The Dark Rites of Cthulhu (13 page)

Unable to stop himself, Jefferson stood and walked forward towards the open doors and into the room.

Carly was smearing blood on her own breasts and loins now. She paused to look up at Jefferson. Her eyes narrowed but she didn’t stop the ritual and none of the white or black men present even acknowledged his presence.

“I’m here to take you…” Jefferson said. “The city is fallin’ to the Union Army. Soon all black slaves will be free.”

“I knows,’ said Carly. ‘I bin callin’ this power to free us all.”

“This dark magic?”

Carly nodded. Jefferson looked around. The rest of the horde appeared frozen, as though they were statues, posed in a garden of insanity.

“I knowed when we met that you were right for me,” Carly said. “I seen it in your eyes.”

“I love you, Carly.”

“You went to Isaac to try and help me…”

“How did you…?”

Jefferson tasted blood as Carly pressed her fingers against his lips to silence him. It woke him from his confused trance. He looked around at the people again. They were like clockwork dolls that had run down.

“What is dis?” Jefferson asked. “Carly? It ain’t right you kil’ yor sissa.”

“I had to kil’ something I love in order to bring the power.”

Carly backed away to the table. She stood before the book once more, arms held up, exactly as she had earlier.

“It’s almost time,” she said.

Outside Jefferson thought he heard musket shots. The army would be near. What would they do when they discovered the dead white girl? What would they think of Carly working her spell, covered in blood, like the men and women around them, standing paralysed like abandoned puppets?

“They ain’t frozen,” Carly said as though reading his mind. “They is in a dif’rent time from us right now.”

“How?”

“I open’d a doorway… you might say… in another worl’. This is the worl’ of the great ones. The ancient gods that hide in and around our worl’ waitin’ to be invited in.”

“I don’t understand.”

“This book,” Carly said. “My white daddy had it in his library. He had no idea what it was or of the power inside. I knowed. I seen it. I read it and unnerstood.”

Jefferson looked at the book for the first time. He couldn’t read, the words meant nothing to him, but he approached the table, looking down at the hand-scrawled patterns that filled the page.

Jefferson stared at the markings and he, too, began to understand. Carly’s father hadn’t been killed by an uprising but something she had done using this book. It all seemed suddenly clear.

He looked back at the body of the white girl. Carly’s half-sister. Whiter now that she had bled to death than she had been in life.

“You wanted to free everyone?” Jefferson said. “Why don’t I believe that is all you is doin’ here?”

Carly smiled but her face wasn’t the cruel sneer that had eaten into his soul nights earlier. It was warm and happy, the Carly he had fallen for.

“I done this for us to be truly together. I can’t be with no ordinary man, Brent. I ain’t no ordinary woman.”

“What you sayin’? All these white men … All those overseers you went with … you think I don’t knows what you did to stop me bein’ beaten?”

“I couldn’t let them ruin a perfect vessel,” Carly said.

“
Vessel
? What you sayin’? Carly I come for you… you gunna leave with me now or not?”

Carly’s eyes fell back down to the book and the text. She began to chant those alien words once more and then time seemed to restart. Around him the people were moving again. Two of the men caught hold of his arms, pulling him back from the table. Jefferson struggled and fought against them, but the words that Carly continued to speak made his limbs weak, his mind full of a deep thrumming sound and a heavy
fog, and choked off the sound from his voice.

The men pushed him to his knees. Head bowed, all Jefferson could see was Carly’s bare feet beneath the table. The air around him shimmered as though it were above the flames of a camp fire. The temperature became unbearable. Sweat ran down his forehead into his eyes. Jefferson felt an impulse to rip away his clothing. He felt as though the fabric was suffocating him.

Carly stepped out from behind the table. Jefferson raised his head and looked up at her perfect thighs, then her sex, and finally her face. She touched his shoulder and then his head as though bestowing some strange blessing. All the time her lips moved, and that peculiar guttural language poured out, hanging in the air and burning into his soul.

Jefferson didn’t feel like himself anymore. He felt disembodied, and yet the pain he felt in his skin still reached out to him. He remembered the priest on Beaugard Plantation preaching every Sunday about fire and brimstone, the heat of hell, and he thought that somehow he had found his way there. Only Satan wasn’t a man, it was a woman disguised as a human.

He saw through that façade now. Carly wasn’t what she appeared to be and never had been. But how this had happened he didn’t know. Maybe she was some demon born in the body of a child.

“My mamma knew the old ways,” she said. “When my daddy forced his way into her, she cursed him and me. I wasn’t born with a human soul. No human man can ever force me… I can only be given to a god.”

Jefferson heard her words float to him through a miasma of choking sulphuric air. His body coughed, he felt a vague discomfort as the poison choked his lungs but his spirit was separate, gone from the physical form and only attached by a vague umbilical cord of light.

He looked down on the
scene, saw Carly for the demon’s whore she really was. In this state he knew so much of what had been going on. There were flashes of memory.

Carly stopping the overseers beating him, Carly going to the master and telling him to sell her to the whore house. The master was so confused by her soft voice, eyes glazed over by her hypnosis. Then Jefferson saw Carly in the bedroom upstairs. He knew this wasn’t possible, but he was certain he was seeing her with her first client. The man came in, excited by her half-naked body. But Carly just touched his forehead and he stopped moving. For a whole hour the man remained sitting in a chair. Then he left, saying she was the best whore he had ever had.

Jefferson tried to call her name but his ethereal body had no capability to make the sounds his physical form could and now that was so far, far below, still kneeling at her feet.

He saw the darkness gathering around her. The words of magic still poured from her mouth like maggots swarming
from a dead body. They ate at his soul and they pushed him farther away from the world of the living.

The black, roiling shadow thing that grew around Carly was now dwarfing Jefferson’s body.

Carly looked up and smiled. Jefferson wondered if she could see him there, if she wanted him to see everything that was happening.

“It’ll be you in body only…” Carly said. A rapt, fanatical grin spread across her face.

The darkness stretched over Jefferson’s form. He felt a stabbing pain as the thing swarmed him. Then it was as though a thousand bees stung his skin simultaneously. His body jerked in protest. The thing squeezed him, forcing his mouth to open as it pushed the air from his lungs. But as Jefferson’s body heaved in new air, so it drew in the essence of this demon shadow.

Jefferson tried to yell once more, but he was growing more distant from the world of the living. The shadow disappeared inside him. Jefferson felt pain once more. This was the awful agony of his soul being expelled from his corporeal form.

He floated as high as the ceiling now. Carly picked up the blood-stained knife and pointed it upwards towards him.

Jefferson screamed inside as he felt the last tie sever and knew that his body was no longer a part of his existence.

The Jefferson-demon stood now. It looked around, as though seeing the men and women around him for the first time. It took the knife from Carly’s fingers, and without warning, plunged it deep into one of the men nearby. As the man fell, the demon latched onto the wound, drinking and lapping at the blood.

When the blood stopped flowing, the demon attacked another worshipper, and another. Bleeding them all dry.

Carly stood, waiting until the demon was satisfied. Above, silently weeping, Jefferson watched his own body committing the atrocities. His mind screamed in denial as, having fed, the creature turned to Carly and forced her willingly over the table like a dog taking a bitch.

Carly screamed as the demon used Jefferson’s body to pleasure her. She laughed and cried until her own orgasm shuddered through her, and at that point, the demon poured his seed inside her.

Jefferson wished his mind would go elsewhere, that he could stop seeing the woman he loved being violated by something using his own form. This wasn’t what he had wanted for her, or himself.

When their violent mating was
done, the demon took Carly’s hand and led her naked towards the foyer. Jefferson tried to follow, but sensing him still there, Carly paused, looked up and raised her hand towards him.

“Stay,” she said.

Jefferson tried to fight her will but he found himself unable to move.

Frozen in this one place, he could sense that Carly and the demon had left the house but there was nothing he could do but stay where she had left him.

Around him, the air seemed to boil and move as though, separated by a thin veil, monstrous gods held him in place with their unknowable powers.

Time slipped. Jefferson became aware of movement below. A group of union soldiers entered the room. They looked at the slaughtered bodies and shook their heads.

“Looks like some sort of madness went horribly wrong,” said one of the soldiers.

“Bad voodoo,” said another man as he entered the ballroom. Jefferson recognised Matthew. The black man seemed to be helping the soldiers.

“Sorry,” said the first soldier. “We would have saved these poor slaves if we could have.”

“I knows it. We is glad you’re here anyways,” said Matthew. “I only hopes my friend managed to get his girl outta here before this went down.”

Jefferson watched them go.

There was nothing he could do. He was trapped and held there, incorporeal, powerless and hopeless. In his mind he screamed and screamed.

But the Great One, the elder god which had empowered Carly, and which had allowed his own body to be possessed by one of its nameless creatures, just tightened its grip.

Forever.

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By Don Webb

So two years after my last friend had done so, I finally joined Facebook. Hey, I’m in IT, the last thing I want to see any more of is glowing screens. My wife had lots of useful advice: don’t play the games, they’re a time-suck; don’t friend people you don’t at least know; don’t share every political or cute cat meme that comes along.  I stu
ck by her rules for three days.

Ok, at first I played a few games – What Dr. Who Companion Are You? (Sarah Jane Smith). Which Literary Figure Are You? (Leopold Bloom). And I started getting “friend” requests from friends of friends of friends. And how could I not repost that picture of a black and white cat on a skateboard? I mean that’s just too damn cute. So suddenly I had 332 friends. Then I got a request from Xulthan. I didn’t know Xulthan, I figured he was some gaming geek I had known once. And Xulthan added me to a group “The Green God Game.” I hate it when they add yo
u to groups without asking you.

Xulthan posted a video link.

It was the strangest music I ever heard – vaguely Middle Eastern with songs in some language I couldn’t place. I had been in Kuwait during Operation Desert Storm and could pick out Arabic. Maybe this was Yezidi or Martian. But it made the hairs on the back of my neck stick up when I listened. The video feed was pages and pages of parchment written in an alphabet unknown to me. I figured it was clues for the game, so I studied them closely, but nothing clicked. Except I did start dreaming about them. I would be walking in my neighborhood and all the shops would have signs in that weird script, for example.

Then the first game. Answer this riddle or agree to pay the consequences. “You are asleep in your home. It’s 3:33 in the early morning. Someone is knocking at your front door, someone is knocking at your back door. Someone is knocking at your side window. What do you open first?” I put down window, I thought that seemed more like what a friend would do. WRONG – you open your eyes! For the consequence I was supposed to wear a green shirt on Wednesday. I’m a good sport, so I did. I saw three men and two women wearing green in the lunchroom. Three of them had already chosen a table. I walked over and said, “Green God Game?” They said yes and I joined them. The others drifted over. Then one man’s p
hone rang.  He had been texted:

READ THIS TO THE GGG. Welcome. The Green God smiles upon you! Soon your luck will increase if you continue meeting. Hour of the Green Ray. Day of Hermes-Yog. Year of the City 10,347,666. So it is done!

“Cool!” said one of the women – youngish, freckled, with red-brown hair. “It’s an ARG!”

“What’s
an ARG?” asked Thomas Martinez.

I explained, “An Alternate Reality Game. The gamers are fed clues to solve a mystery. It usually ends in them participating
in or witnessing a flash mob.”

The older Chinese-looking woman said, “That’s one of those spontaneous get-togethe
rs? I’ve seen that on YouTube.”

So we talked about ARGs, flash mobs, Facebook, and our history with computers. Mr. Martinez was the oldest among us – he had actually bought an Altair 8800 back in 1975. We talked about performance art. Bill Nadis’ most far-out art experience was seeing the Trans-Siberian Orchestra’s “The Lost Christmas Eve” with his wife a couple of years ago. Suzi Machworter, the redhead, had, on the other hand, been a nude canvass at a Dallas Museum of Art show. An artist had done an Aztec style painting on her naked body, and then invited members of the audience to cover her in black paint until his art was erased. We shared e-mail and FB stats and what part of the company we were from. Then we went back to our cubicles, except for Calvin Lee, the young black guy with the wimpy mustache who worked
in Transpiration, fixing vans.

As fate would have it I ran into Calvin next Saturday. We were both eating at Taco-Taco. He saw me and motioned me to join him in line. At Taco-Taco, you get to shoot dice when you pay for your bill.  If the dice come up Taco-Taco (tacos had replaced the one spot), you won a free lunch. A one in thirty-six shot. Calvin rolled. Taco-
Taco. Then I rolled; Taco-Taco.

“Hey,” said Calvin, “Maybe it’s the Green God? The odds must be thousands
to one against that happening.”

“1,296 to 1.” I said, “Pretty cool. Maybe w
e should play the Lotto today.”

We had lunch, shared our life stories. I did buy Lotto tickets later, but no dice. That night, Xulthan posted his
status.

Look to the northeast quadrant of the sky five minutes after midnight. A wonder shall appear.  Say these words: “Zodicare Yog Sehresh!” and the Green God shall hear you.

I didn’t intend to say anything, but it was a warm night, and Sally sat out our lawn chairs. We smoked a little weed and watched the sky.

Right on time, a beautiful gree
n meteor flared across the sky.

“Say it! Say it!” Squealed my wife. 

“Zodicare Yog Sehresh!” I was pretty dubious about pronunciation.

Next Monday we all wore our shirts. No one had told us to. We were all excited. Then Calvin brought up the free tacos. Then Suzi told us that she and Mrs. Wong had met at a convenience store and dared each other to buy scratch off tickets. Suzi won $75 and Mrs. Wong $100. Then they bought several more tickets and lost each time.

“So,” I said, “How many of you said the magic words after the meteor flared forth?”

Everyone put their hands up. They had different expressions – Mr. Martinez looked ashamed, Mrs. Wong religious, Suzi ecstatic, Nadis embarrassed. Clarence grim – maybe even paranoid.

“Whoever is playing us is doing pretty good.” I said.

There was some nervous laughter and then
my
phone rang. A text from
#xulthanrises.

Priest Jough El Ayin has passed the boundary. Two Powers are seen. Eat no meat this night and you will see Ool Athag.

“What the fuck does that mean?” asked Nadis.

“It means eat fish like during Lent.” Said Mr. Martinez.

“This is fucked.” Said Nadis. “I don’t like being made a fool of.”

Suzi said, “No one’s making a fool of you. It’s just a game. You’re just mad because you didn’t win any money. Come on over to the Sac-n-Pac and I’ll buy you a scratch-off. It will be fun.”

Nadis was a balding single guy in his late thirties. He wasn’t about to turn down being with a pretty girl. They rest of us went back to work, Pete Nunio made dirty jokes all the way back to our pod.

Oddly enough my wife had bought beer battered fish sticks for dinner that night, so I didn’t have to make any decision about what to eat.

That night I dreamed a vast city, whose architecture was some fantastic blend of Angkor Wat and Giger prints – with a little Escher thrown in. The city was filled with strange looking men and women that wore glittering metal masks. At dusk, beneath two huge moons, we gathered at a great pit outside the city. A bright crimson ray came from the depths, and the people moaned in ecstasy. Then two green arms – hundreds of meters long – shot out of the pit. They fastened on an older man who carried a staff.  They seized him, lifted him high in the air, and then pulled him down into the pit. His mask fell off as he descended. He looked like Thomas Martinez. Then people began dancing and embracing. It turned into an orgy. I rutted with a half woman, half goat and I saw Suzi nearby being taken by two hairy, apelike men at the same time.  The air smelled of blood and cinnamon.  Music – the music from the video – played. 

I awoke aroused and tried to get my wife into it, but it was nearly time for the alarm to go off and she said, “Honey it’s a workday. We’ll do this on the weekend, when we can get into it.” I let her go back to sleep and took care of myself. At the moment of orgasm, I almost always make a little noise. This time I said a word, “Sehresh!” I don’t know why, and it scared me enough to keep me from drifting back to sleep.

That morning when I logged in at work, there was e-mail from Nadis inviting all of us to lunch at the Star of India across the street. 

We all showed up (except for Martinez). Nadis had won $1000 on a scratch-off game. 

“It’s all true!” he said.

We made a date to go buy tickets en masse that night. 

Suzi was texted from
#xulthanisrisen.

The time of Exchange is over. Priest Jough El Ayin has transitioned to your space and time. The Green God Game starts on the day of Hermes-Yog at the hour of the Cerise Ray. Odo kikale Nafatagn!

“That’s helpful. Where’s Martinez?” asked Calvin.

“What did you have for dinner last night, Calvin?” I asked.

“Big Mac and fries. Why?”
“No dreams?” I asked.

“Why? You mean that bullshit about don’t eat meat? Why, did you have a dream?”

We looked at each other, our nan and curries getting cold.

“What’s this got to do with Martinez?” asked Calvin. “You guys are serious bullshitters.”

Calvin grabbed his cream colored I-phone and called Martinez. No results. Then he dialed Martinez’s supervisor.

“He didn’t come into work today. What do you bullshitters know?”

We stared at our food. Suzi and Nadis blushed.

“You guys are seriously fucked up. I ain’t playin’.”

Calvin got up to leave. Mrs. Wong said, “Sit down, Calvin. You are playing because it’s how we will get rich. Sit down. Martinez was taken because he stood too close to something dangerous. That won’t be our fate.”

“What do you mean, ‘taken’? Taken where? By who?”

Nadis said, “The God of the Pit, the motherfather of the Green God.”

Pete Nunio asked, “What?”

Nadis said, “Look there’s a text on Scribd. Google
The Seven Rays of Ool Othag.
Suzi and I found it this morning.”

“Over breakfast?” I asked.

“Over none of your damn business. If you want to play a game, you better know the rules.”

Lunch proceeded fairly quietly. We trotted back to our cubicles. I downloaded
The Seven Rays b
ut I didn’t have time to read it. My boss piled it on that afternoon. None of us knew Martinez outside of the game. Well we were all Facebook friends, which meant we occasionally told each other when we made a road trip, saw a cute cat video, or passed on vaguely liberal political memes. Everyone but Calvin showed up after work and we walked to the Sac-n-Pac and bought tickets, and more tickets, and won nothing.

“The Time of Exchange is over.” Suzi said.

“So when’s the Hour of the Cerise Ray? That’s like orange, right?”

Suzi said, “At sunset comes the Cerise Ray down from the ruined planet searching for its opposite among the Hornless Ones. The unity being made in the Red Ceremony magic, all is balanced. Life for death, death for life, and the Daemons sleep in the Sixth Angle until the forces need be equalized again.”

“What the fuck does that mean?” I asked.

“We need to get together at sunset on Wednesday. Day after tomorrow. We’ll play a game.”

“So is this an ARG? Is Martinez spoofing us? Or is this about life and death?” asked Pete.

Mrs. Wong answered. “It’s a game. It’s Facebook. And it maybe life and death. My aunt choked to death on a Mah-jongg tile. Death is never far away. Thousands die each hour, each minute.”

“You guys are so much fun to hang out with,” I said, “as a game, I’m not very amused.”

I went home, said nothing to my wife, and when I saw the Xulthan had posted twice,
I did not read them.

The next morning, I did not read them.

That night I clicked on the two links. Clicking wasn’t playing.

The first was a very amateur shot of a boy being born. Parents looked normal. No occult significance. I always think the miracle of life looks a little gross on video. The second video looked very professional. A camera snakes through what appears to be a Stonehenge style ruin at night. Desert all around, three circles of stone. Great and spooky flute music playing in the background. The camera rests on the center stone the right size for a living room couch. I guess it might be an altar stone. The camera zooms in and we see a glyph carved in the gray-green stone. Simple, geometrical. Yet somehow it makes me fearful. I watch the video seven times in a row until my wife calls me to bed, calling herself a “Facebook widow.” Nice one, Mary, real supportive. I start to tell her about the Green God Game, but realize how stupid and paranoid it sounds.