The Dark Rites of Cthulhu (20 page)

I stop, and suck in deep breaths, closing my eyes. I let my mind quiet. Doubts and fears about what’s happening continue to come up, but I let them slide by. I feel my heartbeat slow and my breathing come back down to normal. I open my eyes.

“There are just a few more steps, Pete. You are almost there, having progressed far faster than others I have trained through the years.”

I grin. “Just how long have you been doing this, Shun? You’re not that much older than me, y’know.”

Shun looks sad for a moment, then he chuckles. “Let it suffice to say I am older than I appear to be. Now…” Shun leaps at me, but the way he moves chills me to the bone. He appears to
stretch
across the fifteen-foot space between us with a giant leap/step, and his fist is flying at my face. As I have been practicing, I spin and twist out of the way, dropping into a crouch, and I thrust my left leg out at his lead leg.

My eyes pop wide. I see my foot about to trip Shun, and then his leg melts and bubbles around mine, as if it’s made of liquid mercury. I struggle, but let the moment by, staying in the fight, even though part of my mind is
screaming
. Shun spins and brings his leg up and then down into a hatchet kick at my neck. I leap to the side and roll, coming up onto my feet already punching at my opponent. I feel my left jab connect briefly, but slide off as Shun twirls under my punch. My right cross punch meets only air, and I feel him shove me. I stumble, looking to where he just was, but he is now a blur moving around me faster and faster, flickering punches and kicks at me as I do my best to dodge and counter.

I realize that I hear him whispering something, but it makes no sense. His murmur becomes a chant, getting louder and louder. For all the world, it sounds like he’s saying “I stand at the Gate of the Silver Key and call to open the Gate. Yog-sothoth! Blur the Spheres of Time, and Open to Me.”

Still makes no sense. But I have bigger problems. I still can’t see Shun. I hear his voice, and feel his attacks coming, but even those appear more now to just be thrown out there, not really meant to hurt me, just a part of whatever form he’s doing. All I really see is a gray blur of iridescent spheres in the mist.

Then I’m on my knees. I think Shun may have hit me like he did that first time, out of nowhere, but I realize there is no flash of pain. But I feel weak, like I’ve been sick for days, and not eating. I look up and I can see something at the edge of the clearing. It looks like two columns that weren’t there before. I’m sure of that. They’re too out of place for me not to have seen them as soon as we got here. I waiver, and drop so I’m sitting on my feet, supporting myself with my shaking arms. My head and shoulders feel heavy, and my muscles threaten to go limp. My upper lip is wet, I realize, and I look down to see that blood is dripping from my face forming a crimson puddle under my chin.

As I watch, something more comes into view between the columns. It looks like a wrought-iron gate…and it’s swinging open. I squint, and my breath comes in pants. I force myself to keep watching. The mist in the gateway seems to whirl and coagulate into what looks like sea foam, twisting into a stretched mass of grayish…something.

“Yog-sothoth! Yog-sothoth! Yog-sothoth!” cries Shun as he continues his invisible spinning.

The something grows as lights throb and blaze from beyond. Empty sound begins to roar in my ears with deafening silence. Multicolored ball lightning bubbles out into the clearing, floating around the foggy grassy field moving opposite Shun’s dervish dance. A form materializes between the columns and a black-shrouded, impossibly tall figure steps forward, and Shun stops his whirling so suddenly I fall again, now lying on my stomach, propped up on my elbows, not allowing myself to stop watching.

Something is different about Shun, though, now that I can see him again. His hair is snow-white, and he stands with a bit of a stoop. I see him drop to his knees and open his arms wide in front of the form. The giant reaches down with a gaunt hand, and touches Shun’s forehead.

Shun stands and turns to me. He walks over and stands behind me. “I am sorry, Pete,” he whispers, and yanks me up onto my knees by the back of my collar. “But I need you for something else. If I am to keep going, I need to offer one who has glimpsed the Spheres and begins to understand. You showed such promise, but the millennia weigh heavily upon me, and I must do this if I am to continue walking the Earth.”

I’m too tired to do anything but tear up and let the tears fall. I have no strength left. Shun hoists me to my limp feet and guides me to the giant. He looks down at us, his face still hidden within the cowl he wears. The figure opens his arms, and Shun lets go of me. As I wobble and start to fall, I feel Shun’s foot shove me at the lower back, forcing me into the creature’s embrace. I drop forward into darkness.

The arms close around me and I am falling, falling.

Anger, fear, resentment drift away, and the darkness is no more.

The Gate opens.

Now I can see.

Forever
.

The Bride of the B
east

By Glynn Owen Barrass

What a hell of a place, what a god-awful hell of a place
. Robson took a nervous drag from his cigarette and squinted. The cemetery grounds were layered in mist, lying thick on the gravel path he walked down, coating the ancient, ivy smothered slabs he passed. The trees loomed like a canopy above him, allowing a ration of early morning light to filter through, and making the whole scene surreal, dreamlike, as if he hadn’t been pulled out of bed at five in the morning to come see the murders at Highgate Cemetery. He was really just back in bed, tucked up with his wife’s warm shape beside him, snoozing away for a few more hours before work.

Footsteps approached, muffled by the mist, followed by a thin shape. Balding, combover, long tan trenchcoat, mid-fifties.
Bill Hookham, good man
, Robson thought. The pathologist sucked on a cigarette, smiled around it as he stopped before Robson.

“Hey chief,” the man said. “Came looking for you. Heard your footsteps.” He removed the cigarette with one woolly-gloved hand and raised the other to shake Robson’s own.

“Bill. Always a pleasure,” Robson said, and they walked side-by-side the way Hookham had come from.

He turned to Hookham as they walked.

“So what’s it like there? Jessup was vague in his call.” Jessup, a Detective Sergeant and Robson’s assistant for three months now, was still a little wet behind the ears, but…he was a good man.

“The lad’s there already,” Hookham said, “With four of my boys and a couple of beat
bobbies. This is ugly, chief, the worst I’ve seen. Three kids naked and dead and…”

“And…” Robson looked at Hookham again.

The man sucked his cigarette to the filter and tossed it into the mist.

“Witchcraft,” he said. This one word was all Robson needed to make his day a thousand times worse.

“Oh fuck,” Robson replied.

Still with the mist, it wasn’t lifting, but at least the trees had parted, bringing more light to the scene as the pair approached an aged crypt, grey, cracked and weatherworn. Four of Hookham’s men, dressed in white coveralls, stood to the right of it, smoking. One uniform stood before a copper door green with verdigris. To the left stood Jessup in his grey suit, making notes on his pad while the other uniform spoke. The uniform nodded in Robson’s direction and Jessup turned, waved, and hurried over. Robson shook his head and tossed his cigarette, pausing to stub it out before continuing forward.

“Detective Inspector!” Jessup said, a beaming smile on his face. Early thirties, clean shaven with blonde hair a little too long for Robson’s liking, Robson gave Hookham a look that was reciprocated at the man’s unwarranted enthusiasm at a murder scene. “You should see this place!” Jessup continued, “weeping angels and gravestones shaped like dogs and pianos, and—”

“And let’s just get to the nitty gritty of it shall we?” Robson said. Hookham snickered. He approached the crypt, nodded to the surrounding men, and paused before the officer guarding the door.

“Detective Inspector,” the man stood to attention like he was in a parade.

“You might want to brace yourself sir,” said Jessup.

Robson snorted and stepped forward. The officer pushed the door open and stepped aside. “Was
the lock on the tomb forced?” he asked the officer.

“No, sir,” the man said, shaking his head.

The lintel above the door bore the name ‘De Racine.’
Spanish? Italian? Yeah, Italian
, Robson thought and went to enter.

“Oh, hey.” He felt Hookham’s arm on his sleeve, turned to see the man had retrieved a large rubber-coated torch from an open toolkit on the ground. “You’ll need this.”

“Thanks.” Robson nodded and stepped forward, pushing the door open further while finding the torch’s ‘on’ switch. The tomb interior filled with illumination, and he grimaced.

The press are going to have a field day when they hear about this
. Robson squinted his eyes shut. Footsteps behind him opened them again; Jessup squeezed passed him and cleared his throat.

Three corpses lay upon the flagstone floor, two women and a man, the male’s feet facing the door while the women’s heads did likewise. The women’s arms were positioned so that their hands, right and left respectively, touched the man’s genitalia.

The women, a long-haired blonde and a brunette, had scratches across their exposed stomachs, swirls and dots and triangles. The man, long brown hair, moustache and sideburns, had a pentagram painted across his stomach, a pentagram in a circle done in either red paint, or blood. It shone in the artificial illumination, so unless it was still fresh Robson guessed the former.

Jessup cleared his throat again and stepped further into the tomb. “Looks like the, um, residents weren’t interfered with,” he said. “You remember that thing some years back? The vampire scare? You don’t think this is connected, do you?”

Oh, great, this just gets better
. “Hope to God, not,” Robson said. He raised the torch and shone it upon the walls. Alcoves holding old dusty coffins, dead, mummified flowers tucked in around them, no vandalism upon the walls, no witchcraft graffiti. “The surviving De Racine’s will be so happy,” he muttered, and stepped forward, kneeling before the recently dead. A dark, ugly bruise lay around the blonde woman’s neck. He turned the torch to the other woman. Same thing, and he found the same on the man’s throat.

“Death by strangulation, the pathologist’s first guess,” Jessup said.

Robson nodded, looked to the marks on the women’s chests and the pentagram.
I’ll want photographs of those
. “You know what, Jessup?” he said and dusted his knees before standing.

“What sir?”

“I really wish I was still in bed.”

“So, old chap. You see the reason for quiet and caution in this case?”

Robson nodded at Chief Superintendent Strange’s words. He’d been getting it in the ear for two hours now; he prayed they were nearly done. Strange – balding, white hair, handlebar moustache with a hint of sandy brown within the grey, was an old private school boy with a clipped accent that constantly intimated the words: “I am better than you.” Dandruff dusted the shoulders of his black suit jacket; not for the first time Robson quelled the urge to tell his superior to dust himself down.

“The press have been very reasonable, since the last trouble at Highgate.”

Robson nodded again.

“So please, no leaks from your men, or it’ll be someone’s meat for the grinder.”

Robson had turned his attention to Strange’s desk; elaborate, old, like the man himself. These words had him lifting his gaze to send
Strange a steely-eyed stare.