Anthology - SHADOWRUN - Spells and Chrome

Gunfire continued to bark, but it wasn't aimed at me. I rolled over onto my back, still clutching the evil book to my chest, and looked up into sheerest Nightmare…

People nowadays think they understand magic. They think they understand the Awakening. Orks. Trolls. Elves. Astral spirits. Elementals. Magic circles. Mystic incantations. It's all frou-frou, man. Fluffy-bunny Halloween dress-up make-believe, robed in black and pretending to be all about power. I looked into the face of that… that thing emerging from the triangle of evocation and I knew that our magic-obsessed and technically adept modern reality was nothing, nothing compared to the eldritch Horror writhing and gibbering at Reality's gates.

Five of the chanters inside the circle were hanging in the air, now, shrieking and struggling as near-invisible tentacles slowly but inexorably squeezed. Nakamura was among them, his eyes bugging from his face in agonizing, mind-rending terror. The rent-a-cops were running, but the Thing had reached out from the triangle and grabbed two of them as well.

And tentacles were reaching for me.

"Here!" I screamed. "Take it!" And I hurled the heavy book at the monstrous chaos emerging from the triangle's rift. The tentacles hovering above me snatched the book from the air, and by then I was scrambling to Cammie's side, scooping her up in my arms, and running, running like Doomsday itself was descending upon us.

And for all I knew, it was. The entire building was shaking and swaying, as though its century-old structure was barely containing the unimaginable force emerging from that alien plane. Ceiling panels and overhead lighting tubes burst and fell in a shower of glass and plastic. The floor danced and shivered, earthquake-wracked, and I heard shatterproof windows outside the room shattering, the crashes like gunshots.

It sounded like the whole damned building was screaming…

I reached the nearest door, pausing just long enough for a quick glance back over my shoulder. Maybe the Thing had what it wanted. One by one, the shrieking, squirming men suspended in the air vanished, though I swear I could hear their fading screams long after they'd gone.

I could still hear them as I descended the stairwell. • • •

The surviving guards had rushed out ahead of us, mingling with the late-night crowds downstairs who wondered what the commotion was up in the penthouse. I was stopped a couple of times by white-faced security people, but got by each time by saying, "Special security, with Roger Nakamura! I've got wounded here! Get the hell out of my way!"

Somewhere in all the confusion, I'd lost my nanny… and I'd peeled Cammie's off her blood-splattered face. They wouldn't track us. The humans wouldn't, anyway.

Gods of all the Metaverse… what did I see?

It still haunts me.

It wasn't a mouth that got Zayid and Nakamura. I don't think it was a mouth.

Is it true that our thoughts create Reality? That imaginal beings and places and nightmare horrors all somehow take shape and form and mass and seething, malevolent will in some other dimension, some other metaphysical plane?

Our myths may have more reality than we can credit. Beelzebub and Lucifer. Dark Hecate and Ammit, Eater of Souls. Yog-Sothoth, Keeper of the Gate, and Great Cthulhu, dreaming in the depths until the stars are right.

Perhaps whatever can be imagined is real, somehow, solid and fully manifested, residing just beyond the insubstantial gauze veils of Reality rising around us. Perhaps evil, true evil, arises from the lightless corners of our own hearts and minds. Perhaps even our darkest nightmares take shape and will, gibbering at the gates.

I have nightmares, now. Nightmares about Dee-Dee and Scooter and patient Thud. Dead names, now.

The nightmares where I again see the Thing are the worst.

And at night Cammie takes me in her arms and whispers soothing words in my ear and holds me close and tells me it's all right.

But it's not.

I can still hear the screams, the terror-maddened shrieks of souls dragged down into darkness. I still hear the despair. The wrenching agony of dying souls.

And I can still hear the blasphemous whisperings of the Book.

The Book of Dead Names.

Oh, gods! Gods in whom I've never believed, help me! The Art of Diving in the Dark By Ilsa J. Bick

Ilsa J. Bick is an award-winning, bestselling writer of short stories, ebooks and novels as well as a child psychiatrist, film scholar, surgeon wannabe and former Air Force major. (She is also fairly peripatetic and easily bored, but no fair diagnosing her until she's left the room.) She has published extensively in the Star Trek, BattleTech and MechWarrior: Dark Age universes, as well as original science fiction, fantasy and mystery. "The Key," a supernatural murder-mystery about the Holocaust and reincarnation, was named "distinguished" in The Best American Mystery Stories, 2005 (edited by Joyce Carol Oates); a novelette-length sequel, "Second Sight," has just been released in Crime Spells (eds. Martin H. Greenberg and Loren L. Coleman); Locus's Rich Horton calls the novelette " the best (in the anthology)… heady and involving."

Forthcoming are two young adult novels, in hardcover, from Carolrhoda Books: Draw the Dark, a paranormal mystery Publisher's Weekly called "inventive" and "riveting," which also made the semifinals of the 2009 Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award (as Stalag Winter); and The Sin Eater's Confession, revolving around the murder of a gay high school student in rural Wisconsin.

Currently, Ilsa and her family live in Wisconsin where theirs is the only mezuzah in town.

– Kupau wau i ka mano ka mano nui ka mano nui kupau wau i ka mano:

I am finished to the big shark, all consumed by the big shark, I am finished.

(Old Hawaiian saying)

Somewhere off the Kohala Coast, Hawai'i

May 9, 2070

Something wrong.

A beautiful day, a light breeze, the sea placid as blue glass, the auras of dolphins shimmering like comets screaming to earth.

But something was definitely wrong. A distant hiss of evil whispering from the depths like a murder of crows muttering on a naked limb above a newly-turned grave. The water's fingers stroked the hairs along his arms and neck into stiff hackles through his drysuit. Something snagged the meat of his brain like the set of a hook. Reeling him in…

Knows we're here. Maybe that's what it wants. Beneath his vest-definitely not standard-issue-a cold sweat pearled his chest. A new and more troubling thought: Jesus, can its magic reach this far? Can it see what I think?

Not good. He'd have to watch himself. No use tipping it off…

These are the demons. Daniel Ben-Yusuf raised a finger to his throat. Rachel's mezuzah hung around his neck-a focus, or simply a protective amulet of silver and amethyst, he was never sure-but his gloved fingers met only chilled trilaminates and butyl rubber. These are the princes of enmity dwelling in the abyss…

With the sleds, the light went fast, turning thin and watery at twenty meters. There were still plenty of fish-a rainbow of gobies and triggerfish and angels-darting in and around dense pinkish-white forests of elkhorn coral and the bristly quills of sea urchins. By the time his HUD said he was at twenty-five, the water was a weird blue-gray, and by thirty, as they stopped to purge their low-pressure lines and switch out to heliox, the reef was completely vertical, the fish petering out, the anvil of water palming Daniel's body dense and heavy. Far below, the sea was a very cold cobalt blue, the color of a lost day slipping inexorably toward night.

At sixty meters, they tied off their bail-out tank, double-checked their spare air canisters. (Hey, call him a cockeyed optimist, but if something went wrong at depth, the spare air might get one, or both of them to the bail-out.) At ninety-seven meters, a click sounded in his full facemask, and Alana's voice fizzed through, tinny and flat because of the depth: "Oh shit. Look down, your two o'clock."