Necropolis: Book 4: Hybrids Page 5

  “Ingenious!” gasped Hiromitsu in wonder.

  The children could raise or lower themselves. The makeshift elevator worked smoothly and efficiently.

  As Hiromitsu watched the children slowly descend into the pit, Veronica hesitantly inched her way towards the house's entrance. The main entrance sat at a crooked angle with no door but a huge A-frame threshold, at least ten feet high.

  It smelled of damp forest wood, and as they approached its entrance they noticed, on either side, carved into the timber, were those same octopus-like faces.

  The A-frame threshold entered into a sloped floored foyer – in all likelihood to protect the inner area from the elements and rain.

  The inner chamber was lit with natural lighting through ingenious spaces woven along the top of the walls where the ceiling met.

  Dappled rays of daylight entered the chamber at slanted angles and sharply etched the lines in the carving on the floor.

  The floor in this large room was mostly a single massive flat surfaced boulder, with grit or sand or gravel pounded level around it. What was carved into the floor was a giant motif of a detailed octopus or squid head. Veronica knelt down to touch the engraving. The chiseled lines were deeper than they initially appeared, having been back-filled with sand. She picked at the compacted sand with her nail as she spoke, “Je comprends pas. What is with this carving? It's everywhere on the island.”

  Hiromitsu was studying the workmanship of the engraving. “There are many things on this island I cannot understand. The misshapen sun and moon. The complexity of that pulley design is an engineering marvel. This carving. What tools could they possibly have access too? It must have taken months!”

  “Seven months, twenty-four days,” answered a stranger's voice behind them.

  * * *

  The only light that reached Dante and Tamara as they lowered themselves down and down was from above.

  The woven basket creaked as droplets of spring water from the pit's walls splashed them. The cascading water acted like prisms, casting countless rainbows against the cavern's glistening walls.

  They past countless bats roosting in tiny nooks and crannies, squeaking faintly as they passed, irritated by their presence.

  But still they descended. One hundred, two hundred, three hundred feet and still no sign of the bottom. They were thoroughly soaked by the spring water.

  They had taken turns on the rope to avoid fatigue, but at this point worked together in silence. Every little grunt or sigh echoed sharply, stirring the nesting bats above.

  * * *

  Veronica and Hiromitsu were both startled as they turned to face the voice. Their surprise only grew when they lay eyes upon the speaker.

  He was the strangest of men. He was a gimp and leaned to one side, his left leg clearly crippled and bent. His hair and beard were long and unkempt. The right side of his head was picked bald of hair.

  But his eyes! It looked as if the bone around his right eye had been crushed and broken long ago, having healed wrong. But the eye itself! It was swollen and enlarged and where the white should have been, had turned as transparent as water.

  His shocking countenance had overshadowed the fact that he held some sort of pistol pointed towards them. Its barrel was as wide as a shotgun's. The entire pistol was plastic and bright orange. It took Veronica and Hiromitsu a moment to recognize the flare gun.

  Veronica put her hands up while Hiromitsu held his hand forward with a cautionary motion. “Please! Please be careful with that!” he pleaded. “We mean you no harm.”

  As the cripple hobbled into the room he answered: “Harm? Harm is all this gun can do!” he waved the flare gun as he spoke.

  “Please!” Hiromitsu repeated while positioning himself in front of Veronica.

  “It can't kill you.” As he spoke he twisted a single strand of hair with his free hand. Around and around his finger he wrapped the hair. Then pulled it out of his head. “Nothing can kill you here!”

  “What do you mean?” asked Hiromitsu.

  Veronica intervened. “My name is Veronica,” she reached out her hand slowly in greeting. The cripple tensed up and pointed the flare gun directly at her face. She closed her eyes and tried to hide her face. Hiromitsu gently pushed Veronica's arm down.

  “Lee...Jim... James. Lea-” the cripple stammered. “Leaman. My name is Leaman... and... and this is m-my island. What are you doing here? How did you get here? Do you have a boat?”

  Veronica, as frightened as she was, found her strength and courage in her concern for Dante and Tamara. She didn't like the direction the conversation was heading in. She didn't know whether Leaman knew about the children or not. There was no way to explain their presence here without implicating the children. “What do you mean, nothing can kill you here?” she redirected the conversation.

  “Nothing, nothing here dies.” Leaman began twisting another strand of hair again. “Not the bats. Not the moths. Not me. Not my Friend. Not the... Nothing dies here.”

  “Friend? You have a friend here?”

  Chapter 10: Scion of Azothoth

  At long last the basket bottomed out. The light was weak at this great depth, but the cavern floor seemed to ripple and move!

  Dante and Tamara sat in the basket, recuperating their strength and allowing their eyes to adjust to the gloom.

  The large pit opened up into a much larger pear-shaped cavern. A small pond collected the falling water and drained into a deeper tunnel leading into Stygian darkness. Centuries of dripping water had formed stalagmites and stalactites and columns across the drain tunnel's entrance, forming a natural stone portcullis.

  But as their eyes adjusted, they noticed the cavern floor around the pool was anything but natural! The colour of rust and furry, it constantly shifted and moved. The entire movement centered around a strange outcropping of stone from the pond.

  Tamara hung her face over the side of the basket, staring at the weird moving floor. “They're moths!” she exclaimed quietly in wonder.

  “Moths?” echoed Dante as Tamara pushed her hand at the floor. The large rust-brown moths around her hand scattered, flying chaotically, their wings beating dully in the still air, vacating a large patch of bare stone floor beneath them.

  Dante stepped out of the basket, causing more moths the fill the cavern's air. “What are they circling?” he asked, shielding his eyes from their flapping wings, trying to get a better look at that strange outcropping in the pool.

  “يعبدون لي“ a raspy voice crackled like dry autumn leaves in its foreign tongue, but in their minds, they heard it clearly: “They worship me.”

  The children froze as its dry desiccated voice echoed around the cave.

  * * *

  “Oh yes!” Leaman exclaimed excitedly, lowering the flare gun momentarily. “I do have a friend here! You'll have to meet him! He's incredible. One time, this one time, my roof, this roof, leaked, and he knew! He knew how to fix it! He taught me how to waterproof it!”

  “You built this... this house?” Veronica asked. “It's really quite amazing!”

  “But that's not all!” Leaman was bobbing up and down now. “He has shown me wondrous things! The climb to visit with him is treacherous; I have fallen once,” he ran his finger around the edge of his damaged eye. “But he taught me how to weave and I made a large basket and rope and he showed me how to make this complicated, this complicated... thing... pulley... it's hard to describe. It allows me to visit him regularly.”

  “A pulley apparatus? It allows you to raise and lower yourself?” Hiromitsu joined in.

  “Yes. Yes!” Leaman had lowered the flare gun completely now. In his excitement he grabbed Hiromitsu's wrist. “Here! It's just over here! I have to show you! You need to see the wonderful things he can do!”

  A cold sick feeling ran through the pit of Veronica's stomach. They couldn't go out. Then Leaman would surely know of the children and that they used his basket-elevator.

  Hiromitsu was trying to res
ist Leaman as he pulled him like an excited schoolboy, his eyes wide. But like a light-switch, his demeanor suddenly changed as he pointed the flare gun pointblank at Hiromitsu's head. “Why don't you want to see it? Why don't you want to see him?” Leaman was agitated, his good eye blinking rapidly, his glassy eye catching the sun rays and reflecting the veins of his retina.

  “Why can't your friend stay here?” Veronica nearly yelled out, again trying to redirect the mad cripple. “Can't your friend move?” her tone shifting to a move sympathetic one. “Is he hurt?”

  Leaman turned to face her, his grip on Hiromitsu relaxing. Hiromitsu pushed the flare gun away from his head with his forearm.

  “Hurt? Hurt?! He can't be hurt! He's a god...” Leaman was stuttering and tripping over his words; his emotions running too high. He seemed to pause and give himself a moment to collect his thoughts and compose himself.

  When Leaman was calm he continued. “He knows how to get off the island. He can lower the seas so we can walk off... Yes, he is hurt. He just needs to rest and heal a bit more so he can walk with me.”

  Hiromitsu pulled a confused face. “You know we're in the middle of the ocean, right?”

  Veronica looked directly at him, trying to motion to Hiromitsu to stop.

  “Are you mad? You cannot walk off an island.” Hiromitsu ignored her. He wanted Leaman to focus on him, keep his attention away from Veronica; maybe upset Leaman enough to gain an opportunity. But it didn't work. Leaman remained calm.

  “Of course we can't walk off the island. The dead walk and search the lower island.”

  Veronica and Hiromitsu exchanged a concerned look. “What?” Hiromitsu believed he was listening to the ramblings of a madman, but he wanted to keep him talking.

  “I don't know what they search for. I see them every time the tide drops. When the tides are high, like they are now,” he waved his gun towards the doorway, “I always fear they'll come ashore. But they never have. I think, I think their dead bodies are waterlogged. They don't float. I don't know. I don't want to know.

  “I had thought in time they would go away. I had thought the thing that feeds on them would have eventually consumed them all... but I was wrong... more keep coming... I think they're the crew of The Yamayuki... I think...” Leaman rambled on, talking more to himself now, his voice trailing off.

  Veronica, believing she was indulging the fantasies of a madman but wanting to draw out the conversation, continued, “What thing that feeds on the dead?”

  Leaman's drifting thoughts dissipated as he answered matter-of-factly. “It comes from beneath the ocean. The Whisperer.”

  There is a moment, a point in time, when one realizes their perception is askew; mistaken. That their presumptions are in error. A sober moment when the revelation crashes into their fish-bowl world. It might have been called an epiphany had the realization opened a new paradigm of a hopeful or better world. This was anything but that. At Leaman's utterance of the name, Veronica's hope in the world sank, for she recognized it. The Whisperer haunted Dante's dreams. Dante struggled his entire life with nightmares plagued with this – what she had thought fictitious – entity, The Whisperer. The rantings of a madman suddenly became all too real! “Quoi...?”

  “The Whisperer?” Hiromitsu repeated incredulously. “I know that name,” he whispered somberly. His niece, Tamara, battled with this nightmare being for as long as he could remember. He himself had encountered this, this thing, in a nightmare only once; the night baby Tamara called out for help – the night his sister Shantigra went missing. While Veronica was forced into a shocked silence, Hiromitsu was angered now. “You lie!” he barked.

  Leaman looked confused. “I've seen It. Not just in my dream. I've seen It. In the flesh – if you can say that.”

  Veronica was no longer convinced she was dealing with a madman any longer. She preferred the ramblings of a lunatic. “Is... is your friend The Whisperer?” she asked, frightened of the answer she might discover.

  “No. No!” Leaman's good eye began to twitch as he became more agitated. “No!” his voice boomed! “Never! The Whisperer haunts my sleep! All the time It's there! It's in my head! It never leaves! I can't sleep! I avoid sleep! The Whisperer's not my friend!” Leaman was beside himself now, waving his arms, and the flare gun, frantically. “Nyarlathotep's my friend! He helps me!” his shouting voice was shrill now.

  “Nyarlathotep?!” Veronica's resolve turned steely at the mention of that name. She was all too familiar with that alien monstrosity and its evil and hateful potential.

  “Where is it?!” she screamed at Leaman. “Is that fucking monster in that pit!? Are my babies in danger?!” her maternal instinct was frothing up into pure rage, her eyes scanning the room for a weapon, a branch, a stone, a stick, anything!

  “Monster?!” roared Leaman. “Do not speak ill of Nyarlathotep!!” he was drooling as he shouted. “He is a God!!”

  The thought of this delusional madman or Dante and Tamara facing that monster in the darkness and alone was too much for Veronica to bare. Weaponless, teeth bared, she roared as she charged Leaman. She'd tear his eyes out with her bare hands!

  Leaman, shocked by the sudden attack, fired the flare gun!

  * * *

  “I sensed you here.” Dante's voice echoed in the cave. He spoke out loud even though he instinctively knew his thoughts could be heard. He could feel the psychic tendrils brushing and caressing his mind.

  Tamara's mind linked with Dante's. “Dante..?” she whispered, trying to get his attention.

  “What are you?” Dante asked, ignoring Tamara.

  “كنت مثل ابني“

  “You are the same as my son.” It insinuated its thoughts into his mind.

  “ ولكن هل تعرف ما أنت، ماذا يمكنك أن تفعل؟“

  “But do you know what you are, what you can do?”

  “Dante...?” again Tamara vied for Dante's attention.

  “ أستطيع تعليمك“

  “I can teach you,” its voice wound its way into the corridors of Dante's mind.

  “ أنا يمكن أن تظهر لك الأشياء الرائعة كنت قادرة على“

  “I can show you the marvelous things you are capable of!”

  “Dante!” Tamara shouted, her voice harsh against the bare stones. The moths all took flight, obscuring what little light was available. “He's feeding off you. He's slowly syphoning your energy!”

  “Your son?” asked Dante, oblivious to Tamara. “Answer my question. Who are you?”

  “ أنا فرعون الأسود“

  “I am the Black Pharaoh,” its voice brimming with pride.

  “ اقترب“

  “Come closer,” the odd stone protruding from the pond spoke. Dante began walking towards the pond.

  Tamara was scared. Although she was linked to Dante, he wasn't responsive.

  “Mama?” she called out into the darkness, her metaphysical mind conjuring that inter-dimensional window.

  As Dante approached the peculiar stone outcropping he thought it was a statue at first. But as he was within arm's reach he realized the horror. It was a man; an ancient half-fossilized mummy. Its legs were submerged beneath the pool of water, encased in centuries of limestone. Its one arm fossilized to stone, while its torso and other arm were mummified dried black leather.

  Around its neck hung a pendant, a necklace, an amulet with a mesmerizing gem embedded within. Deep within its queerly sculpted facets glittered a faint light. So hypnotized was Dante by its light that the mummy easily reached out its blackened bony claw and held the boy's wrist.