The Weird Company (35 page)

“What’s that?” queried Hartwell.

Mister Ys raised his hands up in a gesture of frustration. “I don’t know,” he confessed, and a smile crossed his face. It was the first positive emotion I had ever seen him express. “It’s exhilarating isn’t it? Not knowing what’s going to happen next, it makes me feel so alive.”

CHAPTER 24

From the Account of Robert Martin Olmstead
“A Return to Kingsport Head”

It took hours to construct a machine to open a passage that would take us from the Antarctic to Kingsport Head. Ys and Carter did most of the work, under the supervision of one of the Ulthareon. The other four left us to travel to other parts of the city, to inspect and repair the damage that had slowly built up over the years. Hartwell offered to show them the room full of their dead brothers, but when he stepped forward the cats took up a defensive posture and Hartwell retreated, choosing instead to tend to the still-unconscious Elwood.

I on the other hand tried to talk to Asenath, but something was wrong. Every time she let her mind drift her form became soft and she lost cohesion. As long as she thought of nothing but herself, she stayed as she was, but any deviation from that and her limbs grew soft and her flesh waxy. It took a supreme effort to maintain her form, and if she were to do that she had no room in her mind for other thoughts, including me.

Instead I found myself watching Carter and Ys as they assembled the gate machine. It was intricate work, more art and magic than science. The parts had been scattered around the factory floor, and I found it ironic that the shoggoths did not know what they had, and had spent their time instead building the rocket. I must have commented on this out loud, for Carter supplied an explanation of sorts. Such a technology was forbidden to the shoggoths, they were literally blind to it. Their minds could not understand it, their sensors could not see it, or the parts that made it. If they were to inadvertently enter a gate their very structure would collapse, driven to destruction by their mind’s failure to understand what was happening. At least that was how most shoggoths had been programmed. At this he seemed to scowl at Mister Ys.

Ys shrugged and seemed to take the comment personally. “The proscription against such a thing was forgotten by the Yith, it was a mistake, one we continue to regret and suffer from. We are and have been apologetic.” Ys had reverted back to his unemotional self.

“Apologetic, you create an entirely new species of shoggoth able to move through space on its own, one that hates the Yith and the Q’Hrell, and is willing to cross space to gain vengeance. Your flying polyps are patient and they’ve pursued you and yours across the galaxy. You’ve led them a merry chase, but they are getting closer every century, and in the meanwhile they lay waste to whatever Q’Hrell world they stumble upon. I suspect they are here on Earth already, waiting for you. Like I said, they are patient, I think they know about your plan to leap into Earth’s far future and they are going to be prepared for your arrival.”

“We are prepared for interference. We have prepared options, alternatives, divergences, preferred lines of sequences. There are levels of existence that we would prefer to avoid, but we would have no regrets moving into them.”

“No,” when Carter said it that word sounded like a curse, “I suppose you wouldn’t.”

“Have you noticed Mr. Olmstead?” Hartwell was whispering in my ear.

“Noticed what?”

“Chandraputra-Carter-Zkauba, whatever you call him, when he speaks he no longer makes that weird clicking noise. Isn’t that curious?”

He was right. “What do you think it means?”

“I don’t know, but it would be interesting to find out don’t you think?”

I shook my head and stared at Hartwell with my lidless eyes. “I think that there are some things even we weren’t meant to know.” I left the good doctor staring at the two bickering aliens and found a quiet place to lay my head and get some sleep, or something that resembled it.

It was apparent when the time finally came, for the air within the gate machine suddenly became soft and hazy. A crack in reality formed and it spread, widening into a gap large enough for even Carter to fit through. Within that space I could see a sloping landscape covered with trees overlooking the sea. Beyond that were the lights of Kingsport. We were being sent home, and I was glad of it, but at the same time I had the feeling that we were being dismissed, like children who had brought an unpleasant situation to the attention of a parent, and were now being sent to their room. This feeling grew as the five Q’Hrell who made up the Ulthareon seemed to strut and preen as their strange whistling voices seemed to urge us on in a way that wasn’t at all supportive.

Carter went first, the fabric of the universe swallowed him up, like he had slipped into a pool of water. It moved him. That strange gated tunnel, it moved him through space and took him from where he was with us, across the world to more familiar and hospitable surroundings. He waved at us from over there, and beckoned us to join him. It was Hartwell who went next and the doctor stumbled as he ran through, sprinting from Antarctica to Kingsport. Carter caught him as he came through, and steadied the doctor on the slope beyond. Asenath chuckled at the sight of the slender doctor being manhandled by the giant alien.

It was Asenath’s turn to go next, and she did so with some hesitation, turning to look at me for some modicum of support and reassurance. I however had gone toward the other end of the room to fetch the body of our still-unconscious colleague Frank Elwood. I caught her eye and saw a look of sheer terror suddenly came across her face. It was a look that told me that something was wrong. I scanned the room and saw what had sent Asenath into a panic. Across the ceiling, creeping, thin and black, were dozens of shoggoths and by the look of them they were not there at the behest of their masters.

Asenath began to move toward me, but instead I screamed her name and ran toward her. As I did the shoggoths began to fall from above, and the cats, taken by surprise, were suddenly in a pitched battle for their own survival. I grabbed Ys by the shoulder and ordered him to get Elwood. Then I flung myself toward Asenath and launched the two of us through the gate.

Asenath wrapped me in her arms. Her breath was ragged and I could smell blood as she told me to hold on. We stepped kata, or at least she did. We moved, but it was not left or right or forward or back. It was a direction I did not know, which I could not see, but which seemed to be perfectly natural, as if it had always been there, just out of sight. As if a blind spot in my mind had prevented me from seeing it my entire life.

The space within the gate was a shock, and I lack the words to describe the space itself, but I could see the things that were in it, the things that intruded, and the things that were outside. I could see the buildings, but their structure was porous, and flimsy like a mist, Asenath was a tetrahedron of some sort, shining violet, with spikes of green. There were other things here, more organic in appearance, strange fusions of titanic echinoderms and arthropods that scattered as we moved amongst them. Yet of all the strangeness that I saw in that place, perhaps the strangest was that of the shoggoths themselves. I could see them, and in some ways they were not unlike the porous walls and floors of the building itself. Yet where the building had some substance in the in-between space, the shoggoths had none. Indeed they seemed to be entirely non-dimensional, unable to intrude into where we had gone, and therefore appeared as little more than troublesome pinpricks. Where they had been massive and terrifying in normal space, here they were little more than gnats, waiting to be snuffed out with a single casual act. I reached out, ready to dispatch one of them, when Asenath began screaming. The transition through the gate was tearing her apart, we had forgotten she was little more than a shoggoth, and Carter had warned us that shoggoths were incapable of passing through gates, their minds wouldn’t allow it. I spun her around, twisted both of us, and pushed back into the world.

I turned and looked through the gate. There was a pitched battle being fought between shoggoths and cats, and through it all Ys was bringing a semi-conscious Elwood to the gate. As he approached, the Ulthareon suddenly became excited. The emissary came forward, the thing seemed to be eager, and was waving its tentacles around in a tizzy. Its wings were shifting colors, cycling through deep ochres and vibrant yellows. The alien lord nearly threw Ys out of the way as it enveloped Elwood in its thick appendages. It examined him, ran its feelers over his head and neck, and then the colors changed. Then it grew in intensity, becoming a wild, almost rabid frenzy. I cried out and made a move to intervene, but Asenath stopped me. Ys was screaming something, something I couldn’t understand, the gate didn’t allow for the transfer of sound, but it was clear something horrific was happening.

The other four Q’Hrell moved forward. In my head I could imagine that the chorus was discordant, but at the same time strangely unified. I watched as the cohort of aliens surrounded a frightened and confused Elwood. Ys had backed away, and was now almost to the door, but the battling cats and shoggoths barred his passage. All five things were touching Elwood, stroking him, their wings flexing and screaming with colors. On the far side of the gate, I could not hear the song but somehow I knew that it had grown even louder. The five aliens had enveloped Elwood in a network of tentacles. A lattice enveloped his head and neck, it seemed to merge with his skin, to create a bridge between the man and the monsters that had for some reason become fascinated with him. But fascinated was the wrong word. The Q’Hrell were obsessed with him, and that obsession was unhealthy. There was still no sound but Elwood’s body was wracked with pain, his head was thrown back, his mouth was open, and I knew he was screaming.

The gate was closing, and as it did the ability to see what was happening on the other end began to fade. Asenath and the others didn’t see what I saw. Maybe they didn’t want to, or maybe it was just a matter of perspective, or perhaps my extended senses. Whatever the reason, it was only I that saw the tentacles tighten around Elwood’s neck. It was only I that saw it, but I wish I hadn’t. Even Hartwell turned away, as if he knew what was going to happen. When they did it, they did it quickly. They took his head off, it tore cleanly, like a cork coming out of a wine bottle. The gate collapsed completely, but not soon enough. Not soon enough to prevent me from seeing those five monsters tear apart Elwood’s still-screaming head. Tear it apart and then take the pieces and devour them, hungrily.

CHAPTER 25

From the Account of Robert Martin Olmstead
“The End of Things”

There were five of us who had gone up the Kingsport Head, and only four of us who came down. Our adventure, our mission, had cost us dearly. We had lost Elwood, and his death had a profound impact on us all, Hartwell most of all. Carter was also mourning the loss of his ship. The rest of us thought of it simply as a machine, but Carter had spent millennia traveling with it, he had somehow grown attached, and even spoke of it as if it were alive, possessed of some sort of personality. I laughed at the idea, but Asenath assured me that such a thing was entirely possible, that machines could have not only personalities, but even souls.

Carter, whose knowledge of Kingsport had procured us a place to recuperate in safety and peace, was mourning his loss, but was taking some solace in the fact that he had rescued both his armor and his queer book from the wreckage. He spent his days rebuilding the mask and outfit of his Chandraputra disguise. He was still an ancient alien, perhaps the last of his kind, trapped on Earth, surrounded by humans for whom he felt kinship, but knew that they could not be trusted. He needed to be able to move about the world once more, and the persona of Swami Chandraputra supplied that.

When Asenath talked about a machine having a soul she made it clear that she considered herself a prime example. After all, the shoggoth mass that she was in possession of was simply a kind of biological machine. Asenath called it a proto-shoggoth, and was concerned that without the proper routine of maintenance, and a strong personality to exert control, the mass of flesh would begin to degenerate and collapse, eventually dissolving into a mass of decomposing tissue. Hartwell and she worked on training her how to sustain herself, but she would need a way to regenerate her tissues regularly. Not surprisingly, Asenath said she knew of a place not too far away.

As for my relationship with Asenath, it became strained. She became distant, uncommunicative and quick to anger. She didn’t seem particularly upset with me, but rather more frustrated than anything else. One afternoon it all came to a head and Asenath revealed what was troubling her so much. She had told me once that when it came to the magics of the universe there was a masculine and feminine side to things, and that when she had been Ephraim she had wielded a considerable amount of power. As Asenath she had wielded a different kind of power, not lesser, but simply different. Now, even though she maintained the same outward appearance, the universe seemed to know. She was not human, at least not in the strictest sense, and therefore neither male nor female. It seemed that passing through gates wasn’t the only thing that shoggoths couldn’t do. The whole situation made her feel desperate, inhuman, less than real. For the first time in centuries she could not feel the power that she had wielded and that frightened her. Until she resolved that issue she had no right, no need, no desire to have any kind of relationship with me.

As the days turned to weeks, and our wounds healed, Asenath’s hold over us grew weaker, and a great sense of restlessness came over us. I took to writing this account of our adventure, and pressed both Hartwell and Carter to supply me chapters. Asenath refused to have any part of it, but I remembered her tale and told it for her. It was Carter who finally suggested the end of things. The Weird Company had done what it set out to do, what it had been charged with. It was time to end its commission. Asenath protested, suggesting that given our disparate abilities, that more might be accomplished, that we could become a kind of adventuring company. The idea had its attractions, but the loss of Elwood could not be denied, and in the end we all decided, though somewhat reluctantly, to dissolve our partnership.