SANITY LINE
Episode 04 - Immersion
If there was a cell in Niles Clatyon’s body that didn’t wish for death at this one particular moment, he couldn’t find it. Nothing was good about this situation. He hadn’t experienced such a severe hangover since his Academy days, and he knew for damn certain he couldn’t have drank nearly as much last night as he had back in those days. Ignoring for a moment his liver probably would have given out, it was difficult to conceive of having spent that much money at a bar, with drink prices several dozen-fold greater than the retail.
No, something was wrong. He had a memory – a sea of stars, the bitter taste of leather, a sharp pain in his neck that seemed to have transformed into a dull ache across his entire body. What the hell was he sleeping on, stone?
He snapped awake. It was dark, pitch dark, and is often the case of modern man without his devices, he had no sense of the time. He supposed it could still have been night. The surface beneath him was coarse, cold, and gritty, solid as cement, which he suspected it may well have been.
Though it was tempting to assume he had passed out in an alleyway somewhere, that did nothing to explain the abject lack of lighting. Instinctively, he rose to a low crouch and waited, remaining very still. He had a lighter in his pocket, but he knew from one-too-many bad soldiering novels that that would do more to illuminate him than his surroundings. Just now, he had the sense he wasn’t where he was supposed to be, and that meant it wasn’t the best idea in the world to just assume he was alone, or that the people who were around didn’t want to harm him. Not out of any malice, necessary – whoever had wanted to hurt him by putting him in this situation could easily have killed him themselves – but just out of indiscriminate violent behavior, which the detective considered the backbone of the violently criminal mindset.
And there were others. He could make out their voices, dimly, and they provided the narrative for his exploration of the only passageway leading from his spot, which he probed out with an outstretched hand as he followed it.
“It was probably the Librarians’ responsibility. If not THE Librarian, than at least one of the Librarians.”
“What makes you say that?”
“The Librarians are known to be courting the Curator of the Museum. I mean, Professor Coultier is as close to being one of ours as you can get without actually coming inside, but they don’t know that. They want his brain just as badly as we do.”
“A mind like that is wasted on maintaining the status quo.”
“Only from the perspective of agents of change.”
Clayton was at a corner, around which must have been a light source, because he could now perceive by the dim glow of the light that reflected around it. The walls were not concrete, as he had guessed, but close-set brownstone. Remarkably good construction, and unusual features of interior walls.
He pressed up against the edge of that corner and delicately peered around, so that only the periphery of his left profile could be viewed – just enough space to get his left eye pointed in the right direction.
Ten metres down the next section of the corridor was an opening that lead into a larger chamber, not that it was grand – perhaps five or six metres wide, circular, and with at least one other opening that Niles could see. The chamber, such as it was, was filled with dozens of votive candles on every available surface, apart from avenues of the floor, each adding their weak light to the proceedings. A table-like structure, like a sarcophagus or an altar, was playing host to a man.
The man, like so many that seemed to becoming annoyingly common in Nile’s life, was masked. He wore a long grey coat, somewhat tattered at the lower hem, with a deep hood. Under this was a dark jacket with a high mao collar, ribbed with white structure in a mockery of a rib-cage. The left sleeve was either cut away, did not exist, or was worn under what appeared to be an elaborate armour-piece worthy of Hollywood stage design, giving a demoniac appearance to the entire left arm, from the claw-like fingers to the sharp looking ridges at the shoulder. The mask, which, taken with the hood, completely obscured the identity of this figure, was of a bone-like colour, extending down over the neck, superficially flat and featureless save for the deep dark wells where the eyes of the wearer ought to have been.
It was the arm that gave it away. Four years ago, a grand jury had refused to indict one of Niles’s suspects – an accused multiple-count murderer named Eli Sharona. Niles had always found the Grand Jury result, and the prosecutor’s subsequent decision not to go to trial anyway, a gross miscarriage of justice. He’d all but caught Sharona red-handed, and if Gloria Creena’s murders were worthy of lifelong incarceration, than so were the often equally-violent deaths Sharona had administered.
Sharona had, when he was arrested to be charged, been wearing a full-length cybernetic prosthesis of his left arm, one of remarkable dexterity which was not unusual considering his then-studies in thoracic surgery. It was military-grade hardware, the kind of stuff that big technology giants like Magnussun Arms and Slipher Medical Division liked to produce to show they had that club in their bag. What made this damning, however, was that Sharona was found to have a case-mod for the arm at his apartment that was very much like, if not identical, to the armour this man was currently wearing.
Niles retracted his head, and felt himself going into a cold sweat. He had his chance. He would argue self defense, believing as he did that Eli Sharona was an extremely dangerous individual, who was keeping him apparently captive. The forensics would agree, since the only way out of wherever he was was apparently through the room Sharona and his friend occupied. He might be suspended, maybe even lose his job, but here was his chance to do what the system could not.
Slowly, he reached under his left arm for the slung-under holster there, letting his skin wrap around the custom polymer grips of his Colt Detective Special.
The conversation around the corner suddenly broke off, and a third voice entered it – the clear and familiar Received Pronunciation tones of his Grey Angels contact, Scion. “That would be a singularly bad idea, Niles. Why don’t you come on out and join us?”
---
Vidcund hated complications. It wasn’t that he couldn’t handle them – he’d yet to meet the complication that changed the ultimate result of his attempts to tackle a particular task. It was that he was going to have to go through his schedule now and decide, out of all the other appointments he had booked today, what was trivial enough to cancel or postpone. This in itself was a non-trivial problem. Wearing many names meant managing each name’s overall reputation individually. Some were okay to be shown to be unreliable, but their uses were few and far enough between that he couldn’t always bump one of their appointments. It didn’t always exist.
As he sat down on Niles Clatyon’s rather nice (and rather unused) leather sectional to review his plans for the day on his phone, he was wondering if it was more important to push his meeting with his boss, or his meeting with his task force, since those were meant to be the two next things.
He’d come here to suicide Clayton. after reviewing the crime-fighter’s dossier, Vidcund had concluded that Niles offing himself wouldn’t be so far-fetched as to inspire unusual levels of scrutiny or suspicion. It was easier to fake a suicide than an accident, particularly where men were concerned, as their suicides even tended to be violent or extravagant anyway, allowing all but the most shoddy craft to be explained away as self-inflicted.
Annoyingly enough, Clayton wasn’t at his apartment. He wasn’t at his office, either, and hadn’t reported in for his shift. The Detective had a Force-issued unmarked car that Agency could have tracked, but it was evidentially not what Niles was using for a day vehicle, because the car was parked right where it was supposed to be at the precinct lots, according to both the records of the National Police Force and the transponder they didn’t know the car was equipped with.
A quick search of Niles’ highly-organized home office revealed that he either kept no insurance paperwork at all, or had it all stored in the car itself. Vidcund would have at least been able to activate the civilian transponder in Clayton’s car if there was a record of it, but a key server was down today for maintenance, and he couldn’t get at the records he needed to get the appropriate Vehicle Identification Number.
It was a troubling situation, to be sure… but maybe the plan itself could be changed. Niles’ psychological profile reports from the National Police Force suggested to Agency analysts that the detective’s condition was worsening. He already had episodes of minor depression stemming from the premature death of his parents and younger brother when he was in his early teens, and it seemed that a psyche already damaged was getting chipped away at by his relatively high profile in the Zaxtonian Union’s seedy underbelly. It wasn’t yet full-blown paranoia, but Vidcund could do Niles a service – protect his reputation and clear him of the psychological suspicion by confirming for everyone that someone really was out to get the detective.
Of course, the detective wouldn’t be alive to benefit from it, but from Vidcund’s perspective that just made the situation doubly good. Now he just needed to wait for a free moment in his schedule.
Crisis averted.
---
“Do you know who I am?”
Niles was surprised to find that Sharona, Scion, and their unnamed, masked companion were not alone in this small vault of what seemed to be a larger mausoleum. There were two others, too, he’d failed to take into account. One was tall, lanky. He wore a grey, diamond-patterned bodysuit where everyone else seemed to wear coats, his mask a rather disturbing image of mutedly demoniac clown. Niles’ sharp eye detected a bundle in the small of the back which was probably some kind of tool kit. The man who had been speaking with Sharona was, rather than wearing a mask, fitted with some type of hood on his jacket, which had a black material hanging in front of it, creating a quite convincing illusion of shadow. The last, then, was dressed in a smart suit under his jacket, and wore a mask with one eye-slit underscribed by the international symbol for currency, the dollar sign.
Niles had taken them all in carefully before letting his gaze fall back to Sharona. “You are Eli Sharona.”
“I am also called by another name.”
“Archangel.”
“You catch on very quickly, detective. I suppose that’s why you’re so good at your job.”
Scion laughed, behind his starry mask. “You slept a little longer than we expected. If I’d known you were also drinking, I might have sedated you differently.”
“I think we can safely take you off the Christmas Card list, then.”
This time, it was Archangel’s turn to chuckle. The others did, as well. Niles couldn’t blame them. There was a palpable tension in the room that needed breaking. Scion continued, “you’ll feel better in time. Most of whatever you’re feeling right now is down to sleeping on cement. Or drinking too many Spanish coffees.”
“How could you possibly-“
“Scion knows everything,” said shadow-face, “or rather, Scion likes to think he knows everything.”
Money Mask cut in, “In fairness, Prodigal, Scion knows most things.”
A shrug from the subject. “Scion knows enough about enough things to know how little Scion knows about anything.”
“Can we get to what I’m doing here, please?”
“You’re here to die, Niles.” Archangel put his flesh-and-blood hand on the man’s shoulder, “Don’t worry. It won’t hurt.”
---
“Receiving phone call from Redacted.”
Vidcund’s thumb tapped the button at the edge of the steering wheel that connected the call. “Därk.”
The first thing to catch his attention were the sirens. Someone was calling him from the field. “Vidcund, it’s Stamatia. I have to cancel our meeting.”
“Clearly.” Vidcund indicated, “What are we hijacking today?”
“A school shooting. It has elements we’re interested in.”
“Like what?”
“I’m piping you a map. You come here and tell me.”
---
Donnovan Kline was into his wine. This was in and of itself not unusual, nor should the tone be considered overly accusatory. He was an oenophile, certainly, and consumed great quantities of the precious liquid, but he was rarely truly drunk. It was simply an accompaniment, like the pressed vinyl Shubert playing in the background.
He had his sleeves rolled up to his elbows, and his hands themselves were marred with animal glue, which he had been applying to the spine of a particular block of pages, stitched and ready to be given their cover.
He’d had to stop because the doorbell had gone off. Visitors were few and far between, in a place like this. He lived well outside Kraterburg, deep into the Terrwald, near a rather abandoned former town by the name of Azuldorf. He shared the immediate area with as few as two other households, and all three of them liked to keep to themselves.
He was still rubbing the glue off of his hands with a damp cloth when he opened the door. “Ah. Professor.”
Malvolio Coultier bowed slightly, his presumably-artificially greyed hair marking him as far older than he actually was. “Professor. Am I interrupting?”
“Not at all, not at all. Do come in. I was just finishing a reprint.”
“Which volume?”
“Something to have our friends in the ever-fashionable colour on edge and off our backs,” Kline said, leading Malvolio through to his kitchen. A large dog, bull mastiff by breed, looked up laconically from where he was resting, near his empty food dish. “Bridewell’s Unspeakable Cults. A votre santé.”
Coultier laughed gently, accepting the glass. “Et a toi. Couldn’t get your hands on the original?”
“Don’t be ridiculous. I’m about to take a massive risk by releasing this copy into the wild, as it were. I wanted the Bridewell because it’s neutered by the errors. Last thing I need is to have some idiot call down the Demon Sultan in our moment of triumph. The 1909 edition would be too mundane to attract Agency Division’s attention, but the older Bridewell is just dangerous enough.”
“We are moving ahead with the plan, then?”
“Assuming you have actually found what you think you have found, yes.” Kline sipped his wine, now muting his stereo system. “I take it you have something for me?”
Malvolio looked at the folder in his hand as though he had forgotten he was carrying it. “Ah, yes. I’ve made a photographic rendering of the Wellhead.”
Kline took the photo, studying it for a long time. “… This is a modern reproduction. Someone else has read the Manuscripts.”
“I thought so too, which is why I also subjected the capstone to full analysis.”
“And?”
“In every respect, there is nothing to suggest a single tool mark more recent than several million years.”
A slow grin spread over Kline’s face. “… My dear little Brother. We are very much moving forward with the plan.”
---
Vidcund had witnessed scenes of great carnage, in his life. He’d even caused a couple of them. But the aftermath of this shooting was striking to him. He stood centre stage of the school auditorium with his hands tucked into his pockets, frowning at the wreckage of seats, the tattered curtains to either side, and, most daminingly of all, the smell.
“This doesn’t smell like a recent crime.” He looked to the leader of the agency clean-up team. “What does this smell like to you, Sergeant Drache?”
Drache straightened, lowered his respirator, took a deep lungful, and spent several seconds settling the mask properly over his face. “Cat piss and a week-old corpse.”
Vidcund nodded gently. “Ammonia and Cadaverine. There’s no way in hell this happened today.”
“And yet, there’s no way in hell this could have been covered up long enough to reach this state.”
He continued to survey the scene. Lumber – what appeared to be the cladding of the auditorium floor – was embedded in the walls, in one place, in the ceiling. Chairs in their rows of five had been cast effortlessly well away from the ten-foot diameter hole in the floor, or else had slid back into it. Vidcund had a mental image of a great blast at that position, and his men were presently poking around in the void beneath the seating, which had, until now, been a storage area.
He turned, facing back-stage, where the last few bodies were being identified and tagged. The school’s Drama Society had been in rehersal, and from what he could tell, they had been wiped out to a man. There were three or four students on the Drama Club roster unaccounted for – someone would be calling their parents.
If it wasn’t for the fact of the smell, Vidcund may well have been prepared to declare the whole thing an ordinary pipe-bombing, with some summary “mopping up” action by whoever was responsible. But the smell had every suggestion inside it that something was wrong.
A field-armoured technician was hoisted out of the void by a companion. “Special Director!”
Vidcund turned again. “Yes, what is it?”
“We’ve concluded our sensor sweep, and can find no trace of any explosive.”
Alright, Vidcund thought. Now, you have my attention.
---
“Do you know this man?” Archangel turned his phone around, and the largish screen displayed a very clear image. Still, it took Niles some time to sort it. They said the best disguises were simple, and yet, he still found himself baffled when the look of comprehension finally dawned on his face. It had been the clothing – this sharply dressed, bespoke-wearing man could hardly have been the somewhat hipster Anthropologist, and yet… “That’s Donny Malard.”
“I am incredibly surprised you would accept such an obvious pseudonym. Would you care to hazard a guess at this man’s real name?”
Niles shook his head. Vidcund didn’t resemble a single person he knew – except, of course, for Donny Mallard. He was too generic. Sure, the blonde hair was a little unusual, but you really needed more than hair colour to go off of. Archangel seemed to expect this, and flicked at the screen with his thumb, evidentially locking the phone as he put it away. “Donny Mallard’s real name – or at least, the closest to a true name we’ve yet discovered – is Vidcund Därk. He is an operative of your Agency Division.”
“Why on earth would Agency assign an agent to me, without just telling me?”
Archangel rose. A pall of dust hung atop the table-like sarcophagus he had been seated on, and he scratched at it with a clawed finger, recreating one of the sort-of misshapen magic circles from the scene of Gloria Creena’s faux-suicide. “I had originally thought it was simply because you were dealing with this matter. They like to linger around cult matters, no doubt thirsting for whatever magic may or may not have been involved.”
Niles rolled his eyes, folding his arms. “I’ve had more than enough woo. Science might not have the answers to every single question, but actual magic is just absurd.”
“As absurd as someone walking around a corner, when they had not been in either corridor previously?”
Niles gave a slow, annoyed sigh as he clenched his jaw. “You’ve been at my computer.”
“Eight-digit passwords are hardly secure, even if they were generated cryptographically randomly,” Scion scolded.
Archangel straightened slightly. “… Magic is just the science nobody’s taught us yet. Ask your average person how a processor works. Go ahead, ask.”
The detective shrugged. “What does this have to do with you killing me?”
“Not me, exactly. I mean, I’ll certainly be sending you into certain death, but I have every intention of pulling you out of the frying pan, when all is said and done.”
“So generous of you.” Niles’s brow furrowed as he folded his arms more tightly.
“I’ll want things in return of course, but since most of those things involve getting to the bottom of the… weirdness going on with Creena’s case, I figured you’d find the terms to be rather, agreeable. Especially since you’re probably dying without my help.”
“Well, if I’m dead either way, what do I need to do?” There was, yet, hope for salvation. Niles reasoned that he could probably con Archangel into helping him, and then turn around and, with support from his peers, bust him. He could already see the look on that psychopath’s face when he was unmasked.
It made him happy, but the paranoid parts of his mind wondered if Archangel was right, and he really was dead either way.
---
Vidcund took his time in the elevator, today. This building had a particularly nice set servicing the middle floors, which were mounted to the exterior of the building, and ascended in what must have been a sealed glass enclosure. It afforded a great view of the city, which appealed to Vidcund’s great fondness for heights, but that was not the real reason he was riding them so slowly.
He was reading an email that scrolled across the bottom of his glasses, like subtitles. Drache’s team had finished securing the site of the school incident, and was now on their way to secure this building. That in itself was kind of them, but it was more pleasing for him to read that they’d accounted for all but one of the missing children. He dug out his phone, requested a dossier on this Maria Frost, and then returned his focus to the matter at hand.
He’d already paid a visit to a room on the ground floor next to the security office, which happened to be the master routing room of the building, where most of the digital infrastructure – including phone lines, data, optic fibers, coaxial cable, and anything else that needed to be properly arranged – was organized. This happened to include the security camera network. It was trivial, with access to this room, to loop all of the cameras. A camera loop was detectible, but Vidcund was banking on that. It protected his identity, without alerting the security, and without being so sophisticated that the police would suspect anything more than efficient gang activity.
He pinched the left temple of his glasses, cycling through the many “filters” they could apply. This relied on special sensing equipment in his phone, he was told, which was patched into the Augmented Reality interpreter. Eventually, he turned all of the filters off, but only after having used them to confirm that there was nobody in either adjacent apartment to his target’s, as well as the one across the hall. They weren’t rented out, anyway, but stranger things had happened.
Drawing his Chinese-made handgun from under his jacket, and pleased to see the ammo count pop up in the bottom corner of his glasses automatically, he snugged up against the target door, and applied his autokey. He could come back and force the door later, when there was no need to be concerned with alarming people by the noise.
---
The last thing you should ever tell a paranoid man was that he actually had a right to fear his impending death. Alone in the dark, Niles had taken back to his vice – the drink. He had been hitting the bottle rather hard, keeping his eye on the traffic below from his living-room window, and it was in something of a drunken haze that he heard the footsteps in the hall.
Immediately, they had his attention, head snapping around like a Doberman’s, only to plague himself with an internal sense of inertia unreflected in the real world. He listened for one or two breaths, daring not to fill his lungs more than half way, heart pounding at his chest.
The footsteps stopped, replaced after a pause by a low electric whine, right outside his door. Carefully, quietly, he drew out his security blanket – his prized possession. The Colt Detective Special was not a large weapon, in fact it was a cute little snub-nosed cap gun compared to the huge, overcompensating hunks of metal that defined the modern handgun, and had decades of history behind it, this being a retooled model from the Second Series, probably produced in the 1950s. But that tiny two-inch barrel could deposit its load of five .38 Special rounds to within about a half a degree of error. As a personal defense weapon for household use it was almost ideal. As a customized variant with retooled grips, reduced pull strength, and loaded with full metal jacket overpressure ammunition, it was a burglar’s nightmare.
In the haze and off-focus of the heavy alcoholic, however, Niles’ quick-draw seemed to crawl at a snail’s pace. The door was already opening by the time he’d cleared leather. By the time his left hand was cupping under his right, it was wide enough open to see a dark figure silhouetted against the hallway lights. Even as he was straightening out his shooting elbow, even as he was lining up the sight picture, the shadow in the doorframe was snapping up its own weapon. Semi-automatic, unorthodox single-handed grip. Vidcund could see the muscles of the intruder’s free arm tensing, no doubt trying to turn the door back.
Mr. Shadow’s muzzle flashed, an instant behind Niles’s own, and he could have sworn he was watching the bullet. There was a buzzing in his ears, then the collective gasp of hundreds of shocked onlookers. A white-hot, searing pain in his left shoulder. There was no tug, no strong shove. That was Hollywood theatrics. Equal and opposite reactions, and so on, prevented a bullet from throwing you anywhere, without also throwing the shooter. Mostly.
Immediately, the taste of iron blossomed in his mouth, and before he could think much more about anything, he was falling. The Detective Special tumbled from his hand, joining the broken glass from the cup he had dropped to draw it, and he landed heavily in a small pool of whisky, glass, and ice.
There was a thunderous applause. Through the haze, looking “upward”, he thought he could make out, against a sudden glare, a packed auditorium or theater, the crowd of blurry faces eagerly applauding.
He thought, what a curious way in which to die.
---
Vidcund slammed himself against the now-closed door, his ears still ringing. He had not expected the target to be armed. It was against the law for civilians to own handguns – longarm licenses were available, but there wasn’t one registered to Clayton. Sure, he was a cop, but it was against duty regulations, strictly speaking, to bring your sidearm home with you, much less to have it in open carry at all times.
Evidentially, the regulations were not universal. He made a mental note to remember that. His mouth was full of the tastes of iron and copper – blood and adrenaline. The adrenaline, he was used to… but the blood?
He found he actually had to fight through his conditioning to figure out where his body was paining him, and once he had, he wished he hadn’t. He gave a breathless gasp – and could have done little else, his left lung having collapsed as the bullet passed through it – sagging to the floor. Slumped against the wall, he’d dragged a telltale line of blood down the wall with him.
His vision swam. There were alerts going off inside his glasses, what seemed like a hundred and one icons. Heart rate too high, weapon absent (where did I leave that?), four or five contact notifications.
“Lucky bastard.” Vidcund spat. The taste of iron was becoming a stench. He was bleeding profusely through his shirt and jacket. Dying. How many people had he killed? How many hundreds cases had he handled without so much as a scratch?
He had the sensations of floating, as if he was back in his sensory deprivation tank. Everything became more remote, even the pain, as if the entire situation was abstracted. He was in pain, but it was less actual, visceral pain, and more a memory or an understanding that he was in pain. The sounds had a muffled quality, as if coming in from a great distance.
He had a dim awareness of jackbooted feet arriving beside him, and then, as he looked up to see who was there, everything resolved to static.
---
Something singularly strange was happening. Death, to the agnostic, was a dreamless sleep from which one never awakened. It sounded terrifying, until you remembered there was no you for it to happen to. It was supposed to be the end.
Still, the brain could survive for several minutes without the heart, and in the haze of dreams, nobody could say for certain that a second of dream took a second to occur. It so happened that dreams had that peculiar, timeless quality. A tiny mote of lucid thought allowed this to come to Niles Clayton’s attention, while his brain frantically tried to make sense of what was happening to him.
He’d found himself under-water, and had clawed his way to shore. As he looked now at the lake he’d emerged from, at the foggy shroud of dense mists that hung upon it, he marveled that he was not freezing cold. Certainly, there were drifts of snow about… or what must have been snow, even with that ashy quality. It was night time. All about him was the smell of brandy. It permeated everything, seeming to reek into his clothing and skin, absorb into every pore.
He looked up, trying to get a bearing on where he was, and screamed out in the silent horror of dreams to see two moons, radiant and terrible, hanging the one advanced of the other in the sky. His head swam, his mind seemed to bubble, and all at once he felt as though he had exploded from the inside, having an internal awareness of himself as being scattered like dust on the wind.
He now craved oblivion, and hoped this nightmare would soon be over.
---
The assault on Emir Kath High School had begun, as these things often did, well before the first blow was struck. The Cult of the Sleeping Eye was a fragmented and peculiar device, and from the outside looking in, it was difficult to see that it was, in fact, one united body. There was the Cult itself, of course, with Gloria at the head, but there were also two splinter factions – The Sons of Glory and the Glorious Brotherhood, that were, in turn, lead by Gloria’s lieutenants, Crowe and Baha.
And, to the extent that wars waged with magic could be said to contain salvos, battles, or anything a normal war might, Baha was to fire the first few warning shots.
The Glorious Brotherhood, such as it was, was a rather small group, but, as was their leader’s wont, they made up the erudite and socio-political elite of the Sleepers. They had been recruited among the occultists of Kraterburg – of which there were more than the usually-fair share – and from all walks of life, so long as they combined the three vital traits of studiousness, potential, and access.
It was the access that had given Baha the idea in the first place. His Agency mole had advised him of something new, of a monster, degenerate race which the Sleepers had not before treated. And so he worked alone, in the clear, secret Sanctum he maintained in a special part of his Kraterburg apartments, working the magic of the Golden King to his own ends.
He could not speak the Glorious Tongue, as his sibling-cohorts could. Very few of his cult did, either. Instead, he worked in a language winnowed out from the best parts of Enochian and Arabic, forcing the dusty smoke that was building up in this sealed chamber into denser and denser form, taking on more and more the shape of a humanoid – human was too strong a word.
The creature that finally materialized was short, perhaps a child’s height, no more than a metre. It had a large head, devoid of all but slitted eyes and a disproportionately large mouth of outsized, human teeth. It had arrived unclothed, and as soon as it had appeared in the ashen circle meant to trap it in this sanctuary, it began to wheeze loudly. Several deadlocked moments passed – it should well have left, by now, using its peculiar talents.
The longer Baha glared at it, however, the less threatening the wheezing became, until the voice died back completely.
“… What does my master command?”
“We have work to do, little doorman.”
---
A school after-hours was one of the more abandoned places one could find, but that abandonment could not be relied upon. The auditorium would be rather crowded, of course, with actors and technicians and all the other student-workers involved in preparing for their show. The main problem was people outside the school coming in, and how to keep the festivities that were to follow confined to the auditorium.
Nobody wanted to prolong the risk of exposure playing hide-and-seek with frightened high school students.
The solution was as clumsy as it was elegant, and it began with a score of Baha’s doormen, who materialized ex nihilo in the key corridors and access-channels, even lingering in the shadowy gables of side-doors and cafeteria loading entrances. Where they went, their wheezing followed, and the paralysis that came with it needed only a moment to strike.
Would that it had struck anyone else, or else something might have been done, though imagination fails to determine what could now have prevented the tragedies to follow. If it had been any other student who had reached for the door that connected the auditorium-stage to the central corridor, the paralysis would have been noticed.
For Maria Frost, however, sudden mental stops, nervous trembling and bouts of unsourced fear were a matter of strictest routine, so much so that the students nearest her - the few she counted as friends, anyway – did little more than coax her away from the door, speaking in gentle tones to her until she inevitably calmed down again.
They didn’t become particularly concerned about the outburst of silent fear until she proved more stubborn than usual in being talked out of it, and in her dogged insistences, eventually the supervising teacher made for that very same door, freezing just before it and dragging his hand back from the door as though scalded, taking several large and automatic strides away from it before he’d realized he was supposed to be reassuring.
There was a pregnant pause there, and it likely would have ended in an outbreak of panic even if what happened next hadn’t.
---
The Blighted Grove had been, in many respects, the birthplace of the sleepers. The legend-cycles of the White Keepers, that priestly caste of the ancient Tererrans who had ruled that wood since time immemorial, claimed that when the good and wholesome gods of Earth had finally sealed away the madness that was the gods with which the Keepers had taken issue, the final blow in that war had been struck here. Even the cultists who heard of the legend did not believe it, and the Blighted Grove was chosen for an altogether different reason. This was where they had gotten their start, in years before memory.
The body of the main cult, what little of it had survived Gloria’s imprisonment and the rumours of her death, had gathered for a great ceremony. Wood had been felled months ago, in the dead of winter, from selected other groves – for nothing properly grew in the Blighted Grove. The trees that remained were ancient and gnarled, but never showed any least sign of life, apart from having failed to decay for years. This wood was itself specially treated. The faithful who had survived the sede vacante period of the cult’s history had kept to ancient rituals and traditions, repeatedly drying the wood and soaking it in baths prepared with certain essential salts, then drying it again in sheds kept fogged by the burning of certain herbs.
Now, these logs composed the heart of a central fire that burned in the clearing of the grove, throwing up a thick column of smoke that was visible from distant towns like Anfangsburg, Azuldorf and even the suburbs of Tererra itself.
Antoine Dobson sat on the back porch of his cabin, watching the smoke rise from the valley in which the grove slept. He and his pals were enjoying the tail end of the deer season – more an excuse for drinking, than one for actual hunting. Deer were few and far between this close to the valley of the grove, preferring the richer bounties a few miles further away. For Dobson and his boys, hunting season was an excuse to get away from the wives.
He cracked a fresh can of the nation’s cheapest and most popular light beer, snatching up his binoculars from the top of the cooler beside him. After spending a moment focusing, he had a good look at the fire itself. The sickly yellow flames lapped at a heap of wood that had to be intentional.
“Hell of a bonfire, boys. Let’s go have a look.”
It took some doing to get the boys rallied – everyone except Antoine was well into the bag by now, but Antoine was a big boy with a bigger liver, and beer had always made him energetic rather than lazy, at least until after the fact. With some cajoling, though, the four were soon on their way – rifles slung over shoulders, extra beer in backpacks. The way was clear enough – though trackless, the valley pretty well funneled them back to the fire, and on their return, they’d have a fairly decent view of the way without any foliage to obscure their vision.
---
“Ia! Nyogtha gofn’n, Ya sll’ha, ya hafh’drn, wgah’n Shugg…”
Only one coherent voice was sounded in the din. The revelers, skyclad and in the full debauchery of their cult’s precepts, had given away from the chant to a cacophony of ululation, screams, and woops. There was a fevered pitch to all the proceedings, but one voice chanted calmly and coolly among them all.
As Gloria’s seemingly broken voice slithered expertly over the tones of that dead language of the gods, that fevered tongue even the most demented of Pentecostals couldn’t touch upon the reality of the matter, the sky had grown darker. There was, for this, no outward cause – no great unscheduled eclipse of the sun, no sudden arrival of clouds. The heady smoke of the bonfire may have accounted for it, were it not rising so perfectly and directly into the air.
The smoke, or perhaps simply the energy of the ritual itself, had quite the affect on the other attendees, who had devolved into an orgiastic conglomeration of most any kind of sin or vice one would expect. All of man’s great debaucheries – drink and drug, sex, violence – took place under that pall of rank smoke.
As Gloria gestured and orated, as Baha shaped the smoke itself with his gestures, sending tendrils of filamentous glyphs drifting upward before being re-absorbed into the main column, and as Crowe lost himself in the orgiastic worship of his prized sect, the flames abruptly turned a sickly grey-green, no longer giving out nearly so much light as they had before. The effect was one of twilight in the grove, of premature sunset, were there a sun to be seen.
It was in this sort of pregnant atmosphere that Dobson and his boys were being lead ever further forward into the press – drawn in at first by the ecstatic activity of the outer periphery, and then, too afraid to wander any further away. It seemed the wrong thing to do, and in this hellish inner circle of the rite, there was too much violence. As they walked ever closer to the fire itself, the dancing gave way to orgy gave way to outright violence. They saw things they did not wish to see.
Just as they prepared to turn back, the great fire collapsed on itself, and Antoine turned just in time to see three great shapes burst forth from it.
---
Maria was catatonic, or so her frightened classmates were assuming. Minutes had passed, but in those few short moments, virtually all of the drama club, and certainly all of the responsible adults meant to be their minders, had tried the various doors leading out of the auditorium. Immediately, before so much as touching any of them, their ears and minds were filled with a most dreadful wheezing. Many had lapsed into panic attacks – Maria recognized this as the first beginnings of fear in people who had never lived with it before. True fear, as a rat in water, as a wolf cornered by a bear. That visceral contraction that comes at the moment the plane is about to impact the cliff. Mankind had forgotten fear, but a few, like her, had learned it anew.
And through the haze of fear, through the blind panic that would have her clawing at the walls themselves for egress, she became aware. In a single moment, barely filling a second, she achieved a sort of mental clarity that had drawn her attention to the seating.
If we can’t get out, how could anyone get in?
A shade late, she bolted, snapping out of her apparent catatonic trance to rush for the wings. We say late, because it was in the very moment she began to move that things, more literally than she was comfortable with, went directly to hell.
There was a great groan like a tossing ship, before the wooden flooring of the seating area blossomed outward, shards of wood thrown with such force that later investigators would come upon the scene as though a bomb had gone off. The others shrieked, but their general terror was really only an inspiration for silence in Maria. She saw, through her peripheral vision, huge slug-creatures, the three of them easily filling both the void they had punched in the floor, and then, as they surged forward into the room proper, what little space the small “orchestra” pit had occupied. She didn’t need to watch them retch to know that they vomited up not a meal but their passengers.
She’d seen them before. Ridden in them before. She knew all about the Nyogtha gofn’n, the children of the haunter of the dark, and had even summoned them.
With no better option for hiding, she ducked behind the weighty master curtains, and brought her thumb to her mouth, biting hard at the tender flesh there until she tasted blood.
---
There was a sensation akin to waking up, without realizing that you were asleep in the first place, a sort of startled jolt as the train of one’s thoughts suddenly dropped from a height onto the tracks of the waking world. There was a sensation of complete immersion. Vidcund could feel, though he saw and heard little, that he was wearing a respiration mask. As his mind settled back into a calm, defaulted state, he closed his blind eyes and stretched out, with some practice, for that feeling of otherness, that extra-body propiroception.
To his great surprise, it came to him all at once, and more strongly than ever. He was struck with the sudden sensation of his limbs, each of them, being in two different positions at once, his eyes at once open and closed, his face at once masked and not. The top part of him was at once floating above the surface of an immersion tank, and completely submerged.
Ah, yes, I remember now…
Spurred by the memory of things he had once forgotten, he shifted his focus, lending more and more of his thinking-time to the set of sensations ascribed to the half-immersed body. All at once, like the cracking of a stressed joint, these were the only sensations he felt.
He sat up with such a start that he banged his head on the ceiling of the immersion tank. Drifting for a moment, and dazed, he wondered just what in the hell was going on here.
---
“Ya hafh’drn n’gah, n’gah’ai, uln g’rahn hupadgh n’gah. Sll’ha sng’wahl. Sll’ha shug.”
The chanting could not have belonged to a human voice, and yet human he was who waited behind the skull-like visage of Archangel. The Sepulcher of the Grey Angels was their most sacred space, at least to the cultic members of the gang’s higher ranks. It was a place to honour the fallen, but also a place of great rebirth.
A pentagram of curved lines had been drawn on the ground beneath the altar, upon which Niles Clayton’s corpse had been reduced to dust. Dead these past three weeks, he was to be returned to life. Usually, the “resurrections” Archangel presided over were of a spiritual and metaphorical nature. Today would be different.
The other four points of the star were guarded by the other four ranking members of the enterprise – by Scion, Banker, Prodigal, and Locuna. They stood as witnesses only, and as security should the thing go awry – a possibility, Archangel said, when dealing with anything older than a hundred years or so, in terms of knowledge.
They had all been doubters until the body had collapsed to dust, a bluish-grey powder. Just to remove the possibility of anyone claiming it was staged, Scion was prepared to suppose, but then, two weeks in the grace surely had taken care of that.
“Y’ai’ng’ngah Yog-Sothoth H’ee-L’geb Fai Throdog Uaaah.”
The dust swirled around itself, forming a sort of sideways cyclone there on the stone slab. A dense shape was forming through the haze of moving particles, the dust collapsing into itself, back into a physical form, when with a sudden impact Niles Clayton’s restored body was slammed back down onto the slab by gravity.
His screams were entirely inhuman. Archangel chuckled rather warmly, closing the book he had borne.
“There. Told you I would save you.”
There was a hush throughout the room as Niles fell silent, foam at the mouth and chest heaving heavily. The four other Founders wondered at his very existence, and all the many, many things it implied. There was the strangeness of his murmuring, of a broken voice imparting fever-dreamt tales of twin moons in a sea of black stars.
Niles, thankfully, was already lapsing into the amnesiac properties of acatalepsy, and was unconscious within seconds. Archangel explained this as the others pondered whether or not it was a failure. “The human mind is incapable of understanding certain things. We have known this as long as we have known how to know, as long as there have been questions like “What colour are clear things”. That does not, however, prevent them from experiencing these things. The most merciful thing God ever did, if he did in fact do anything, was to grant our brains the ability to break so thoroughly they forget the bad experience. He will be fine in a few days… as you all were, when you underwent similar experiences.”
He looked around the room. Everyone present had had their own private brushes with the supernatural, but none could say they’d been to hell and back.
---
“Ah, Herr Därk, so good to see you. I wasn’t really expecting you back.”
Vidcund gave a weary smile. Everyone had been gushing to see him, and what was the worse, his drink didn’t seem to be sitting with him at all well. Too heavy, perhaps, with all the added protein. “Everyone things one little gunshot wound is enough to make me fall to pieces. I expected better from you, Drache.”
“You perforated your Aeorta.” Drache wore a concerned frown, and he was right to do so. That was a grievous wound, and it should have taken more than a few weeks in a fish tank to recover, even with the best technology that Agency had on hand to treat such wounds.
“Which is entirely survivable, apparently. Do we have any new information?”
“Actually, yes.” Drache gestured across the table. This, like most of the conference rooms, was equipped with a touch, autostereoscopic interface, creating the illusion of a three-dimensional field for the handling of information and polarized by the standard-issue AR glasses, examples of which were worn by Därk, and a more robust “safety glasses” variant worn by Drache. It was among the more sophisticated interface systems available, and as far as Vidcund knew, it hadn’t yet been released to the public, but that was only a matter of time.
An image of a section of curtain appeared, and Vidcund seized it. Sensors around the room judged the position and orientation of his hands and finger-tips, allowing him to handle the sample as though it was really there, though of course it was entirely intangible and without mass, which required a certain degree of imagination on his part.
“We also finished cross referencing our list of missing persons to the list of students. There was only one name that went un-accounted for.”
“Somebody’s child is missing after a violent attack on a school and they didn’t file a police report?” Vidcund rose an eyebrow, sparing a moment for a skeptic glare.
“That’s not the weird part. The girl’s name is Maria Frost. She has a history with the Primary.”
Vidcund considered that. “… Do you suppose it was possible that Creena attacked the school specifically looking for Frost?”
“I would say she probably found her.”
“Oh no,” said Vidcund, showing the curtain to Drache with the triskelion-stain upon its inner surface. “I very much doubt that.”
---
The shuddering, inching machine was called Dhole, a joke among its operators. It had the dubious distinction of being one of the smallest tunnel boring machines ever constructed, at a mere diameter of only 2 metres. It had, however, advanced at a rapid and telling pace, and only now broke through into the chamber they were calculated to have entered two weeks ago.
Immediately, as soon as the first gust of air was detected, the machine was shut down, and the final few inches of rubble were removed by hand, with the work crews working as silently as possible. Strictly speaking, they weren’t supposed to be here, even if this was the sort of thing that was pre-ordained by time.
They were a level below the lowest sub-basement of the Terrwald Regional History Museum, in what amounted to a pit thirty-foot deep that had once been much deeper. The pit was vaulted over with brick and mortar construction that none of the tunnelers – experts in such things – particularly trusted. The sole entry – or at least, the formerly unique entry – had been a scaffold-platform drawn down by winches. As a part of the history of the region, this area had been vaulted over and buried, best to be forgotten. Naturally, when the museum had more or less discovered the location by accident, it was immediately excavated, and furnished with pumping equipment to drain it and keep it that way.
Almost immediately after that, they ran out of money for the further repairs needed, the re-engineering required to shore up the weight of the ceiling (now that it had a museum on top of it, though at least half of that new weight was shared by the surrounding, solid earth), the installation of proper ventilation, and the purging of a probably-deadly species of mold that was growing on most of the available surfaces, and was now sporing thanks to the changes in humidity.
The diggers, of course, were prepared for such things. They wore industrial-grade filtration masks, Tyvek jumpsuits and bore with them all manner of protective equipment in addition to their various tools.
One of which, the most hastily deployed, was a high-pressure system on a portable framework. Once assembled, it would allow a single worker to operate a boom-arm that would allow him to apply a thick coating of sprayed concrete to the area of the hatch through which the Museum’s elevator would descend.
Once this was done, the leader extracted from a aluminum-sided, crashproof case, a singular item. It could only have been antique, though a casual observer saw in it no civilization’s usual tropes – it was instead a sculpture of odd angles and carvings, surmounted with a short shaft at the end of which was fixed with a single red jewel, the rest of the body wrought out of what seemed to be, more or less, solid brass, at least from what the man could see of it as he assembled the few pieces in which it was transported.
As he had been demonstrated, and had done countless times before, he touched one of the strange symbols carved into a surface of the device, and the red gem at the apex began to glow with a dim light. He busied himself with a technician’s attempts to get a connection with a wireless transmitter that had been placed in the museum basement the night before, which would have given them some degree of observation and control of the Museum’s various security systems.
Presently, the light of the jewel flared and resolved itself into a life-sized, immaculately detailed bust of the group’s patron.
“What is it, Elder Brother Peaslee?”
The expedition leader turned. “Brother Kline. Forgive me, I did not expect such a quick connection.”
“We can spare the niceties.”
Peaslee grinned the lopsided grin of a scoundrel past. “We have found the door.”
Kline gave a slow, well-earned smile. “… I am the Key.”