Tales of the Unquiet Gods (19 page)

Pat knew he should be terrified - and part of him was, a bit - but he'd spent long enough as walking wounded that the absence of pain brightened his entire outlook. He simply reveled in feeling good. He wanted to dance, and quelled the urge to whirl Melody around. He settled for flashing a smile over his shoulder at her. Her eyes widened in response, and he started to think they might actually make it to see the sunrise.

The unholy chanting grew louder as they approached the hole clawed in the side of the tunnel. Pat looked at the spot where the monster hit the tunnel. Cracks radiated out from the point of impact, and powdered concrete dust drifted in the dank air. On the floor, furrows marred the opening, and Pat pointed them out. It would be easy to twist an ankle. Melody nodded, never ceasing her song.

They slipped into the rough-hewn tunnel side by side, to the unpleasant accompaniment of the ongoing ceremony. The garbled words didn't split Pat's skull the same way Aram's commands had, however, and he eyed his petite companion. Melody had drawn her penny-whistle from whatever pocket she kept it. She held it before her like some holy symbol, keeping her other hand on the rough wall. Pat silently resolved to do whatever he could to ensure her song continued.

They moved down the passage until they came to a doorway of hewn stone. The string of safety lamps ended there, with the last one hung to illuminate the door. At some point in the distant past, someone had carved a set of symbols that made Pat's eyes water. Except for four at the corner that read "1926." So much for the distant past.

Pressed for time as they were, Pat took a moment to snap a picture of the carved doorway. Assuming they lived through the night, it would almost certainly be useful.

They passed through the doorway into a small room constructed of sharp-edged, tight-fitting stones. Much like the doorway itself. The room was lit by a pairs of torches, to set to either side of the portal in which they stood. A stairway down opened in the middle of the room. Reliefs adorned the walls, hideous things of debauchery and human sacrifice. On both of the side walls, inhuman abominations much like the one presumably below them strode through cities of bizarre architecture toward a point over the staircase on the wall opposite Pat and Melody.

There, a carved globe of the earth formed the arch of the doorway down, and over it a stone sea monster of gargantuan proportions heaved itself from stone waves. A master had made the room, but he must have been mad. He'd perfectly captured ancient cruelty in the god-beast's grotesque face, the hunger as one of its many heads devoured a tiny human form. Pat shuddered.

14

The chanting, clearer than before, echoed up out of the stairwell. Pat took a deep breath pushed out with the senses he'd been given. The familiar wrongness welled up from below them, but the only thing Pat really sensed was the space around him, and then the stone that made up the walls. He pushed past those to a bewildering mix of substances that set his mind reeling. With a start, he pulled back, gasping for breath. Melody looked a question at him, but kept singing.

Once Pat got his breathing back under control, he tried again. He narrowed his focus, pushing downward. He sent his senses down the stairs, following the tunnel as it curved into a tight spiral. He gained confidence as he went, feeling how he could follow the empty space, and stop feeling at the point where his ethereal sense encountered the stone walls of the passage.

For about two full turns of the spiral. It was as though he'd hit a wall, and couldn't feel anything past it. Up to that point sense the fit of the stones in the floor and walls. He even felt the tracks in the dust, but at that point, his new sense of things faded out completely. It was like trying to stare through thick fog, or a soot blackened window. There was something past it, but he didn't know what.

Pat pulled back until all he knew was what he saw, smelled, heard. He took a deep breath and closed his eyes. With every bit of himself he could muster, Pat pushed at that obscuring barrier, to the point where his head throbbed with the effort. At last, he came back to himself, to find Melody shaking him.

He leaned against the stone door jamb sucking air. Sweat trickled down his face, and when he wiped at his nose, his hand came away red. Melody glared at him. Pat was making a habit of angering her.

He heaved himself off the jamb, and almost fell over as his vision of the world split and warped. After a brief moment, the double vision realigned. In its wake, a pounding thud took residence just behind Pat's eyes.

"Oops."

Melody nodded her agreement, eyes narrowing in irritation, and shifted her song to one slightly languid. Pat's sudden headache eased slightly, and he smiled his thanks before walking down the stairs. She followed tight on his heels.

As they moved downward, the echoing chant grew clearer. Some trick of the construction turned the spiraling tunnel into a stone megaphone. With the knowledge that someone in the modern era had built at least the antechamber, Pat suspected the effect was intentional. At cardinal points around the central column of the spiral, more torches lit the way.

Throughout their descent, Pat kept his new spatial sense active, though well within the limits he'd painfully discovered. The staircase was really more of a ramp, as each stair wasn't more than a couple of inches high. Something else strange preyed on Pat's mind as they walked. The curves felt wrong. Off, as though they should have been steeper, but weren't. He shook it off and kept moving.

They passed through another arched doorway at the bottom of the spiraling staircase, this one blessedly free of mind-bending carvings, and entered a long room, oddly shaped room. Doorway opened up all along the wall, though upon investigation, they proved to be empty. Thankfully. Pat didn't want to face any more whacked out cultists than he absolutely had to.

Pat stopped in his tracks and cast about him. Something was off, wrong: he just couldn't quite tell what it was. Like an itch he almost felt. With a deep breath, and a quick prayer, he closed his eyes and pushed out with his new sense. The room was off. Lines curved when they should have run straight, and walls leaned in at angles that didn't make sense. When he pushed through the stone walls, his mind nearly cracked. On the other side stood dirt and rock and the remains of a civilization, and at the same time and occupying the same space, something both living and dead. And it knew he was there, as an elephant knew when a fly landed on it.

Pat's eyes sprang open, and he looked to Melody. Whatever she saw there lit a spark of fear in her azure eyes, a mirror of the sheer, atavistic terror that burrowed into Pat's bones.

"This whole place -" His voice cracked. Pat swallowed to ease his fear-parched throat and somehow forced words through his clenched jaws. "There's something - here. Something big. All around this place. Almost, like it's a part of it. We need to hurry."

Melody nodded, and Pat was impressed as she continued her soft singing. Together they turned toward the sound of the increasingly frenzied chanting coming out of one of the closer doorways.

As they approached, Pat saw the short passageway led into a cavernous room. Torches lit the sinister hallows with flickering flames that cast dancing shadows. The dimly lit space seemed filled with twisted pillars stone, all serpentine curves and sharp edges. Even as he moved, it seemed the pillars did, too. It quickly grew hard to gauge depth and distance.

They were lucky: they'd seen nobody in the disquieting temple. And a temple it was. Everything about it screamed place of worship. A twisted, evil sort of worship; worship of something horrific and unknowably cruel.

Pat slipped around a pillar and saw that getting noticed wasn't going to be a problem. just inside the pillars sat a crowd of people about Melody's age. Pat estimated no more than twenty, probably students by their dress, they sat in poses from rapt to bored. Pat marked that none of them bore the monstrous Iaphneths. Those were no doubt reserved for the chanters at the front of the sanctuary.

The half dozen celebrants in the room stood facing away from the entrance. Each one wore a deeply cowled garment covered in embroidered symbols that shrouded them from head to toe. They stood in a line at the front of the youths while a seventh figure stood in front of the black pool from Pat's nightmares. The leader of the unholy communion wore a robe like the others, but his head was bare, and Pat recognized Aram even though his back was turned.

Between them, on her back in the center of the ritual circle he remembered, struggled a young woman. Shackles held her arms over her head and her unclothed legs apart, and the monstrous eel-headed creature stood over her, vitriolic slime dripping from its open mouth. Pat remembered what Aram had said about Carla "being blessed for bearing the first of the New Ones."

The hooded figures twitched and writhed in their places. Pat's saw their robes squirming across the shoulders and his stomach turned again. Under each, he knew, lurked the clawed tentacular Iaphneth. Their hideous chanting rolled through the corrupt and darkened fane, and the crustaceous beast twitched in time to its rhythms.

An odd popping noise underlay the unholy scene. It wasn't until a chunk of the monster's chitinous plating fell off that Pat found its source. The thing was shedding its carapace, like some gargantuan insect. As he crept closer, Pat saw pale, pearlescent slime bubbling at the thing's serpentine neck.

In unison, the cowled celebrants lifted their arms, their chant rising to a fevered climax. With a roar, they wrenched their arms down to their sides. The figures slumped in fatigue, but Pat found his gaze locked on the creature. It's elongated head writhed on the column of its neck, fanged jaws snapping at the air. The popping noise increasing in volume and frequency, until it sounded like a machine gun. At last, the creature's armored hide disintegrated and sloughed off in a mass of purple shards.

As one, the young witnesses froze, and Melody gasped, shocked into silence. Pat couldn't fault them. The figure left behind only vaguely resembled the hulking arthropoid it had been a moment earlier.

Muscles writhed and bulged under the same blueish gray skin that covered its still-bestial head, the whole dripping with the slime of its horrific rebirth. It looked more manlike - though that wasn't hard - with its previously massive claws transformed into four long, opposable fingers. Its recurved legs now matched its arms in length, and as it rose to an alarming new height, a massive, barbed phallus depended from its groin.

Pat grimly raised his pistol, uncertain it would even help. At least the thing wasn't wearing an inch of armor anymore. Before he could squeeze the trigger, Aram turned around.

His robe was open to the waist, clearly displaying the horrific Iaphneth around his neck. He'd decayed from athletic-looking young student in the time since Pat had last seen him. He looked emaciated, his ribs standing out clearly under unhealthily gray skin.

The vile creature controlling the man, on the other hand, looked much like the one that had possessed Pat when it first cracked out of its egg. Fleshy tendrils the color of an ideal peaches-and-cream complexion wriggled on Aram's skeletal chest, interspersed with nightmarish, cherry-red claws halfway between fingers and a crab's legs.

The unholy combination of man and monster raised a bony finger to point right at Pat, and in a voice louder than he should have been able to manage, spoke.

"Apostate!"

Aram roared in his incomprehensible tongue, and froze Pat where he stood.

"You reject our fellowship, and then come to take what is ours by might? Our Mother will consume your soul for this affront!"

As a unit, the robed celebrants turned to face them, and Pat's mind nearly shut down. Mike had described what he'd looked like under the control of the Iaphneth Tourney killed, but Pat had pushed it away, suppressed it in the same way he'd tried to forget portions of that dark time.

Each of the robed figures bore an Iaphneth, and each had his or her head thrown back. Each horror thrust a muscular stalk out its host's mouth, grossly distending throats and jaws to the point of breaking, while tendrils and claws writhed around necks.

Pat wanted desperately to fall into a fetal curl, screaming at the horror facing him. A small, minuscule part of him, however, roared in the silence of his soul. All that he'd faced, all the Aram-Iaphneth and its pet monster had done to him, all that they still planned, and the weight of that horribly alien presence he'd felt. Everything that dreadful master of theirs wanted with its pawns and its tools and its victims.

All of it stopped now.

Pat raised his gun and centered the sights on Aram's furious face. The puppet shouted incomprehensible words that drove spike of pain through his head. His hands shook so much he couldn't aim properly, and Pat took his finger off the trigger for fear of shooting an innocent.

The hooded Iaphneth pawns spread out, moving through the small crowd of still-frozen witnesses. Pat took a momentary break in the agonizing incantations to duck behind a pillar, and saw Melody put her pipe to her mouth. Her song soothed the pain in his head and stilled his trembling hands. She looked at him and nodded. She'd been right, and Pat was going to apologize first thing, assuming they survived.

He spun around the other side of the pillar bare feet from one of the Iaphneth. The thing's horrible proboscis lunged toward him, fangs snapping. Pat whipped his gun up and squeezed the trigger, more by reflex than intention. The suppressor converted what should have been a deafening roar into a loud coughed, and the compact pistol sent a golden, glowing bullet through the thing's jagged-toothed maw.