Oliver

  Sleeping abnormalities wake to resurgent life,

  and blasphemously surviving nightmares squirm and splash out of their black lairs

  to newer and wider conquests.

  THIS IS THE WORK OF THE FALLEN ONES. I CAN FEEL THEIR RESIDUE.

  Oliver ignored the voice in his head. He was picking gingerly through the rubble of his home. Not a single wall remained standing, and black slime dripped from broken bricks and shattered two-by-fours. A fire was burning where the kitchen had been, but it didn’t look to be in danger of spreading.

  I CAN FEEL YOUR EMOTIONS. PLEASE STOP.

  “It doesn’t work like that,” he said, lifting the remains of the living room couch. Nothing underneath except singed carpet and powdered drywall. He let the misshapen lump of furniture fall back into the mess and turned to where the first four stairs poked up out of the wreckage of his life. There might be an empty space beneath them. He might be there.

  IS THIS FEAR? ANGER? WHY DOES THIS SIGHT DISTURB YOU?

  “Because I don’t know if my dad’s in here!” he hissed, pulling away a chunk of wall to reveal the space under the stairs. At every step and every turned chunk of bricks he feared to see a hand, a pool of blood, a broken body like Ms. Gilman had looked after she’d been smashed, but all the nook under the stairs held was Dad’s old luggage and a few storage boxes. Lifting his eyes, he surveyed the wreckage. It would take him hours to check every possible spot, and some of the chunks of brick wall were too big for him to lift. The street was empty. No fire trucks, no police. He thought he saw Mr. Coburn in the window across the street, but when he looked again, all he saw was a twitching curtain.

  WE SHOULD NOT REMAIN HERE.

  “I’m not leaving.”

  IF YOUR PROGENITOR HAS CEASED, THEN HE HAS CEASED. IF NOT, THEN HE IS ELSEWHERE. TO REMAIN BENEFITS NO ONE.

  Oliver picked his way over to where Dad’s bedroom had been. “Just a few more minutes. Please. I can’t leave yet. I have to make sure.” There was Mom’s picture from the shrine, the frame bent and twisted, only half of the photo remaining. If he could find the bed, maybe there was a space under the frame? His father could have hidden there.

  THIS EMOTION IS DISTRACTING. I DO NOT LIKE IT. IT COMPELS BEHAVIOR THAT DOES NOT AID US.

  “I’m sort of stuck with it.”

  AND NOW SO AM I. DO AS YOU MUST… BUT BE HASTY.

  “Wow, that almost sounded like compassion.”

  THE MORE OUR SENSES ALIGN, THE MORE I AM AFFECTED BY YOUR INTERNAL PROCESSES. SOON YOU WILL GAIN ACCESS TO MY KNOWLEDGE AND SENSES, BUT ALL I RECEIVE IN RETURN ARE YOUR ANIMAL INSTINCTS AND BASE FEELINGS.

  “Welcome to humanity.”

  IT IS NOT PLEASANT.

  He shoved over another chunk of wall. Nothing. “Tell me about it.”

  I AM DOING SO.

  “No, that was… never mind. We can leave sarcasm for another day.”

  The squeal of braking tires brought Olly upright and reaching around for his backpack. His father’s Corolla was humming by the sidewalk, and he saw an indistinct figure inside lean over to roll down the passenger window. “Oliver! Come!”

  It was Dad. The sob that had been stuck in his throat since he’d first seen the wreckage broke free and left him. He bolted out of the rubble as fast as he dared and wrenched open the door, diving in. He hugged him for all he was worth across the middle console. His father patted him awkwardly on the back.

  “All right, son. Time enough for that later. We have to go.”

  He couldn’t let go yet. “I thought you were dead.”

  “I am not. Please buckle your seat belt.”

  Annoyance tainted his relief, and he sat back into the passenger seat. Twice today he’d thought the most important people in his life had been killed, and neither of them seemed to care that he was getting jerked around like a yo-yo. He slammed the car door shut a little harder than he needed to and clicked in. His father quirked an eyebrow to let him know he’d noticed but said nothing. They screeched away down the street much faster than he’d ever seen his dad drive.

  “We need to go back to the graveyard,” Oliver said. “The Kraken got killed, and I need more of them.”

  His dad frowned. “Kraken?”

  “The Little Ones. That’s just what I called it in my head.”

  “Ah. We’ll do that, but we have to go one other place first.”

  “What happened to the house?”

  “The beast you saw under the library came for us. I assume it was the same one, at least. It matched your description.”

  “And you saw it? You were home?”

  “I was.”

  “How are you not dead?”

  His father rubbed a hand over his bald head. “I am not entirely unable to defend myself.”

  “Come on, Dad. Just because you’ve got a pistol… would it even hurt something that big?”

  “Shoggoths are not immune to bullets. But I did not bother with the pistol. No, it’s my old notebooks that saved me.” He gestured to the backseat, where several ancient spiral-bound scratch pads were sliding around.

  “You… read your old notes at it?”

  “Incantations. Our master has left behind plenty of clues for those who care to look. I was able to mask my presence from the thing and get out to the car even as it tore down the house around me. With a little more preparation I could have done far more than that.”

  This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.

  “Incantations. Like, spells? Seriously?”

  “Seriously.”

  He glanced back over his shoulder, but the wreckage of their home was already out of sight. “Don’t get me wrong, Dad, I’m glad you’re okay, but couldn’t you have saved the house?”

  “As I said, I might have been able to had I known things would escalate so quickly.” He gripped the steering wheel. “Hang on.”

  They took a corner at thirty-five, and Oliver hoped the old door latch he was leaning against would hold. It did, and they shot out onto Liberation Ave. It looked like Dad was headed for Main Street.

  “Should we be going this way? Isn’t this where it lives?”

  “We have to risk it. It came to our house first, but that was not its only target.”

  “Where else?”

  “It has attacked several other homes of the prominent adherents to Yog-Sothoth. The leaders, if you will: the LeGrasse family, old Douglas… I followed it at a distance until I thought to check back home for you. But no matter where else it goes, it will certainly strike the church, and there are things there that must not be destroyed.”

  They turned again, the old car nearly tipping up onto two wheels, and then careened down Broad Street. The bell tower of Bethlehem Lutheran church rose on the left three blocks down, clearly visible over housetops and chimneys, but something had torn a hole in the bricks halfway up, and the tower leaned precariously.

  Dad hissed. “It’s already there.” He stepped on the gas, pushing it up to sixty.

  “That means we should turn around, doesn’t it?”

  “We’ll have to risk it.” His dad sounded grim, determined. He was as bald, bespectacled, and thin as he’d ever been, but he looked like a whole different man.

  “You want to fight it?” Olly gaped at him. “That’s insane!”

  “Not fight, not if we can avoid it. I’ll use the obfuscating incantation, we’ll slip in, grab what we need, and be gone before it knows anything.”

  “Look at the church, Dad! What happens if it comes down on our heads?”

  Walter Mason braked to a halt and slammed it into park less than a block away from the church building. “If we lose what’s inside the building, we might as well step into that thing’s mouth right now.”

  He reached into the rear seat, snagged an unremarkable red notebook, and flipped through it. Peeking over, Olly saw neat, cramped handwriting interrupted with geometric designs that made his eyes cross. His father thumped a finger down on a page halfway through.

  “Here.” He looked over at Olly, suddenly fierce. “Don’t move until I stop speaking.”

  He nodded mutely, wondering what would happen if he had a sudden itch. Let’s not find out.

  Dad traced his pointer finger along a complicated design, never lifting it from the page, never stopping his movement. “C’ ah’n’ghft hup shuggog throdog ehye…” he muttered, eyes half closed.

  On and on he droned, barely seeming to take a breath, for one minute, then two. Oliver could hear sounds like an industrial demolition from nearby, crumbling brick, shrieking metal, and a low rumble that put him in mind of a tank or semi but was certainly neither. He itched to do something – to run away, to go fight, something. The incantation didn’t seem to do anything, as far as he could tell. Finally, his father’s guttural intonations ground to a halt.

  HIS ACCENT IS GOOD.

  “Now we go,” Dad said, gripping his pistol. He opened his car door.

  “Wait,” Olly said. “Are you sure it worked? I didn’t feel anything.”

  “This isn’t movie magic, son,” he snapped. “There’s not some purple light with these things. It’s simply a science most can’t understand. I promise I did it correctly. Come.”

  MY CONFIDENCE IN YOUR PROGENITOR GROWS. HE HAS KNOWLEDGE I DID NOT SUSPECT.

  “So we should go with him?”

  AS YOU ARE SO FOND OF TELLING ME, I CANNOT MOVE FOR YOU. BUT YES.

  Olly clutched his backpack, slinging it on his front in case he needed his crowbar. “Dammit. All right.”

  “Language, son.”

  They ran toward the church. Olly stuttered to a stop when they cleared the nearby houses and could see into the church grounds. Mist hung close to the ground around the trees and small church graveyard, and the shoggoth Oliver had caught only glimpses of beneath the library hulked around its perimeter. It was bigger than it had been, rolling forward on an undulating set of suckered tentacles that held its body fifteen feet in the air, its center mass larger than an elephant, and a dozen or more arms all waving sinuously in the air as they raked against the heavy quarried stones of the lower edifice. Its red eyes darted in all directions, some on tentacle tips, others clustered on its body. It was heart-stopping in its horror.

  “If it could sense us, it would have attacked already,” his father said, gesturing to him. “We have to get inside before it brings the whole thing down.”

  There were gaping holes in the sides of the chapel nave already, and dust hung in the night air. Olly steeled himself, but he couldn’t make his legs move. His body refused to approach its death.

  His father came back and took him by the hand. “We must, son. You and I may be the only ones left capable of resisting this lunacy. I’ll be right here with you. Come on.”

  “You sure I need to be doing this? I don’t know where we’re going.”

  “There is worse than this to come, Oliver. Find your courage.”

  Gritting his teeth, Oliver nodded. They hustled across the still grasses beneath the weeping willows, steering well clear of the side where the shoggoth was pounding at the wall in animal fury. They were not silent, but whether its own noise deafened it or Dad’s not-really-magic had worked, the great beast appeared not to notice them. Circling to the rear entrance, they came to a door that might have been a rector’s entrance or a penitent’s gate or something else entirely, but Oliver wasn’t about to ask his father, who most certainly had the answer. Dad pulled out his keychain, which tinkled with unnerving loudness, and then they were in the dark of the building. Dad led them unerringly through tight, wood-paneled hallways and darkened rooms. The building shuddered under the incredible force of the shoggoth’s attack.

  “Quiet now,” his father whispered. “We’ll need to be quick.” He opened a door, and Oliver found himself in the great chapel behind the altar. Choir pews stretched back on both sides, and shadowed iconography loomed unseen in the dimness overhead. Moonlight streamed in through two big rents on the south side, and Olly saw a tentacle wrap around the edge of the breach, pulling away another huge chunk of masonry.

  His dad ignored it all, scampering to the broad, low altar that Oliver had only seen a few times when he was younger. The moon shone down right on the white cloth of the table, and Olly’s heart seized, certain that the beast would see his dad and smash him flat. Somehow, it did not, despite multiple red eyes waving right outside the broken wall.

  Dad was fiddling with something on the floor right behind the altar, and Oliver finally darted to his side, one eye still on the shoggoth sending stones clattering down on the parishioner benches. Right as he reached him, his father pulled up a trapdoor hidden in the carpet, revealing a ladder down into darkness.

  Of course there’s a basement. Every frickin’ building in Olmstead has a secret monster basement. I shouldn’t even be surprised.

  Murder basement or not, Olly was glad to slip down out of sight. His father followed immediately behind, pulling the trapdoor shut. He clicked on his penlight, shining a dim radiance onto a compartment no larger than Oliver’s bedroom. It was raw stone, windowless, and stuffy. It looked like Dad’s shrine on steroids. Every inch was covered with gilded images of Yog-Sothoth and the Little Ones, serpents twined around rods, and other, stranger beasts that he’d never seen before. Inverted pyramids hung from the ceiling, and the angled geometries that had started showing up in his sleep the last couple of days were around and behind everything.

  One of those oddly-angled objects was a desk of some sort, and his father went right to it, put his palm to the surface, and whispered more guttural words. The top surface went translucent and vanished. Olly gaped, but his father wasn’t wasting any time. He pulled a slim tome bound in a pale leather from its recesses and handed it carefully to Oliver.

  “Put it in your bag.”

  Olly complied, but as he worked the zipper, his dad put a hand on his shoulder, stilling him.

  “This is the most sacred, important book you will ever hold. It is worth more than my life. Maybe not more than yours, but at least equal. Do you understand? Keep it safe.”

  Olly nodded, stuffing it in amongst his tools, glad he’d taken out the lighter fluid. He paused as he zipped the bag back up.

  “Did it go away?”

  His father went silent, listening. The pounding had stopped.

  “No,” he said. “I don’t think it did.”

  The trapdoor flew off its hinges, and a massive tentacle crowded down the hatch, grasping blindly.

  His father pulled out his gun, firing twice. “Stand back!” he cried. Olly shoved himself in among the alien paraphernalia until his back touched stone. The tentacle was whipping wildly, and his dad fired again. Then a glowing red eye opened at its tip, and it darted unerringly forward, wrapping itself around his father’s leg. With a jerk and a twist, Walter Mason was hanging upside down, lifting toward the hatch.

  “Dad!” Oliver screamed.

  “Run,” his father gasped, and then he was gone.