Cold: Chapter Fifteen
In which you have chosen transparency despite the danger. Good luck?
Chapter 15
I stumbled to the door and opened it, the sunlight glinting off the metal half of Clyve’s head stinging my bio eye like bees. My cybernetic eye auto-adjusted to dim the light, so at least I had that.
“Hey Clyve.”
“You doing ok, Ken? You missed work the last two days.”
“Two days?”
“Yeah.”
“Well,” I said, looking down at my shoes to get a break from the bees, “I know when people say ‘it’s a long story’ it’s usually not, but in this case it’s a long story. Come in for a minute, would you?”
Clyve nodded, and I stood aside to allow him entrance.
“Holy shit, Ken, did you…black out and piss yourself?”
I sniffed the air. Stale urine and sweat and just nasty. “I guess so,” I said, shaking my head. I patted my pants, which were dry, so that must’ve happened a while ago.
Didn’t surprise me – if I’d been asleep for a full two days, then biological functions had to do their thing. I was just glad it wasn’t worse.
“I mean, I’ve heard of a bender, but this is not acceptable, Ken.”
“That’s not what this was.”
I sat back down in my chair, which stank of piss and stale sweat. “Look, uh…this is hard to explain, ok? Give me a minute to try to put it all together.”
“Why don’t you go do that in the shower?” Clyve suggested.
“Ok,” I said. I stood and walked to the bathroom, turned on the water, got naked, got in. The hot shower liquefied frozen shards of memory and fused them back together, so that when I got out, I felt clear-headed again, and by the time I toweled myself off, I knew what I needed to tell Clyve. Two acetaminophen and two ibuprofen would knock out my residual headache. I changed into clean clothes and returned to the living room. I sat in a different chair this time, a clean one that didn’t stink.
“I’ve got a lot to tell you, Clyve. Stuff I didn’t tell you about what happened at the coast, first of all.”
“I knew you’d kept something from me,” Clyve said. “But I figured you had a good reason, so I didn’t press.”
I let it spill. Being captured by the cult, the cult leader’s warning, my fears about what might happen if I told him.
Fears I still had.
“Someone somewhere” would face consequences if I told Clyve that the cult had captured me at Yaquina Head. But what about the “someone somewhere” that would face consequences if we didn’t stop the Cold One from doing whatever it was it wanted to do?
Which we still didn’t know.
But with Nyarlathotep in the mix, it couldn’t be good.
I stood and approached Clyve, training my cybernetic eye on his, granting him transfer access, showing him my capture by the cult and everything else I’d kept out of what I’d shown him the last time.
“So that’s what I hid from you.”
Clyve nodded. “Well, I don’t know what you’ve unleashed by telling me now, but you’ve done it, and now we move forward. But what does this have to do with your two-night piss-soaked bender?”
“I went somewhere,” I said, and then it all just tumbled out. “In my dream. Somewhere real, but somewhere you and I can only access when we sleep. I think it’s called the Dreamlands. There was a town called Inquanok, and a ghoul who helped me, and the Cold One is working with a really evil guy called Nyarlathotep, and—”
“Whoa,” Clyve said. “Try it a little at a time.”
I realized I’d basically thrown a hundred puzzle pieces at Clyve and told him to assemble the picture himself.
So I told Clyve everything, from waking freezing in Leng, to the ghouls who helped me, to the priests of Inquanok, and finally my meeting with Nyarlathotep and being forcibly snapped back to the waking world before I had all the answers.
“Who’s this…Nyar—what did you call him?”
“Nyarlathotep,” I said. “He’s basically like if the Joker was a god, and had godlike powers, but somehow even more chaotic, more sadistic.”
“Was this the first time you came across him?”
“No,” I said, remembering the war. Remembering the figure in the shadows. Those glowing eyes. The ideas he put in my head. The chaos, my unit losing their shit, killing each other instead of the enemy. Having to watch them do it, and having no control, no ability to stop it from happening.
That laugh.
He’d told me who he was that day. I don’t know why. Maybe he knew we’d meet again, and he wanted me to know exactly what I was up against. Maybe he did it for shits and giggles.
Nyarlathotep’s motives were his own.
I didn’t tell Clyve any of this. I just looked down at my own fingernails as my mind screamed, remembering.
“Ok,” Clyve said. “How do we beat him?”
“I don’t know,” I said, my voice a razor held in a trembling hand. “I don’t know if we can.”
“Well, I mean, we have to.”
“Here’s what I know about him,” I said. I’d looked him up after my discharge. “A writer named Lovecraft was the first to mention Nyarlathotep in his writing, calling him ‘The Crawling Chaos.’”
Clyve visibly flinched. “Not that motherfucker again.”
“Who, Lovecraft?”
“Yeah. A few years back my friends in the werewolf pack dealt with one of that guy’s descendants, who was working with a hunter named Angela. Between the two of ‘em they took out half the pack with some dark ass magic.”
“Shit,” I said. “How’d you beat him?”
“My husband is a werewolf Jedi master. It’s a long story. I just wish we hadn’t killed the guy, so we could ask him about this Nyar…thing.”
This got me thinking.
Why were Clyve and I still even alive right now? I’d directly disobeyed Nyarlathotep’s command to walk away from my investigation of the cult. I’d told Clyve about him. We should both be dead, or at the very least I should be looking at a horrifying cube of Clyve viscera right now.
Nyarlathotep’s motives were his own.
I just had to hope we could outwit the guy before he just snapped his fingers and flung us off the edge of the universe.
“I think we need to bring in some more people on this,” Clyve said. “Specifically, Angela Martin. She’s a part of the werewolf pack now, after my husband bit her during the climax of our final battle with her and Lovecraft. I feel like I’m explaining a very weird novel to you,” Clyve said, looking at an imaginary camera and cracking a grin. “Actually, now I think about it, I think Angela still has access to Lovecraft’s old bookstore. Might be some good stuff to research there.”
“I’m just not sure about bringing anyone else in. We’re risking our own lives as it is, and we’ll absolutely be risking the lives of anyone else we involve, and their families, and anyone they love, and everyone, really.”
“Might be worth the risk," Clyve said.
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