Astronomy (11 page)

Susan closed her eyes and fired.

A new scream erupted—grating and musical in its pain. Blood gushed down the rubbery hide.

She fired again. The thing turned its flank to her. It backed away to starboard. Charley rolled aside, shook the feeling into his arm.

He scooped her up and nodded across the glass at the shattered locomotive. “That way,” he said into her ear.

She called to Illyenov to follow them. Illyenov had been afflicted with inspiration. “You hurt it!” he cried. He reared back with his second bottle of gas. “You Magyar, you Cossack. We’ve got you now!”

A machine gun opened up from the far side of the crater. Cheap Russian plating chattered like silverware in a drawer. She heard a bottle shatter. Light flared up, and she heard a breathy
whoomp
. Heat bathed the side of her face.

Where Illyenov had stood, a scarecrow wrapped in flames danced foolishly. It flapped its arms against its shoulders and legs. The scarecrow opened its mouth wide to scream, and—surprise—Illyenov’s voice burst forth.

Susan forgot the gasoline on her clothes. She grabbed for him. Something long and fibrous wrapped Illyenov around the chest and snapped him out of reach. He disappeared under the rubbery skirt of the thing, still burning.

Susan stared in amazement. Shrieve pulled her down as a line of tracers split the night right overhead. The glass trembled against her belly. She looked back over her shoulder to see the smoke gathering itself just yards behind her.

She grabbed his arm. “Time to go.” Urgently now.

They sprinted toward the wreck of the train. No time to worry where Malmagden was. They dove through a shattered windshield into the cab, followed by a line of .30-caliber slugs. The cylinder shook. Hot metal chunked over their heads.

Was Malmagden out there? He had to be dead by now. The locomotive shivered again. Slower this time. Something had gotten under the flank of the overturned train and started shoving.

Susan had hold of a steam throttle. Directly beneath her, an open window rested against the lakebed. A surge rose up against the engine’s driving wheels. She lost her grip. She fell to ground, feet-first. A second shove knocked her forward. The locomotive began to roll so that her legs were outside the cab.

She grabbed more throttles, anything she could find. Charley had her by the arms. He pulled her back into the train. A third shove began to roll the locomotive completely onto its roof. A membrane, bilious and wet, pressed in through the open window. Susan drew away as much as possible. But the windows above her were also open. Any minute, something would come down through there as well.

A moment of silence followed, like the trough before a steep wave. She grabbed onto Charley and he grabbed for whatever he could find. When it came, she realized, this one would be bad.

Machine guns opened up from the entire line of gun emplacements on the compound’s western perimeter. But the fire was panicked and indiscriminate. It did nothing but draw the monster’s attention.

Susan heard the relentless weight of the thing move off into the darkness. The fire from the camp grew frantic, to no effect. The creature moved methodically down the line of foxholes, dragging wire and machine guns and bodies in its wake.

Screams echoed across the glass. They quickly dwindled under the onslaught to a single, aspirated cry. And then a final, sustained round of gunfire—one pistol:
crack, crack, crack.

Susan counted three more shots, six in all. She couldn’t help counting.

When the time came for whoever was out there and the monster was on him, she heard the seventh.

She thought of Malmagden. “Where is he?” she wondered aloud.

“Forget about him,” Charley told her. “The only way he got out of here was playing a harp.”

But Susan wasn’t so sure. Malmagden knew the angles and the planes and all the formulae between Yr and Nhhngr. All he needed was a moment alone, something to draw with.

She quick-glanced out a shattered window that had been upended toward the sky. She saw him—he was stepping into an Angle Web in the ground just as the creature came back for him. It circled him the way a dog worries at a trapped rodent. But Malmagden was taking his leave. He turned to the light, smiled his lazy, charming smile at her and then was consumed by azure flames.

The creature bellowed and raked the ground where Malmagden had stood, dragging bodies and machine guns back and forth as it dug.

Susan thought about getting off this glass. But the nearest cover was a hundred yards east of here, under moonlight. They stayed with the train. The bellowing and destruction grew distant. At some point it may have passed on into dream. She woke up on Charley’s shoulder. Dawn light slanted across the glass.

“You smell like gasolne,” Charley said. At 5:30 in the morning, this seemed the sweetest endearment ever whispered in her ear. Who can say why?

A path of charred earth and glass, thirty feet wide, crossed the crater floor, from the Soviet camp and on over the rim, into a dense wall of trees beyond the open northern end of Faulkenberg Tal.

They followed it back to the Russian camp. Everywhere were signs of desperate battle. Shell casings clicked and crunched under their shoes as they re-entered the perimeter. The giant fire at the center of the crater now lay scattered into guttering embers. Small pits from hand grenades dug the ground all around it.

The only thing missing were the people. Impressions of bodies were everywhere, crushed through the glazed sand and into the rocky soil; their legs and arms were bent at excruciating angles.

But no bodies—no bodies, no drag marks, no blood.

She cast about for the place where Malmagden had made his exit, but everything looked different in the daylight.

Charley silently watched her awhile. He shook his head to himself. Eventually, he said, “Don’t do this to yourself. We’ll find him later. He’s not getting away unpunished.”

But vengeance was the last thing on her mind. She was thinking about
Das Unternehmen
. Only two men knew enough to stop it—Carl Leder and Krzysztof Malmagden. And only Malmagden was sane.

This seemed like a lot to explain at 5:30 the morning after a massacre. She just kept searching.

She found it at last. The Angle Web had been drawn in a hollow left by a Russian hand grenade. The sun was coming on and the Web faded every place the long morning rays slanted through. Only a bit of it glimmered at the bottom of the crater.

“Here.” She pulled Charley over to see. “This is where Malmagden went.”

It flared briefly to life beneath his shadow.

“Can you read it? Can you tell the location?”

“He went back to Kiel,” she realized as she spoke. “He’s waiting for us there.”

Charley frowned at her. “You can read that much?”

Not really, no. She didn’t base this conclusion on her reading of the Angle Web, but her reading of Malmagden himself.

Malmagden, she realized, was as scared as they were. He hadn’t escaped the creature to go into hiding—there was no place to hide. Malmagden was going ahead of them to track down Jürgen Kriene.

They found the Plymouth turned over on its side. Some corrosive agent had washed over the hood and right front fender. The paint was eaten right through to the bare metal. The chrome trim was a dull orange. The front tire looked soft. Susan wondered if it would hold up, but it did.

They pushed the car onto its wheels, drained their last spare gas can, and rolled up the twisting road out of the valley.

* * *

A godawful creaking sound woke her from her third nap. She placed the sound immediately—they were back in Kiel, in the waterfront district. That creaking, groaning sound in the background, that was the conclusion of the day’s drag race.

She figured it to be about six. Right about now, a couple thousand kids and old people would be dragging the last of somebody’s U-boat out of the shipping channels in the harbor. They’d be getting their pay, maybe a few cans of C-Rations. The thought of food made her mouth water. When had she eaten? She couldn’t think.

Susan saw the back door open as they parked on Berendstrasse. Shrieve was too tired even to yell about security.

“Christ.” He sounded disgusted. “They must be looking to meet their first German.”

“Smells like they’re cooking dinner for him and everything.” Whatever was going on the stove, it smelled wonderful.

“Hey,” she called out. “Who’s supposed to be down here?” She heard dinner music coming from the dining room, a light waltz from one of the lesser Strausses.

Charley held her up at the door before they went inside.

“When we first saw you in that warehouse on Münterstrasse, Bogen and I may have been a little . . .”—he squirmed a bit—“skeptical, I guess.”

“You mean because I’m a woman.” She smiled. She thought that was dear. “Fifty years from now, lots of women will shoot guns. It won’t be a big deal anymore.”

Perhaps there was more to it than that. Shrieve started to raise his hand toward her slightly crossed eyes. But he stopped himself. He smiled, nodded. “Yeah,” he said. “Something like that. Anyway, I just wanted to tell you that—Christ, I had this thing all rehearsed in my head. I just wanted to tell you that I’d have you at my back anytime. You did real well up there.”

“You did real well up there too,” she said. She didn’t know whether one returned a compliment to one’s case officer or not, but Charley just smiled.

“We should find out when dinner is,” he said. “I’m starving.”

She told him to go clean up; she’d have a look in the pot. He lingered on just a moment, and she smiled at him, What?

“Nothing.” He shook his head, embarrassed. He went off, calling after Bogen.

Susan felt her cheeks warming. Curse of the red-haired woman, she blushed easily. Good thing Shrieve wasn’t here to see.

She washed her arms in the sink. It felt so good, she leaned her head under the water and let it pour down on her till the gasoline smell faded.

She yelled for whoever was making dinner tonight. Betty Lou Sharpe, she said to herself, and laughed at her own joke. This was the tail end to a running gag: Anything that didn’t smell of garlic, Betty Lou Sharpe must have cooked it.

She wadded up a towel around the lid handle. Christ, it must have been boiling for hours. She could hardly pick it up.

She looked for a heating pad to lift the lid. She found one on the back of a chair, but it was covered in some kind of blood.

Susan stared at it a moment.

Blood.

Shrieve called to her from the dining room. “You need to see this,” he said. Something in his voice made her run.

* * *

She found him by the door, crouched over himself. His arms were folded across his chest and his fist was shoved under his nose. He might have been studying a dinner table tableau prepared for the cover of the
Saturday Evening Post
.

Before them lay some formal occasion. Candlelight and mismatched dinnerware gave it an air of low-rent elegance. Eight good friends sat across the table from each other.

Any minute now, Pete DeLeone was going to ask Johnny the Plumber to pass the gravy. Sandra Obersmith would have another awful run-in with the Dutch librarian at the shipping museum. The conversation would pick up from there.

If only they could spit out the rope of pink intestine gorging each of their mouths.

Susan found the doorjamb and steadied herself. She had to force herself toward the table. Evidence must be gathered. Yes.

Over each stuffed mouth, eyes were creased in horror, agony, outrage. They had each died right where they sat, consuming themselves an inch at a time.

She looked down at their hands. Their hands were wired to their chair arms. Each had been provided cutlery. A fork poked out of each right hand, a knife out of the left. Somewhere beneath the blood and viscera of their bellies, each wore a napkin, neatly pressed into his or her lap.

Shrieve was saying something about Dale Bogen.

Dale Bogen, she realized. Oh, Christ. He wasn’t here.

“Maybe he escaped?”

“He didn’t escape,” Shrieve said into his hands. He had been up to Bogen’s room, but he would not elaborate on what he found. “Did you,” Shrieve had to clear his throat to keep talking. “Did you check the pot?”

“What?” She couldn’t understand why he was talking about dinner at this particular moment.

“The pot on the stove. Did you look inside?”

And then her brain-lock let up just long enough; she saw what he was getting at. Oh, Jesus.

Shrieve told her to stay put. She just looked at him,
Yeah right I
’
ll stay put.
She did let him tip back the lid from the pot. She couldn’t bear that.

Shrieve looked a long time. When he’d seen enough, he set the lid gently back in place. He wouldn’t look at her. She saw his shoulders go up and down, heard something like a sigh.

“Somebody’s fucking dead,” he whispered. She put her arms around him. He was shaking. “Somebody’s fucking dead.”

* * *

Five minutes searching the upstairs rooms, they discovered the real target of the attack on Berendstrasse house—the Black Library was gone.

Susan marveled at the thoroughness of the thieves. The metal racks of lower-level research, the shelves of purely historical and geographic material, the safe holding the really dangerous books like the
Necronomicon
, the card file that tracked their usage—even the desk and chairs were gone. Someone had cleaned the place to the walls.

The Black Library, that was a gut shot. Without the
Necronomicon
, they were flying blind. They could dig up everything they needed on
Das Unternehmen
, but it meant little if they had no research material to put any of it into context.

The only people they could even talk to were Malmagden and Carl Leder. But Malmagden had absented himself from further inquires. And Leder? Aside from Krzysztof Malmagden, Leder was the only source of information on Azathoth and his attendant entities.

Susan found a phone in the kitchen, near the cellar door. The phone number for Agnes Dei’s mental ward was scratched an inch into the wall by something as thick and sharp as a rat-tail file.