Necropolis: Book 5: R'lyeh Read online

  Donita cocked her head to one side and smiled out of the corner of her mouth, as she was wont to do. “Come now Mr. Siad Abdullah, Alia tells me you've tracked down the translated copy of The Gulur Dögun? What's its title in English again? Refresh my memory. The Amber Dawn?”

  “Yellow Dawn,” both men corrected her.

  “Well, well, well! You see! You both have something in common after all!”

  Siad shuffled through some papers on his desk. “Yes, we have tracked The Gulur Dögun down. It had been returned to the wrong shelf. But you may find this of interest, Mr. Zann. The last individual to have loaned this book out was an American student named Riley Smythe.”

  “The name means nothing to me. Why would that interest me?” Otto still hadn't taken his eyes off the Sikh.

  Siad returned to his seat and calmly motioned with his hand for Otto to sit. “Please Mr. Zann, we don't need to be hostile,” he said with a warm smile. ”Please, have a seat.”

  “You sit, please Donita,” Otto said to the pregnant woman. As she took the seat Siad added, “Can I get you water? Fresh juice?”

  Donita shook her head and motioned for Otto to sit. “Mr. Abdullah, why is this student, Riley Smythe of interest?”

  Siad Abdullah remained quiet for a moment. “It would seem you two are not the only ones interested in The Music of the Spheres.”

  “What?!” Otto exclaimed. “How do you know of -”

  “Hush!” Donita cut him off. “Alia knows. I told my sister. Please Mr. Abdullah, continue.”

  “Yes ma'am. The other three titles you had inquired about Mr. Zann, Riley Smythe has shown interest in each and every one of these titles...” he let the sentence hang, hoping its implications would become obvious.

  “...oh my...” Donita added in a small voice.

  “Why is that important?” Otto was still angered and flustered.

  “Mr. Zann, these tomes are extremely rare; unique. The few remaining others have been lost or destroyed. There are no other remaining copies. These are the only books in the bibliothèque du Moubayed that makes any reference to The Music of the Spheres.”

  “So, let's go find this Riley Smythe. Where is he staying, at l'université de Etienne's dormitories? Le Château de printemps?”

  Siad Abdullah pulled a sour face. “Yes. He should have been.”

  “That doesn't sound good,” said Donita, the concern showing in her voice. Her blue eyes were dazzling in the office's subdued light.

  “No ma'am, it isn't. Riley Smythe registered as a student here in September 1926, four years ago. His tuition has always been in good standing, being wired from Innsmouth, Massachusetts, USA like clockwork every year.”

  Otto crossed his arms and smirked. “Sounds like a model student! You know, Siad, I don't really care about your student body. Can you direct me to my book, please?”

  “Otto, please be quiet,” Donita gave him a stern look and turned her attention back to Siad. “Mr. Abdullah, what's the problem?”

  “The problem is, Riley Smythe has never attended a single class in the four years he has been here. None of the professors know of him.”

  “Ha! A ghost in the system!” Otto smiled from ear to ear.

  “Otto!” Donita's blue eyes were feral as she glared at him.

  “Alia thinks he may be an imposter,” continued the Sikh solemnly.

  “What do you think?”

  “I believe Riley Smythe is an alias. I think our library and university has been infiltrated by an unknown and undesirable element.”

  Donita's blue eyes became piercing as she locked eyes with Siad. “Is Les Châteaux de Etienne-de-Lafontaine estate in danger?”

  “It is my sworn vow to allow no harm to befall you my lady -”

  “Not me. The students. The faculty. My family?”

  “Yes, I fear so. Maybe. It would depend of what his agenda is with The Music of the Spheres. What is the potential of this forbidden and esoteric music?”

  Donita and Otto exchanged a concerned glance.

  Chapter 4: The Battle of Leaman's Island

  USS Antietam, 2 miles West

  of GEOP-Event's edge

  From this extreme distance the Shoggoths appeared like bats pouring out of the cavern's throat; black dots filling the air. Like a murder of crows, they polluted the skies around the USS Antietam, circling in a wide four kilometer perimeter.

  It wasn't until their true size were realized that their absolute horror became apparent. Formless, wingless train-sized aberrations should never be airborne. A figment of a demented mind's imagination, these were things that should not have been. These were nightmares made real; the impossible become reality. Against all logic, somehow, the things flew! The black amoeboid things flattened themselves out into a putrid pancake airfoil one second, then convulsed, pulsated, swelled, and squeezed forward through the atmosphere. They slithered and perversely inserted themselves through invisible pockets of air. In some sort of fluid way, they plummeted and trembled across the sky; like a haphazard controlled falling. One second they appeared to be gliding, but the next this illusion gave way to a slingshot motion, like a Miyazakian nightmare.

  The white pill shaped turrets of the American destroyer's Phalanx CIWS guns pivoted as the search radar acquired numerous potential targets, its software analyzing and prioritizing threats. The automated robotic hum of their motors the only sound breaking the monotonous ocean waves.

  Every man aboard held their breath in anticipation. The circling Shoggoth swarm making the silent tension cogent.

  Hmmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm the pivoting domed Phalanx guns murmured, waiting for a target.

  It started with the faint distant sounds of the Shoggoths. “Tekeli-li, Tekeli-li, Tekeli-li,” when two broke from the surrounding swarm, in their catapulting-gliding flight.

  When the flying monstrosities broke through the USS Antietam's two mile kill zone the Phalanx turrets concentrated fire on one Shoggoth. The Phalanx CISW firing at 75 round per second ripped it to shreds, its protoplasmic bulk falling off like blood-rain, its mass thundering into the ocean in pieces.

  When the first threat was neutralized, the Phalanx guns pumped a stream of projectiles through the second Shoggoth closing in. Blood, ichor, and semi-formed organs trailed the dying thing, but its momentum carried the remnants of its bulk slamming into the destroyer's hull, the warship tilting. Its bleeding mass slipped across the deck, acrid smoke billowing off the ship as its acid burnt the hull. The remnants of the slaughtered monstrosity tumbling over the edge and the USS Antietam righting itself.

  There was a silence, the briefest lull. A quiet before the storm as the entire war-theater seemed to hold its breath.

  “Tekeli-li, tekeli-li!” Their faint cries from their distance surrounded the warship, inundating the air. Then the battle began in earnest as the protoplasmic horrors began swarming the USS Antietam from all directions.

  The destroyer's multiple weapon systems came online, acquiring short and long range targets. The tranquility of the early morning was shattered as the military might of the American navy let loose its ballistic fury.

  Chapter 5:The Gulur Dögun, by Ása Davíðsdóttir

  Le Château d'été,

  la Propriété et les Vignobles de LaFontaine;

  Saverne, France.

  1930

  “Davíð Hróðgeir, an Icelandic member of the 1860 Greenland expedition, had studied and recorded text from an Esquimaux tribe high up the West Greenland coast. This singular cult of tribal degenerates practiced a curious form of devilworship with a repulsive and deliberate bloodthirstiness.” Donita began informing Otto of the legendary book's history.

  “Davíð Hróðgeir's only translation was a chant to a hideous fetish idol. His translation of their chant, 'Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn,' being as follows: 'That is not dead which can eternal lie. And with strange aeons even death may die.'

  “Rumours abounded that the explorer Davíð Hróðgeir ha
d discovered a much larger volume of text from this degenerate Esquimaux tribe, but it was kept secret and never translated. It would only be decades later, after the explorer Davíð Hróðgeir's death in 1908, that the lawyers of his estate would pass his untranslated notes into his daughter Ása Davíðsdóttir's possession.

  “It would ultimately be Davíð Hróðgeir's daughter, Ása, who would finish translating and publish her late father's work and research in 1910.

  “Ása Davíðsdóttir had titled the translation, the Gulur Dögun. An approximate English translation being 'Yellow Dawn,' or often mistranslated as 'The Amber Dawn.'

  “However, this history of The Gulur Dögun's publication is as interesting as its contents are. It was a book many believe was never meant to be.

  “Its initial print run was a small one, with distribution aimed at a small and specialized scientific community. But its shipment never arrived, being lost in transit. The mystery of this missing shipment was never solved and when its printers were contacted to rerun the book, the print shop had been closed, purchased by an obscure Innsmouth Publishing Company in May of 1911. Its lithography, typesetting and plates to have disappeared from the pages of history.

  “And on a darker and more sinister note, and to further add to the mystery and compound the publication, was its author's - Ása Davíðsdóttir, now 50 – disappearance on her holidays in July of 1911. Her missing persons file remains unsolved.

  “I only have one other concern,” Donita finished. “How did the bibliothèque du Moubayed come into possession of this copy? It is in pristine condition.”

  “That's all very interesting,” began Otto in a feinted bored tone, “...well... not really,” his ire and sarcasm pronounced. “We're interested in what it has to say regarding The Music of the Spheres. Missing persons from twenty years ago? That's police business. Misprints and lost deliveries? I'm not interested in the mismanagement and mishaps of a print shop. I don't care how this library got its copy. I'm only glad it has one!”

  Donita sat quietly and gave Otto a sour look, clearly unimpressed with his attitude. She ignored his indifferent comment and began leafing through The Gulur Dögun. “Here! This is the part that initially caught my attention,” Donita began. “The translation refers to our universe as 'The Quantisphere'.”

  She began reading aloud:

  “Our world, everything we can hear and touch and smell and imagine and see, our entire universe, is little more than a tiny bubble in an ocean of Chaos and madness; an aberration encased in an all too thin shell or membrane. All of our reality is contained within this Quantisphere.

  “The Quantisphere is an invisible membrane; not the boundary of a bubble, but something that exists between your thumb and forefinger when you squeeze them together, wherever and when-ever you may be. This is something hyper-dimensional.

  “Beyond lies the Outer Chaos, the often formless, seething, sometimes mindless energies that exist where even the notion of Time has no remit.

  “Outside the Quantisphere there are substances and fibres of physical and incorporeal matter that defy human understanding, the rules of space and time fly apart like water when a drop of oil strikes the surface. Nothing is certain. Nothing is consistent.”

  Donita paused in her reading. Otto raised his eyebrows, “Our world is an aberration?!” he paraphrased The Gulur Dögun. “That's a pretty dismal view of reality.”

  Donita's piercing blue eyes scanned across the pages as Otto spoke. “It gets worse,” she added, placing a finger at a certain passage. “It speaks of intelligence from this 'Outer Chaos', from beyond our world.”

  “There is intelligence out there, but so alien, so awful and jarring to our human senses, that to even perceive the existence of such things can drive any normal man utterly insane.

  “There are Travelers from this Void. To these Things that lurk and fester within our reality, unhindered by the boundary that protects us, the Quantisphere is nothing more than a shift in terrain; like going from land to sea.

  “Then there are those gargantuan and terrible entities, the Great Old Ones and the Outer Gods. Immortal, eternal, and yet for all their staggering power, only capable of coming through into our reality in rare and specific conditions: through the Music of the Spheres, when the stars are right, when the fabric of the Quantisphere is thin enough to rip, or when their human and [non-human] worshipers expend enough energy in gruesome ceremonies of blood sacrifice to burn a hole right through, creating temporary doorways from Beyond.”

  “It would seem that Davíð Hróðgeir's Esquimaux tribe had repeatedly attempted these rituals, with hopes of opening a doorway to the Outer Chaos... but to open it for what purpose?”

  “This is interesting,” Donita added, “its mention of the Music of the Spheres. Clearly our research and theories are correct. According to this reference, the Music opens a doorway outside our Universe; outside this Quantisphere.”

  “What's not clear,” Otto commented, the concern showing in his green eyes, “is whether this doorway is one or two ways.”

  Flipping forward several pages, looking for a specific passage, Donita answered, “It hints at it being two-way, as it mentions its exposure and some sort of 'taint'.” She ran her finger across the page, “Here!”

  “Exposure leave a [Taint] upon the physical and psycho-emotional construct that defines a living mind. Anything from a human tampering with arcane magik, or a seal streaming through ancient temples on the [arctic] sea floor.

  “The [Taint] burns and scars thoughts, infusing them with an alien energy that slowly burns like embers caught in the invisible vortices of a cosmic breeze. A [Taint] that can never be removed and lingers like a cancer, always threatening to spread and increase its corrupting influence.

  “Knowledge of all of these realms and entities, and of the operations that allow an individual to call upon Things greater than themselves, can be found and learned by those willing to accept the risks and confront the Fears of their own mortality and sanity.

  “With this magik an individual can permanently change fragments of reality, sometimes whole bodies, even locations, depending on the energy being expended. And that is the lure, which is why some people strive to engage with what lies beyond the Quantisphere regardless of certain destruction. The potential for madness and mayhem are at the heart of any encounter.”

  “The Gulur Dögun makes mention of 'the Music of the Spheres' as a condition capable of thinning the fabric of the Quantisphere enough to slip outside of our reality; an exit from our universe.

  “The Gulur Dögun also makes obscure references that exiting the protective membrane of this Quantisphere leaves us exposed to the Outer Chaos, which leaves a 'Taint', burning or scarring both the mind and body. It alludes to the potential of vast power to change, alter, or warp reality, but little details as to the nature of this Taint.

  “It is unclear what this referred “Taint” is. Its translation is poor and somewhat sketchy, almost like Ása Davíðsdóttir couldn't find the proper word in either Icelandic or English for the Esquimaux concept. Maybe a proper noun or title?

  “Could this “Taint” be what the Chinese Tao Xian Ching refers to as 'Symbiots'?”

  Otto stared at Donita deep in his own thoughts before responding. “We need to get our hands on the Tao Xian Ching.”

  “The Gulur Dögun makes note of some sort of magical ability to call upon Things greater than ourselves. A summoning; a grimoire. We need to view the Coptic Klulu Gnostica,” Donita corrected Otto. “It's a grimoire. There has to be a reason why Alia is keeping it so secretive. I understand why she won't allow a student to study it. But me? She's hiding it for a reason.”

  Chapter 6: The Battle of the Four Symbiots, Part I