The Weird Company (29 page)

“Thank providence for small favors,” muttered Hartwell. At our incredulous looks at his callous comment he took umbrage. “For years I suffered under your oppressive control, did your bidding and your dirty work. It’s nice to see you cowed for once.”

Ys turned away, but Asenath called after him. “Did you think this would be easy Mister Ys? Did you think that you could come to this place and not face obstacles? For all your planning and plotting you are just as vulnerable to the whims of chance as any one of us. You and your kind, so pretentious, so haughty, but it’s all an act isn’t it? Take away the advanced science, and the foreknowledge, and what do you have? Just a man, just a man like anybody else.”

Asenath had shamed the time-traveling alien mind, and in doing so had re-established herself as the dominant factor in our little party. In that one outburst, that one rant, Asenath Waite had wrested control from Mister Ys and once more become the leader of the Weird Company. What’s more is that she resumed her mantle as if she had never lost it. It was as if we were back in Arkham, in her great hall, and she was barking orders, and cajoling us to join her on her fool’s quest. This time however, instead of looking at her with reticence and loathing, I saw her through eyes that were tinged with something else, and I marveled at her prowess and ability.

“Tell me Mister Ys,” Asenath was not done with the man yet, “how exactly did you come to be here? Gedney was dead, and yet here you are inhabiting the body of what I suspect is something akin to one of Dr. Hartwell’s experiments. You’ve even crudely bandaged yourself, but to what end?”

Ys turned and there was a calm venomous look in his eyes. “We have many strategies Kamog, more than you could possibly understand. Number nine has to do with the reanimation of the recent dead, a process we can accomplish from the depths of space or even across the millennia. The resurrection of Gedney so that I could occupy his body was a trifling matter. As for the bandage, I thought it would garner a sense of compassion, and ingratiate myself with you and yours.”

He tried to continue but Asenath cut him off. “Shut your mouth you deceitful creature. I don’t know why you are here, or what you want but you’re here now, and I have to deal with you. We are here for a reason, to put an end to the shoggoth threat, you will assist us. You will follow my orders, and you will help the entire team accomplish our goals. If you do not, or if you put any of the team in danger, or fail to properly protect them I will kill Gedney’s body.” She paused and let what she had said sink in. “I know what happens to Yith when the bodies they inhabit are destroyed before they are properly extracted. I have no qualms about letting that happen to you. Do you understand me?”

Her demand was met with a reluctant but definite yes.

“We’ve been wounded and waylaid. We are going to take some time to recover and heal. We’re also going to come up with a plan of attack, using the mapping machine over there. Dr. Hartwell, are you capable of producing more of that reagent?”

He nodded. “I know where there is a cache of dead Q’Hrell that I can harvest the ingredients from.”

“You and Elwood will be responsible for that. Carter, you will do something that you should be quite used to. Somewhere in this city is a gateway to the Q’Hrell’s virtual world. You will find that gate and descend once more into the Dreamlands. There I expect you to find the allies we need, whoever or whatever they are.” She didn’t even bother to look for confirmation, and instead turned to look at me. “Olmstead and I will find where the shoggoth’s are staging their operations and attempt to assess the situation. As soon as the rest of you are able you shall join us.”

“What about me, what shall I do?” It was Ys that was asking, and his tone wasn’t its usual flavor of imperial haughtiness.

Asenath smiled and in a sweet, almost loving voice responded, “Mister Ys, I thought that would be obvious. You’re going to go with Carter, and meet with your own kind.” She was still smiling as she added, “I wonder what they’ll think of you?”

CHAPTER 18

The Statement of Dr. Stuart Hartwell
“The Blood of the Progenitors”

I write this at the bequest of Mr. Robert Olmstead who I suppose is searching for some sort of closure. Of all of us, and I say this understanding the irony, he is perhaps the most human. He has spent his days documenting our adventure, remembering what he can of his recruitment, of his rescue of Frank Elwood, of our excursion to Antarctica and our less than triumphant return. That five of us began that journey and only four of us returned seems to have had a profound impact on the young man. That he was not with Elwood and me when we went to collect the circulatory fluid of the Q’Hrell leaves young Olmstead with a knowledge gap that he seems uncomfortable with. He’s looking for an explanation for what happened. He thinks that there might be a clue to what happened in the time that we were below. I think he is wrong, but I’m willing to help him see that in his own way, in his own time.

Just hours after his rescue, Elwood’s recovery, accelerated by the factor I had isolated from the Q’Hrell, was nearly complete. Using the mapping device we located the three areas that each team would need to investigate. The entry way to what Carter called the Dreamlands was deep in one of the central towers, beneath a honeycomb of chambers filled with dormant Q’Hrell. Most of these chambers were indicated as being sealed, and impossible to open. One section however indicated that it had been penetrated, the seals degraded and the residents within, dozens of Q’Hrell, had all expired. There was an indication that something was still alive within that chamber, but what it was the machine could not seem to define. The third destination was some kind of massive chamber within which swarmed an ever-changing number of shoggoths. Thankfully this location was in the same tower complex as the places the other teams were going, though forty-five levels higher. Olmstead commented that at least we were lucky, given the size of the city, that all our objectives were in the same complex. Ys didn’t think it was luck, instead he suggested that the entryway to the Dreamlands and the associated Dreaming Chambers were the reason that the shoggoths had set up their operations in the tower above. The gateway and the chambers were the primary users of the energy still being generated. Indeed, when it came to energy, the complex in question had primacy over all others. Whatever the shoggoths were doing, it seemed they needed a secure source of power.

Committed as we were to Asenath’s plan, the six of us made our way to the tower which contained our targets. We had expected some resistance, that as we travelled we would be beset by monsters, but there was nothing. Perhaps we had seen enough horrors, perhaps the universe was finally allowing things to go our way, or it could simply be that the shoggoths did not see us as a threat. Such a conclusion seemed to fly in the face of logic. Elwood had previously been attacked and replaced, and it seemed that our opponents knew about us, enough perhaps to dismiss us as a danger.

When we finally came to the central shaft we bid farewell to our teammates and Waite and Olmstead went up, Carter and Ys went deep, and Elwood and I went down to the Dreaming Chambers.

As we walked along those gently sloping paths Elwood took the time to apologize to me for being caught by the shoggoth and allowing himself to be mimicked. “The thing was obsessed with trying to learn how to step outside. I think it was the only thing that kept me alive, him wanting me to teach him my trick.”

“Did you?”

“How could I, I don’t even know how I do it, I just do.” His voice was full of frustration. “I suppose it was a gift of a sort, from poor Walter. He is the one who figured all this out, or did he? Perhaps like myself Walter was gifted with his ability from someone else. Perhaps it is infectious. I caught it from Walter, and Walter from that hag Keziah Mason. Could it be Doctor, that the ability to move through space and time can be passed from one man to another as others pass the common cold?”

I pondered my friend’s theory for a moment. “I suppose anything is possible. I didn’t used to think so, but that was when I was younger, before medical school, before my parents were killed, before I followed in the footsteps of Herbert West.” I let loose a cynical laugh. “If you had told me that a boy from Arkham could study medicine, and grow up to battle monsters in the polar wastes I would have called you mad. Yet here I am, far, far from home, up to my neck in what most men would call madness, ready to act the hero and do battle against monsters.”

Elwood stopped in his tracks and stared at me with those strange violet eyes. He seemed to be assessing me, trying to take my measure. “Do you really think that? You and I, we’ve done terrible, monstrous things. I let Gilman die, you experimented with death itself and in the process you may have been responsible for the death of millions. That night at the hospital, we both did horrible things just to save ourselves and cover up the truth. But here and now, in this place, are we heroes Doctor?”

I put my arm around the young man who seemed not so young anymore. “I think so my friend.” I told him as we walked. “I think here in this place, at the very end of the world, if we cannot find redemption, then perhaps we were never villains in the first place.”

The rest of the journey was made in silence, which suited me, for I did not wish to explain why I had not noticed that he had been replaced, though I did feel a pang of guilt for that particular failure. I did wish that Elwood would find it within himself to try and move into the in-between. This was something he was loathe to do, not so much because of his experience with the Hounds of Tindalos, but rather because within the walls of this alien city, with its weird geometries and energies, and the extra-dimensional Vugg-Shoggog pulsating in the sky, moving through that realm was uncomfortable to say the least. He had difficulty putting it into words, the best he could do was suggest that the weird geometries made his brain ache and his stomach hurt. I didn’t press the issue, though if he had been able to do it our journey might have been shortened significantly.

By the time we made it to the damaged Dreaming Chamber my nerves had become unsettled. The weird, sourceless light that seemed omnipresent within the complex had grown dimmer as we had descended, and was now little more than a pale, featureless glow that only let us see for a dozen feet or so. With this came the inevitable auditory hallucinations, of things shuffling and sliding about in the dark. There was that eerie feeling that we were being watched, perhaps even stalked, and I remembered those weird symbols on the map that faded in and out suggesting that something was alive in that dread space.

As we had expected the seal on the chamber door was broken and the great five-fold gate was ajar, not much but enough that both Elwood and I could slip through the gap. As soon as we had it was apparent that we were not the first to penetrate the interior, for the sleepers within had all been assaulted. I counted twenty-five of the pentaradial aliens known as the Q’Hrell, and all of them had been decapitated. The heads had been piled up in a corner of the room, but the bodies had been mostly left to sit inside a kind of cradling cage of wire mesh and lights which once must have been an elegant construct, but now seemed decrepit with damage and age.

“I thought you said that shoggoths didn’t devour the Q’Hrell,” commented Elwood. He had noticed, as I had, that something had molested not only the severed heads of the Q’Hrell, breaking open the outer integument and tearing out the inner membranes, organs and musculature, but had done the same to a number of the bodies of well.

I approached one of the closer bodies and examined the lacerations. There were on the bodies puncture wounds, heavily concentrated in the soft areas where the tentacles and wings joined the body. Some of these were so numerous that they had eventually merged and become large enough for me to insert my entire hand within the body cavity. It was through these holes that the internal organs and flesh had been removed. The scene reminded me of bodies I had seen on the fields of war, ones in which dogs and carrion birds had torn into to get at the tender bits within. I shuddered at the thought of what might have happened here. “We should get what we need and get out of here.”

With Elwood’s help I found several bodies that had not yet been eviscerated and using a makeshift knife and some metallic tubing I began the process of exsanguination on the first of the corpses. Q’Hrell blood is not like that of humans or other earthly life, and even after death tends to persist in a liquid form. Consequently even on these dead individuals the process of gathering their vital fluids was not unlike that of a butcher draining a slaughtered pig or chicken, a practice I had helped my father and grandfather with many times. We transferred the green fluid from the collection basin to large metallic carafes, which could be sealed. For these containers we had rigged up a primitive set of tubes, nozzles and bladders that allowed us to spray the stuff in either a powerful jet, or a gentle mist.

We worked as best we could in the dark, quietly too, whispering directions to each other as if our lives depended on it. These actions were taken because of the ever-growing sensation that we were not alone. The auditory hallucinations were growing more frequent, Elwood could hear something dragging along the floor, and I kept hearing a swift, almost secretive kind of chirp, not unlike that of a cricket, though swifter and harder to locate the source. Our paranoia kept growing and as we filled container after container our pace quickened and we began warning each other about the inevitable.

Then it happened. I handed a metal carafe to Elwood, one for which he was not yet prepared. He juggled it, one handed, mostly suspending it in the air in a kind of controlled chaos that vanished when his other hand came into play, as did one of mine. The shiny tubular container flipped end over end as it travelled through the air toward the floor. Elwood dove after it, his fingers catching one of the edges, but all that accomplished was to change the spin and tumble it further out of our reach.