PYRATE CTHULHU - Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos (vol.2) Read online

  My gun scatters. I scrabble at her, coughing and choking, trying to pry her off me. She seizes my head. Slams it onto the floor. Crash. Crash. The room spins. Crash.

  Which brings me to the point where I’m left wondering if I’m going to have the time to enumerate all the mistakes I’ve made before my head gives way.

  Just another night out for Agent Arthur Wallace of MI37.

  Case File #2:Rescue

  8:15 pm, The Oxford Playhouse, Oxford, England

  There is romance to the idea of the Man Alone. Abandoned, desperate, he reaches deep inside and finds the will to go on, to do what must be done, to save the day.

  But when the Man Alone is being beaten to death by a pack of insane theater-enthusiasts, the idea of back-up has a little more charm.

  In those moments there is little better than a co-worker blowing a homicidal Laura Ashley fan off your chest with a blast of electric blue light.

  Clyde — co-worker extraordinaire, and MI37′s resident magician — stands over me, lightning playing between his fingertips.

  It’s hard to express my gratitude. I go with, “Guh-th-fuh.”

  “You’re welcome, Arthur.” As he helps me up, a man in a three-piece suit leaps up on a chair in front of us, growls.

  Clyde raises his free hand. ”Al morath cal arnum.” Blue light explodes and the man pinwheels away over seats, head snapped back.

  “You know,” Clyde says, picking at his tweed jacket, “I really should invest in some sort of robe. With stars and moons on it. Proper old school stuff.”

  I have other concerns. Like putting a bullet in the interdimensional avatar of fear and chaos on the stage whose fault this all is—Nyarlathotep.

  Except the stage is empty.

  “Target’s moving,” I say. ”Out back. Now.”

  A mass of drooling, enraged Oxonians stands between me and the stage. As one, they bay their madness.

  “Lobby?” Clyde suggests.

  I move. A raving student comes at me. I use both fists to club him to the floor.

  The lobby is stark in its emptiness. And we’re moving now. The chase is properly on. You’re mine, you interdimensional bastard.

  From nowhere, a yellow clay jar arcs through the air. I duck. It explodes against the wall behind me. Gas rushes out, a red mist. I duck, but an arm of vapor circles my head. I breathe-

  A wall of flesh rises, engulfing. Jackals chase me across a desert. Water closes over my head, tentacles wrapped about my ankles, pulling, pulling.

  -and crash to the lobby floor. I gasp, claw at my eyes. Three figures in ragged yellow robes are streaming through the street door, curved knives held high.

  I reach for my gun.

  My gun beaten out of my hand by the Laura Ashley-wearer back in the auditorium.

  The first of our attackers is yards away. He stinks of decay. I catch a flash of teeth. Jaundiced skin. Black pits of eyes.

  “Clyde!” My voice slides up to an octave I try to avoid hitting in public.

  He slams out an arm. ”Al morath cal arnum.” Electricity crackles. A strobe flare of light. The leading attacker flies backwards, spiraling through the air, colliding with his fellows.

  I pull myself up, still blinking away the after-effects of the attacker’s gas. ”We need to get out of here.”

  “The Children of Nyarlathotep will stop you!” One of the yellow-robed men is pulling free of the tangled pile of his fellows. ”We will come for you in your dreams. We will unseam your sanity.”

  Clyde mutters something under his breath. The man’s head slams to the ground, tongue lolling.

  “Shall we go?” Clyde smiles at me, holds open the street door. I step out. Time to get finally get the bas-

  I stop. I stare. The streets. The city.

  Where has Oxford gone?

  The road, once paved and straight, is a twisting roller coaster of asphalt and cobbles. Limestone storefronts have curled into blackened husks, glass bulging like blisters. Dreaming spires have stretched to the sky, points drawn out like knife blades. The citizenry scream, and caper, and cower.

  The madness is spreading. It’s not just in the citizens, it’s in the city’s walls, its streets, its soul.

  And seriously, even an interdimensional avatar of madness is a Tim Burton fan?

  “You know,” I say to Clyde, “I cannot wait to find this bastard and shoot him.”

  Case File #3:Countdown

  “Derrière. To Christ Church College. Five minutes or less. Otherwise you’re responsible for the end of the world.” Tabitha, my handler and MI37′s resident cheerleader, sets the ticking clock just in case my day wasn’t going badly enough.

  It had been a simple plan. Go to the theater. Make sure the performer really is an interdimensional avatar of fear and chaos. Shoot him.

  All in a day’s work for Agent Arthur Wallace.

  Except now I’m chasing the bastard through Oxford transformed. Nyarlathotep — the aforementioned avatar — has vomited up the citizenry’s collective fears and given the place a good basting. Architecture spirals out of control. Streets twist back in recursive loops. Buildings teeter and leer.

  Oh, and everybody’s gone mad. The insane cherry on the lunacy cake.

  Ten minutes ago

  Clyde — MI37′s geek and spell-slinger — passes me a plastic earbud. “Tabitha,” he says. I plug it in. Because who doesn’t want a running job evaluation from a committed misanthrope?

  “Screwed that up. Big time.”

  I close my eyes. “Where’s Nyarlathotep?”

  “Christ Church. Potential reality rip.”

  I move. Clyde follows.

  Seven minutes ago

  Get to Christ Church — simple enough. Run in a straight line from the playhouse.

  Except every exit from this bloody traffic circle leads back to where it starts.

  “What the hell?”

  “Reality leakage,” Clyde answers. “Nyarlathotep’s home dimension leaking into ours, distorting space. The sensible thing, when you tear through realities and summon avatars of fear and chaos is to close the door behind you. But if you’re summoning avatars of fear and chaos then there’s a chance common sense isn’t your primary attribute.”

  Which is all lovely to know, but, “How the hell do I get down this street?”

  “Time window shrinking.” Tabitha’s voice comes through tinnily in my ear.

  “Tabby,” Clyde says, “could you be a love and look up the Entropic Negator? The Phillip’s version”

  Which must mean something, I suppose, because ten seconds later, Clyde is repeating the nonsense syllables Tabitha is intoning, and then the world ripples like water, and I get to go down the street I actually want to go down for once.

  When did running in a straight line get this hard?

  Four minutes ago

  If it’s not one thing, it’s bloody cultists.

  The yellow-robed man comes out of nowhere. I spin just in time to catch his fist on my chin. I fall down–not very Kurt Russell of me but typical of my brand of heroism. Fortunately Clyde knows magic. Unfortunately, a second cultist sucker-punches him too, which means I have to do something… well, not exactly heroic…

  I kick my attacker in the crotch.

  That buys me enough time to get up off the floor, and be taken down by a flying tackle from the second cultist.

  We roll back and forth while, in my ear, Tabitha intones, “Tick tock. Tick tock.”

  It’s more sheer frustration than anything else that lends me the strength to slam my opponents face into the brick. Finally he stops worrying about me and just lies there, insensible.

  Just enough time to put the boot in on cultist number one, heft Clyde to his feet, and listen to Tabitha sing a line from The Final Countdown.

  Now

  Seriously. This is starting to get ridiculous.

  The crowd is six rows deep, blocking the College gateway. Students mostly. And not enough sane thoughts among them to rub together a
nd start a fire.

  “Five minutes,” Tabitha says.

  I look around desperately. Time is not on our side.

  And then I smile. Because time might be the answer after all.

  “Any chance you can knock that down?” I ask Clyde. I point to the grand clock tower sitting above Christ Church College’s grand entrance. It won’t slow time but it’ll disperse a crowd.

  “Tabitha?” Clyde puts his finger to his ear. “The Tesselian blade please.”

  A student at the edge of the crowd stops poking at his midriff with a stick and looks at us. He lets out a scream.

  The attention of the crowd shifts.

  Above our heads the clocks second hand ticks, once, twice.

  “Looking. Looking.” Tabitha says.

  The crowd lurches towards us.

  “Look faster.”

  Tabitha starts talking. The crowd starts running. Clyde repeats words. The second hand ticks. Stone work creaks.

  The crowd hesitates as one. Looks back. Looks up.

  Limestone explodes, ripping out and away. The second hand spins away from the clock. The whole tower leans wildly.

  Clyde breaks from his incantation just long enough to yell. “Timber!”

  Case File #4:Portal

  Oxford, England. Not a good day.

  Some days, I think, I really need to ask for a transfer. You get told you’re going into a department called MI37, and you think, oh that sounds cloak-and-dagger exciting. They charge you with defending the realm from all things supernatural and tentacle-y, and you think, well that could be exciting.

  Then you find you find yourself in the middle of Christ Church College facing a pack of yellow-robed cultists standing around a bubbling rip in reality.

  “Not good,” I say to Clyde, my equally up-shit-creek partner.

  The cultists are chanting, of course. Limited options on the daily duties for a cultist I imagine. Chant or sacrifice. And for all my bitching about my employer, at least working for MI37 isn’t tedious.

  Take the portal for instance. If I don’t close it in the next three minutes, all of Oxford is going to be permanently infected by another reality constructed of humanity’s collective fears.

  Likely a suicidal task, but not a boring one.

  Unfortunately Clyde and I lack the appropriate color coordination, so cultists catch on to us pretty fast. Three break from the circle, pulling large knives.

  I really wish I hadn’t dropped my gun earlier. But things tend to get distracting when an entire city goes insane. Still, this is where Clyde comes in. No need for a gun when the chap next to you can access interdimensional energies and sling them at bad guys like exploding basketballs.

  “All yours,” I say.

  “Actually,” Clyde looks apologetic as the cultists circle, “I’m sort of going to be busy with closing the portal. Rather need you to handle this.”

  “What?” I turn to him, the cultists momentarily a secondary distraction. “Don’t we just take out the cultists and then…” My hands describe the portal collapsing

  “Well, yes,” Clyde says. “They all have to stop chanting, but I still need to have the spell to collapse the portal going when that happens.”

  “Whatever happened to teamwork,” I say. And step forward in order to have my arse handed to me.

  The first cultists swings at me. I duck, grab a piece of shattered clocktower, use it to shatter most of his jaw.

  That gives the other two a good time to sneak round behind me. One slices at me. I roll with it. My jacket takes the hit. The second cultist gets a good kick in. There’s a better range of movement allowed by ragged yellow robes that you’d think. I double over, wheezing.

  They come at me from opposite directions, knives held high. I do the best I can and collapse.

  Knives whistle over my head. I use the rubble to crush one cultist’s foot. He drops away howling. Meanwhile the other knife comes down and opens up my shoulder so I have some howling of my own to do.

  I go at the guy angry then. Fighting is not exactly my forte. I resemble an off-balance ballerina pinwheeling across the Christ Church quad. Fortunately the cultist’s hectic chanting schedule hasn’t left him much time for self-defense classes. He swings the knife low. I stagger-step out of the way. My tie becomes noticeably shorter, the end fluttering away. The cultist becomes noticeably less conscious, my chunk of rubble colliding with his left ear.

  And all that would be great if there were only three cultists. But three more separate from around the circle, which draws tighter.

  I close fast. My shoulder connects with one before he gets his dagger free. I step into him, whirling wide with the rubble. A second cultist comes in low and hard, head slamming into my stomach, knife nicking my thigh. I bring my knee up into his nose. He drops away. The other grabs me from behind. The knife comes up. I slam my head backwards. His nose crunches. He drops me. I spin, the rubble held tight in my fist. More of his face crunches.

  The guy on the floor is thinking about getting up. Me and my rubble encourage him not to.

  Three more cultists, but the circle is tight now and I’m close.

  I break into a run, slam past one, spinning round but still moving. One goes to trip me, I hurdle desperately, misstep, sprawl, roll.

  I connect with the legs of a cultist in the circle. He trips, crashes forwards. Forward into the portal.

  An ugly ripping sound. Then the cultists are down one member. The chanting falters. The cultists stare in a tiny moment of shocked silence.

  Except… Not quite silence. Clyde chanting his spell.

  With a sound like a wet fart, the portal collapses in on itself.

  Strike one for the good guys.

  Now if only I hadn’t just given twenty angry cultists nothing to do but use me like a piñata…

  Case File #5:Nyarlathotep

  Christ Church College, Oxford England

  One thing I’ve always liked about Kurt Russell movies is that they end.

  That sounds wrong…

  I like that they conclude. Evil is defeated. The good guy wins. A sunset is ridden into.

  In real life you face down a horde of angry cultists, close an interdimensional portal, high-five your spell-slinging partner, and then you find out there’s a seven-foot tall avatar of fear and chaos who’s all pissed about it and manifested behind you when you weren’t looking.

  In real life this shit never ends.

  Having never faced an interdimensional avatar of fear and chaos before, I go with the nearest weapon to hand and throw a rock at him.

  Apparently this avatar–Nyarlathotep is his name–is made of sterner stuff than that.

  So: plan B.

  It may not be overly heroic to run and hide while getting your friend to do the fighting, but my friend knows magic and I don’t, so this may not be as bad as it initially looks.

  Clyde mutters something under his breath, flings out his hand. Electricity crackles.

  And then Clyde flies eight feet through the air and lands in a crumpled heap. Sort of the opposite result to the one we were going for there.

  God, I wish I’d thought of a plan C.

  In its absence, I stick to cowering. Nyarlathotep steps toward Clyde. He stretches out a robed arm. The impression of a hand and its end–a claw, black leather skin, yellow nails–and then gone, or denied. On the floor, Clyde screams.

  What would Kurt Russell do? Possibly not the smartest question, but it’s stood me better than you’d imagine in times of need.

  Except Kurt Russell would probably charge the guy yelling. The man alone. Guns blazing.

  A stupid, stupid plan.

  Except I don’t have any better ideas.

  There’s a broken chunk of wood on the floor, one end a jagged ruin of splinters. It looks sharp.

  I grab it, brace myself, burst from cover. I level my weapon. I charge.

  As it turns out, the key to a good battle cry is timing. Too early and, well…

  Nya
rlathotep turns, swings his arm from Clyde to me. Clyde finally lies still. And then-

  Fear breaking over my skin like water, drenching me, drowning me. I can see it all. The inevitability. The end. He’s here. Our harbinger. Our prophet. Our Nyarlathotep. He comes bearing this truth: this world collapsing under its own ragged weight, burying us in flesh and concrete; we will chew on our friends, our families–a desperate, animal need to consume, to feed, to survive. An utterly ridiculous, utterly futile urge.

  I’m standing inches from him. Just standing. Weeping. Knowing how foolish this all is, how much madness it is. I stare at the wood in my hands. Better I just end my own life with it. Better I chew off the hands holding the wood. Better I claw out my eyes. Better I gut myself and feast on my own-

  “Ooph!”

  Breath bursts out of me. Something heavy and hard colliding with my back, sending my stumbling, staggering towards, towards…

  The wood strikes Nyarlathotep’s gut. It slashes through the robes. Reams of cloth without end. Still the weight drives me forward, drives the wood in. And it feels I’m crossing some terrible boundary, as if I’m wounding myself. Then: a glimpse of skin–black, yellow, green with pus. I gag, and then the wood carries on, and on, and in, and the figure, the god before me, Nyarlathotep, convulses, heaves, collapses. And the wood goes on, and in, and before my eyes, he dies.

  A feeling like a whip crack inside my skull. And Jesus, did I… was I…

  There’s a pile of red rags on the floor next to me. I’ve fallen down. Clyde is on top of me. I’m holding a charred stump of blackened wood.

  “Sorry about that,” Clyde says, picking himself up. “Think I was trying to stop you from killing him. Did a bit of a number on me, old Nyarlathotep there. Good thing I tripped and knocked you, really. Clumsy bugger that I am.” He nods several times, as much to himself as to me.

  I shake my head, try to clear the shrieking madness Nyarlathotep put in there. And I see the rags on the floor. Empty. Dead. Nyarlathotep… concluded.

  I smile. Because that’s an ending I can really enjoy.

  Case File #6:Sweet Dreams

  Christ Church College, Oxford England

  Some days I really get the vastness of the universe. I’m tiny. It’s big. I don’t matter. I get it.

  Then, some days, you save the world—you know, for example you close an interdimentsional portal infecting the world with madness, kill an avatar of fear called Nyarlathotep when armed only with a bit of two-by-four—and you think the world should really pay more attention.