The Weird Company (33 page)

That pattern of moving from world to world and taking with them choice individuals had over the millennia transformed the Yith into a kind of hegemony, and while the original Q’Hrell still held all the positions of leadership, they had long ago passed into a minority status. The Yith were not a single species, but rather a community sharing a single philosophy, one that included species great and small. Ys may have thought of himself as part of the Yithian culture, but his subconscious still remembered that once, millions of years ago, he had been nothing more than one of the globular things that roamed their planet on a myriad of thick, plastic tentacles, and here in this place that memory was all that mattered.

The concept of the Yithian hegemony was not unknown to me, for it had been repeated throughout human history by the Persians, the Romans, the Chinese, the British, and probably many forgotten others. It seems the tendency to build a nation beyond one’s own tribe was not simply a human trait, or perhaps it was one we had inherited from those who had made us. The Deep Ones, Man, the Yith, we were all in one way or another descendants of the Q’Hrell. Even the shoggoths were just distant cousins, which I suppose made the battle we were contemplating a family affair. That may have been why the Other Gods, who were little more than avatars of various cohorts of the Q’Hrell that still dreamed in the ancient city, were reluctant to act.

I looked around the gardened alleyway as a kitten rubbed against my leg demanding attention. As I picked her up and began to stroke her I casually commented on how when the shoggoths invaded the Earth, the Dreamlands would be lost as well, depopulated by the destruction of the human race.

Ys made a weird noise, which I realized was the equivalent of a Martian laugh. “You think that matters to them? You are still under the impression that this place, the Dreamlands as you call them, is yours, that it is something for Men. Have you ever considered that this place was here long before your species, and will be here long after? After all that you have been through, you still think anthropocentrically. The Dreamlands stretch beyond your world and encompass the other realms of the solar system including Yaksh, VarSuwm, L’gy’hx and even the haunted remnants of shattered Thyoph. How arrogant of you to think that this is your playground. The laws of physics and magics that bind this place were written by the Q’Hrell and are that way for a reason. They serve those who wrote them, and those species whom the builders favor. Man is trapped to a single world, and will struggle to move beyond it. Doesn’t that suggest to you that you and yours aren’t a favored race?”

The setting sun cast long shadows down the streets of Ulthar. All around us we could hear the click-clack of shopkeepers closing up shop and their patrons scurrying home like rats before the last of the sun died. Not long after came the reversing clack-click of a different set of shopkeepers opening up for the night, and the shuffling steps of their clientele came on the cobblestone streets. The lamplighter came by, a song in his heart and a flame in his hand, and with him came the cats, the lords of the city. They called Ulthar the City of Cats, and it was said this was because within its walls no man may harm a cat. While this was a fine title for the city, the legend was mere folklore, conjured up out of the past to explain things that men could not understand. I thought I knew the truth, knew that the old texts had been mistranslated. That Ulthar was not the City of Cats, but the Cat City.

As furry things both large and small, fat and thin, black and white and all the shades and kinds between gathered around my feet, my eyes focused on the calico kitten that had fallen asleep in my lap. I scratched it behind the ears and it stretched and purred in response.

“Ys,” I asked thoughtfully, “are there cats on Mars?”

Ys snorted. “All the planets have cats of a kind. The cats of Saturn are lean, multihued things composed of dust and light. Those of Uranus are thick, craggy beasts who are slow to act, but tenacious once they start. The Cats of Mars are tentacled things, with large eyes, six legs and rasping mouths.” He paused. “Why do you ask Carter?”

I whispered into the ear of the kitten, and it purred and coiled deeper into his lap. “Would you say that cats are a favored species?”

Ys looked at me and at the multitude of cats that had gathered around my feet. “Are you a friend to cats?” There was a touch of panic in his voice. “Do they know you? Are you known to them?” He crossed the space between us purposefully and crouched down in front of me.

I laid the small kitten to the side and watched as it curled up into a ball and purred. I reached out and touched a wall, stroked it gently. Ys watched and his eyes grew wide. I found a depression in the wall and I whispered into it, repeating the plea that I had made to the Gods on Kadath.

“Don’t,” said Ys, but his words fell on deaf ears. He turned and ran, dodging cats as his three legs pounded against the stones of the streets. He was screaming as he ran, but I ignored his pleas to stop. I kept talking, whispering to the city walls telling them my story. It was a long story, but it was the first story that the city had heard in a long time. As I spoke the walls of the city began to tremble; towers bent, and ancient buildings twisted. The residents of Ulthar, the human residents, were panicking, but I ignored their plight. I stroked a low wall and watched it bristle and then begin to hum. An ebony minaret, one that had stood for a thousand years, suddenly became soft and laid down on the street. There it writhed and hummed happily.

Ulthar the Cat City was purring as I pleaded my case.

CHAPTER 22

From the Account of Robert Martin Olmstead
“The Hand of Elwood”

As Asenath and I helped Hartwell down the wall, Elwood opened up a door inside one of the shoggoths that had imprisoned us. It crumpled in on itself, wounded but not terribly so, more in shock than anything else. It stirred as Elwood marched through and made a weak attempt to grasp its attacker, but as Hartwell gained his footing he turned and sprayed the creature with the some of his mixture. The poor thing thrashed and screeched as it foamed up and died under the influence of the chemical, leaving nothing but a burning, bubbling mass of sludge.

Our escape had gone unnoticed, and we took a moment and accessed the situation. There were still five shoggoths working on their squid-like craft, and extensive progress had been made. The interior seemed complete, and the last few hull plates were being fitted into place. It would only be a matter of moments before the thing would be complete. I suggested that we wait for Mister Ys and Carter to return, but both Hartwell and Asenath seemed eager to engage the enemy. We already knew that the engines were operational, a launch seemed imminent. Once the thing was airborne it would be impossible to stop. An immediate confrontation was needed to put an end to the work. In the end Elwood agreed that we needed to attack, and so we made preparations to do so.

We made our way to the shadowy part of the factory floor. The shoggoths took no notice of us, and indeed had never bothered to check on their companions who had been assigned to deal with us. This lack of follow-up could be attributed to either a complete sense of confidence in their fellow, or a kind of out-of-sight-out-of-mind mentality. We had been seen, and dealt with, and were no longer a threat until we were seen again. Either way, it was a flaw in their nature that we were going to take advantage of.

Unfortunately, fighting shoggoths isn’t like fighting people. You can’t sneak up on a shoggoth and hit a vital spot to prevent them from raising the alarm, and then move on to the next target. Killing a shoggoth, as I had learned, is messy business; now four of us were going to attempt to kill five of the creatures, and I wasn’t entirely sure that it was possible. Hartwell, who had some experience in such matters, had laid out a plan to maximize our advantages, and the impact of our assault. The core portion of the plan of attack was for Elwood to draw the attention of the monsters and once more lead them to a particular place, in this case a corner, and then step outside to safety. The others would attack from behind, cornering them and preventing them from attacking us on multiple fronts. It was a good plan, at least I thought so.

Elwood took off at a run, moving across the factory floor as fast as he could, dodging through piles of materials and catching the attention of every shoggoth as he recited the Star Spangled Banner at the top of his lungs. Every few steps he would move outside, disappear for a second and then reappear just a few steps ahead. It was like watching a film which was jumping or missing scenes. I cracked a smile as he began adding a series of gymnastic moves to his course: jumping at a pile of material that he couldn’t possibly clear, vanishing and then reappearing on the other side, and rolling into a kind of weird tumble. It may have looked like fun but it was deadly serious, and when he cart-wheeled into the in-between my eyes caught a flash of something else in the crack, something large, with flashing teeth. When he emerged he was cut, not badly, but something had hurt him. Suddenly he wasn’t playing anymore, and as the shoggoths fell in line behind him he used his talent less and less, and for shorter distances as well. For their part the shoggoths were resorting to the standard practice of shooting tentacles at the poor man, which given their lack of communication and coordination, became something of a comedic exercise as their limbs collided with each other, and they rolled one over the other in a kind of horrific scrum. But as Elwood approached the designated corner, he vanished once more and as we tracked his trajectory we waited for him to appear, but he did not. We waited with bated breath searching the corner for him to appear, but instead the shoggoths flooded in and piled up like a derailed freight train.

Asenath raised her hand to give the order to attack, when the most horrific and pitiful of screams broke out. Elwood had appeared, and while he was in the corner, he was a good twenty feet up the wall, and covered with blue slime and blood. At first I thought he was hanging on to a break in the wall, but then I realized there was nothing for him to hang on to, and what was keeping him in place was the fact that he had rematerialized where he shouldn’t have, and his hand was literally imbedded inside the wall. He shuddered and then went limp, and I assumed that he was in horrific agony, either from the pain of being partly encased in the wall, or from the wounds he had suffered as a result of what was most likely an attacking hound.

The image stunned all of us, including Hartwell, and our hesitation allowed the shoggoths to react before we did. Unbound by any normal physiology, the monstrous amoeboid things slowly began creeping up the wall toward our injured ally. The image of the slimy things creeping up the wall motivated Asenath and she ordered Hartwell and me to attack.

We rushed forward from where we were hiding, and while Hartwell and Asenath began spraying the gathered shoggoths with the blood of the Progenitors I used my preternatural strength to claw my way up the wall to where Elwood hung limp.

I pulled at the body of our injured colleague. Our attack had drawn the attention of most of the shoggoths, but one still seemed to be intent on attacking Elwood. It streamed up the wall in great globs of slime, avoiding our attack and mounting multiple fronts as it spread out across the wall. I did my best to vanquish these attacks, but it was a losing proposition, and faced with the possibility of either Elwood or myself falling to the enemy, I did the only thing that could be done. With a swift and precise strike from one of my great claws I sliced through Elwood’s arm like a hot knife through soft butter. Elwood screamed once and then again went limp as I slung him over my shoulder and carried him to safety. I looked for blood, but there was none. The interior of the stump was devoid of flesh and bone, there was within only a kind of inky blackness that howled and smoked. Indeed from the wall where Elwood’s hand was imbedded the short stump was giving off thin wisps of smoke-like ash.

Hartwell and Asenath were carefully using the spray guns, hitting individual targets with short controlled bursts of the stuff that sent their targets into convulsions. These shoggoths were smarter than the ones we had fought before. They created thin shields of material that could be sloughed off after it had been exposed to the doctor’s formula. They also kept dividing into more and more autonomous units, drawing our attention in more directions. We had destroyed, or incapacitated about half the total mass of shoggoths, but where there had once been five large creatures, there were now twenty or so smaller ones, and they had taken on a wide variety of horrific forms. In succession I watched Asenath kill things that looked like giant scorpions, tentacled slugs, and even a kind of horned beetle. The fact that there were no reptilian, avian, or mammalian creatures in the shoggoth repertoire did not go unnoticed, but at the time I had no inclination to ponder the meaning of such an observation.

Hartwell and Asenath were holding their own, but their progress was slim, and with each passing moment I knew we were at risk of one of the monsters breaking through and overpowering us. Depositing Elwood in a relatively safe spot, I joined the fray, my claws cutting through the shoggoth-things and leaving a trail of parts struggling to reconnect themselves from their disrupted tissues. Gore flew about us we waded into them, and Hartwell and Asenath fell in behind me to clean up and dispatch the more mobile pieces. Working together it took only moments for us to reduce the shoggoths to little more than jellied muck quivering in the corner of the factory floor.

Elwood was still unconscious, the wounds he had suffered from the marauding hound were bloody, but only superficial. Hartwell assured us that he would recover, albeit with the loss of his left hand. As for what had happened internally, Hartwell could not say. It was as if he was no longer made of matter, but rather filled with some weird kind of dark energy. We did our best to make him comfortable and then sat down to rest and plan our next move. Based on what we could see, we had just eliminated only about half of the shoggoths that had been present in the factory room. The others, we reasoned, must not be far, and while we had fared well with this batch, the others were more intelligent, and therefore more dangerous. Ys and Carter were still out there, but their ability to find assistance was unknown. We had to make this room defensible, and more importantly, we had to destroy the squid-like craft that had nearly been completed.