted in an expression of horror and disgust.

Strange syllables were fired like bullets from Warren’s lips, and the undulating, goatish mass uttered a shrill, inhuman shriek in response. It expanded and contracted like a plume of smoke, twisting in on itself as if weightless, yet somehow managing to keep Carter pinned in place.

He thrashed, trying to free himself. Warren grabbed his arm and thrust his free hand forward, stiffened fingers carving sigils on the humid air. As Warren yanked Carter off of the bed, the shapeless thing cycled up and around and spilled past them, still shrieking.

“What—what—what—” Carter babbled.

“A few choice phrases of mimetic verse I learned from a friend in Tibet, enough to shatter the thing’s link to your subconscious.” Warren pulled Carter to his feet. “Are you hurt?”

“No. No. What was that?”

“Something unpleasant, come on,” Warren said, heading downstairs. Carter followed him on shaky legs.

“I saw it, but it wasn’t like that, it was . . .” Carter shook his head, trying to put his dream into words. “What was it?”

“A remnant of an older time, something—ah,” Warren said. The wooden icon of Shub-Niggurath sat where he’d left it on his desk. “A memory of a ghost of a thing,” he said as he picked up the statuette gingerly and carried it toward the fireplace. “I had hoped to add this to my collection, but obviously it’s still dangerous, even with its owner’s passing.”

“You—you knew?” Carter hissed. His skin crawled as Warren started a fire.

“I suspected. But I hoped it would come for me, as opposed to you. Unfortunately, you’re a much stronger dreamer than either of us gave you credit for.”

The fire blazed to life and Warren tossed the image into it. “There. That should do it.”

The woman shape seemed to twist and turn in an attempt to escape the flames, and Carter felt a stab of something inside him.

The dream hung heavy on his mind, and he could taste the salt of her kisses and feel the rough press of her limbs. Part of him yearned to dive headlong into that fireplace and rescue the thing. Then, the wood cracked and blackened, emitting a shrill whine that might have contained a trace of music in it—but, then again, perhaps not.

Regardless, Randolph Carter shuddered and looked away.

The wooden door had swollen in the rain and the paint, once bright yellow, had peeled away, leaving large patches of streaked bare wood. He pushed hard and it grudgingly opened. A thick odor descended upon him, the same one that seemed to linger in every secondhand record shop he had been in: an acrid mixture of patchouli, sandalwood, and sweat. Except that this one had another sharp tang to it, really rich and rank: French cigarettes, he guessed, like those fat cylinders of black tobacco he’d once smoked himself.

He nodded at the counter. He hardly needed to look to know who would be there. They were nearly always the same: men with gray flesh that seldom saw daylight, a large never-quite-white T-shirt from concerts ten years ago, and an unbarbered beard, often full of crumbs. There was also something grave and slow about them, as if they lived in a world where time went on differently, a dimension that only existed in these sorts of shops.

He’d lost count of how many he must’ve been in. There were a lot less than there used to be. Most weekends, he’d take a train or bus to some obscure provincial town, work through the market stalls, junk shops, and charity shops (hard work in its way, and usually for nothing much), and keep a look out for any surviving record shops. They were usually in back streets and had names like Rock of Ages, Second Spin, Wax Works, or simply, for the less imaginative, Bob’s Records.

He’d started young, when he was seventeen, and all his friends were buying disco records or painting themselves up for the New Romance. They didn’t call to him: what did were the heady days of the sixties (which also happened a lot in the early seventies, but time was never neat like that). He loved the hazy psychedelic albums, with their cover designs of flowers, pixies, and mushrooms; the spaced-out drones from primitive synthesizers or mishandled sitars, with their images of deep, star-strewn space; the triple gatefold concept albums about Nirvana, Arcadia, Atlantis, and other way-out places. They were well out of fashion when he began collecting them, and he bought boxfuls for a few shillings each. But now their rarity, even more than their weird qualities, was much better understood, and it was desperately hard to find anything out of the way or unheard of. He still followed his rite of visiting distant little towns, but it was as if the search itself was now as important to him as the finding. It had become just what he did.

He began to thumb through the racks of musty, dog-eared albums in the Rock section, starting properly at
A
and working his way through the letters one by one. Flip, flip, flip, the tired old titles he always saw, making his spirits sink. By the time he got to
D
, that creeping sense of despair had begun to steal over him. What was he doing in this draughty, smelly shop, what was he doing in this dingy, sodden town, what was he doing with his life even, on his own in a rundown rusty caravan without wheels, hidden in the corner of a nestle-infested field, hooked up to an uncertain power supply? The collection was better housed than he was. It had a shed to itself, from which he would fetch records to play, alone at night. Or he would play Record Roulette: roll a dice, count the albums from the number thrown, and you must play that. All the way through. Then roll again and start where you left off . . .

He realized his fingers were flipping automatically, and he wasn’t looking at the sleeves. He stopped, sighed, and let his arms drop to his sides. And then he did something that he never did, or hardly ever, only if the bus or train was due and he had to hurry. He skipped over the letters and went straight to the place where he really wanted to look, under
S
. He stood in front of it, the section that was always the biggest, and he stared, as if willing it to hold what he wanted, the rarest album ever, the mythical work he had never seen.

He stretched his pale hand out slowly, as if he were taking part in some ritual, because he practically was. Then, very carefully, he drew the stacked records toward him, one by one.

It wasn’t a bad selection. Sublunar was here, those cosmic travellers; Stray Horse, the country band; Swiftwillow, the dreamy folkies; Saturn Temple, the overlords of occult gloom; and . . . and . . .

He froze.

His fingers stopped, and he swallowed. He hardly dared to look properly. But it was there, all right:
Goat Songs
by Satyr. He had seen enough pictures of the album to know it at a glance. The title and the band’s name were done in curled lettering, all adorned with thorns, and there was a painting showing an English lawn, with croquet hoops, flower beds, a fold-up chair and table, and a jug of lemonade. A Tudorish sort of house could dimly be seen in the background. A girl’s straw hat lay negligently on the grass, as if it had been thrown aside. There were shrubs of laurel in a virulent green, and topiary cut into curious swirling shapes, not quite rooted to the ground.

Despite the title of the album, he knew that there would be no goat or mythical creature to be seen, just the placid, genteel garden vista. Except if you looked carefully, and he was looking very carefully now, there they were, right by the edges of the shrubs, a pattering of marks in the grass: the marks of cloven hoofs. And, trailing through the bushes, fading off into the edge of the picture, was a pink ribbon such as a girl might wear about her, like a sash.

He stared at the album cover as if he could will himself into the scene. None of the blurry reproductions he had viewed in collectors’ magazines or guides did it justice. They were no more than a gray ghost of the full eerie splendor he now saw before him. He stole a glance at the guy behind the counter, who was ruminating over a crossword and taking no notice of him. He stood in front of the album a few seconds longer, as if to preserve the precious moment. Then, with gentle delicacy, he reached slightly forward and enticed it into his fingers, as casually as he could.