Cold: Chapter Eighteen
In which a dead rock legend helps you fight off a monster.
Chapter 18
“Ken? You ok?”
I heard Clyve’s voice from a distance, carried on waves that crashed against the dark vortex in my vision. The figure stared at me with all of its eyes, pushing on me, pushing on my psyche, my will, but I pushed back.
“No,” I hissed. I tasted blood, a sharp stab on my tongue. I felt myself collapse, pain in my shoulder as it connected with the hard floor, with the vortex, the figure, still clouding my vision.
“No,” I repeated.
The figure grinned with its eye-mouth, thick ichor dripping down its chin as the pupil and cornea split like an egg.
“Kill Clyve,” it repeated, its voice mine this time, echoing.
“No,” I repeated. I felt Clyve’s hand on my forehead, but it felt far away, ephemeral. I heard Clyve calling to me, but that, too, felt like another place.
A song came to me from some part of my mind that this figure didn’t control.
I’m a black star. I’m a black star.
Bowie’s swan song.
I pictured Bowie’s black star, pictured a sea of them, felt the beauty and darkness and tragedy and grief and desperation at the heart of that final album, and I threw it at this creature that represented nothing but nihilism, a darkness void of meaning. A million black stars, edges glinting like crystal, sliced into those eyes, all of them, and the creature screamed, my mind filling with the wails of a thousand damned souls, including my own. The eyes broke, viscous discolored fluid spilling down the creature’s form.
A final, horrific wail, and the creature let me go.
My vision refocused on the world, on Clyve’s face above me.
“You back with me?”
“Look up here man, I’m in danger,” I muttered.
“What?”
“Never mind.”
I explained to Clyve what had happened, what I’d seen. He blinked and stared at me for a minute before Edwin appeared next to him, and together, the two of them helped me up. I caught my breath and weathered a headache boiling around my mind. I sat back at the table, and Clyve sat across from me, head down, taking a deep breath. I could almost see his cybernetics working overtime to keep him calm. Edwin leaned against the bar and stared into the middle distance. The bartender who’d been puppeted by Nyarlathotep was nowhere to be seen.
I did my level best not to look at what remained of Angela Martin, still steaming on the floor.
“On to Lovecraft’s bookstore?” I asked after my mind returned to some semblance of normal.
Clyve nodded.
“I’ll…clean up here,” Edwin said, a catch in his voice.
The bookstore sat in the middle of nowhere near the Columbia River Gorge, a white, squat building with windows covered in old newspapers.
Clyve hesitated in the parking lot.
“What’s up?” I asked.
“Just…bad memories,” Clyve said.
We entered the building, and I found myself immediately struck by the incongruous warmth and elegance of the place. White bookshelves and wingback chairs, Tiffany lamps, gleaming oak reading tables. A small kitchen to one side.
I noticed several of the bookshelves had been emptied, the books piled on one of the reading tables.
“We were going through things with Angela’s help, trying to figure out what some of these books are, whether they’re dangerous,” Clyve explained. “She didn’t know much, but she knew a few things about which books to avoid. Some of these will really wreck your mind.”
I picked up one title, which seemed to be in Latin. De Vermis Mysteriis. Clyve snatched it out of my hands.
“That one is absolutely dangerous – we know that.”
“Dangerous how?” I asked.
“You literally don’t want to know.”
“Noted.”
“So what are we looking for?” Clyve asked, perusing the books.
“Anything about The Cold One, for a start,” I said. “And about Nyarlathotep, and Nodens, and wherever the hell I went in my dreams.”
I perused the books on the reading table. Some of them actually made me grin, a needed moment of levity after everything we’d just seen.
“Never knew the For Dummies people wrote one on werewolves,” I said with a smirk. Clyve nodded, avoiding eye contact.
“You ok man?” I asked.
“Nope.”
“Anything I can do?”
“Nope.”
“Want to talk about it?”
“Not yet.”
I let it go.
But Clyve didn’t.
“Ok, so…here it is. Why are you so fucking calm right now?”
I blinked. I hadn’t really thought about it. “Am I?”
“You’ve gone through some fucking insane things, man. You’ve seen stuff that should have shredded your mind and left you screaming. And here you are, calmly sifting through books.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “We’ve both been in the shit, so I guess I’m taking this as no different.”
“There’s ‘in the shit’ and then there’s this, man,” Clyve said. “This is…this is mad gods from beyond…wherever…fucking with the whole world. This is finding out not only are the monsters real, but they’re this. And I don’t even know what any of it means. I barely knew anything about H. P. Lovecraft’s work before…I did know about it, and the only thing I want right now is to not know about it again. Every time this shit comes up, it…I can’t live in a world with these things in it. And I’ve had a few years to come to terms with this stuff, since…all that happened, and I haven’t fucking come to terms with it. And here you are, and it’s been what, a few weeks since you went to the coast? And you’re just like, ok, there’s a weird god we need to kill, let’s find a book?”
“Dude,” I said, putting a hand on Clyve’s shoulder. “I get it. It’s a lot. Maybe I’m just compartmentalizing right now. I don’t know. I just…”
I trailed off. I queried my mind, tried to find a piece of it that might be screaming in terror. None appeared. My adrenal implant hadn’t even kicked in.
Had I freaked out at all since all this had started? Sure, some. Waking up in the Dreamlands. That creature in the bathroom. But I’d sort of calmly stood back as Nodens and Nyarlathotep, two actual gods, had fought with each other as I watched. I’d seen Nyarlathotep’s true form, and I hadn’t been reduced to a gibbering pile. I’d seen a woman melt in front of me, for fuck’s sake.
“Something ain’t right with you, Ken,” Clyve said, looking right at me, his human eye wet and trembling.
“That may be true,” I said.
Clyve broke eye contact and walked away from me. I heard him take a few deep breaths.
“Look,” I said, my voice cracking a little. “I haven’t been at this for just a few weeks. I know these monsters. I know Nyarlathotep. I told you this wasn’t the first time I’d seen him. I saw him in the war. He basically caused it. Or at least he made it worse.”
I told Clyve what I hadn’t told him in my apartment. About the “friendly fire” incident, about how Nyarlathotep had revealed himself to me, how I’d fought him out of my mind then, how I’d watched my entire squad go insane and kill each other.
“So I’m not new to this.”
Clyve turned around and stared at me as I told the story.
“I’m not sure that explains it, Ken, not all of it, but holy shit. Just…holy shit.”
I nodded, took a few deep breaths, and let my adrenal implant clear my head.
“But yes, at this moment, we need to find a book to kill a weird god.”
I perused the shelves, a lot of titles in languages I didn’t speak, some that I couldn’t even really look at without my vision blurring, unnatural waves unfocusing my mind.
But then I saw it. Nameless Cults. In English, and about cults.
Perfect thing to start with, right?
“This one look safe?”
Clyve looked at it for a moment. “Angela never mentioned this one. Looks like a dry textbook. It’s probably fine.”
Next Chapter→
Image from here. Not AI.
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