Paula Guran - The Mammoth Book of Cthulhu

Feral cunning overtook me, reduced me to an animal. I scooped handfuls of dirt and dead leaves over the abominations, then slipped back among my comrades who’d made merry at my cries of gastric distress. Life in the Legion is cruel.

Nightmares lashed me, surely as Vanger’s whip. I was shorn of rest and sanity, condemned to drift as a voiceless spirit while doppelgangers assumed my life. Brazen, evilly grinning doubles doted upon by dear mother, my friends and colleagues. Each new dawn found me shaking in my bedroll. Only Jim Dandy and Hurt noted my ghastly pale countenance for I strove mightily to conceal the nature of my ills. The instinct that compelled me to bury the eggs also warned that I lived in the shadow of some obscene, circling terror. Should anyone discover my secret, I would be undone in spectacular fashion.

The moral I learned from this experience, is always heed your suspicious inner voice.

On the seventeenth evening Jon Foot himself materialized from the whirling smoke of our main bonfire. The dogs barked with insane fury and then cowered at his sandals. Two sentries pissed themselves. Most depictions of the warlock are exaggerated. Artists render him as a monster: red eyes, spiked horns, a death’s head. Eight feet tall, razor talons and a lizard’s tail. In private, he may strip his costume and resemble exactly thus a demon. However, when I met him, he appeared altogether ordinary. Softening into middle age, his hair receded and his belly rounded. Brown of eye and mildly spoken. His black cloak smelt of sulfur and he smiled too much. He smoked a clay pipe. That was the extent of his nefarious comport.

Soldiers vacated a tent on the edge of camp. Jon Foot quartered within. Shortly thereafter he summoned, one by one, those of us who’d ventured beneath Castle Warrant. The interviews were brief. Men emerged from their audiences none the worse for the wear, although none would speak of what had transpired nor meet the eyes of those who inquired. Vanger’s lieutenants roamed among us and boxed the ears of those who pressed the point. Soon enough, the gossip stilled and the men fell into sulky routine.

My turn rolled round after midnight.

Jon Foot’s tent fumed with smoke from an iron brazier and his pipe.

He reclined upon a stone chair carved into the likeness of a centipede rampant. It much resembled the one I am told existed at court in the Privy Council. The warlock took my measure with a long polite stare. He finished his cigarette and lighted another from the small flames of the brazier.

In that lull, I realized the sounds of camp were not muffled by the tent walls. Nay, we inhabited a bubble in a sea of silent darkness. Cozier than my terrifying span trapped in the caverns, yet much the same.

“Master Ruark, so good to make your acquaintance. I’m sure this will be the high-water mark of my day.” He affected the cultured tones of a highborn. His politeness smacked of malice. Or, perhaps his tepid certainty and unwavering gaze preyed upon my guilt. His demeanor suggested that he knew everything about me all the way back to the rainy morn I dropped from Mama’s womb. He laughed and said, “Yes, yes. I know much. Much , however, isn’t the same as all. I cannot see what happened to you in the dim cellars of Henry Belfour. You were lost and now you are found. How does this happen?”

My intent was to mumble an inoffensive lie or three, to deflect and prevaricate as peasantry has treated with the rich since the beginning of time. Foot, black magician, must have cast a geas upon me, for matters took a bizarre turn.

“I got hungry and I ate three of them fucking eggs you’re on about,” I listened to myself say. Every other muscle in my body froze. I swayed, rooted in place.

“Damn. Captain Vanger counted the haul. A perfect set if not for the ones you abandoned. And the ones you devoured, alas.”

“Too bad. They hit the spot.”

“Thank you for your honesty, son.” Jon Foot levitated to his feet. “Apparently you met an old friend of mine down there in the cellars.”

“Aye, someone else was there. Whispering.”

Jon Foot nodded wisely. “Others sought the Clutch. Bad ones. Ethan, Julie the Fifth, Carling . . . Phil Wary. Black sorcerers, each. It would be no matter to disguise themselves and walk among your comrades. To divide and strike. You were befuddled and cut from the herd. Mere chance delivered you from doom . . . Did he speak to you? Surely, he did.”

My mouth opened again, though I resisted mightily. “Aye. My father came upon me in the dark.”

“Your dead father.”

“As a doornail.”

“This won’t do. I’m sorry.” He actually did seem a trifle melancholy. Then he took a small skinning knife from his pocket and sliced me from crotch to sternum. I cannot emphasize how disconcerting it is to watch in hapless wonder as the cut is assayed and one’s intestines slop onto hard-packed dirt. What’s worse? The warlock crouched, poking through the mess the way priests divine the future from pigeon entrails. The shock awakened my muscles. I regained sufficient control to stagger backward through the tent flaps.

Jon Foot watched me go, knife dripping in his hand. “Come back here, son. I want to hug the shit out of you!” He spread his arms and smiled with pure joy. His shadow against the wall coiled most unnaturally. It bristled with barbs.

Me and my train of guts paid no heed of his imprecation. Three steps took me across the threshold. I collapsed near a cook fire where soldiers just off watch gathered to warm themselves. The last moment I recalled of that particular life are their shouts, their expressions of panic and disgust. Sweet oblivion swept over me, and I was dead.

I revived, blanketed in slimy leaves, in the woods behind this very cottage. Naked and bloody and stinking, but whole. The pink flesh of my belly was without blemish, its cleaving wound had perfectly healed. They say that home always seems smaller when a man returns. This was the opposite. Trees loomed, the night stretched wider and deeper.

Guided by memory and habit, I emerged from the woods and knocked on the door. Ma swooned at the sight of her son, gone nearly two years. More than surprise smote her. More than alarm at my gory visage. Far more, as I discovered upon glimpsing myself in yonder body mirror. Upon departing to seek my fortune in the wide world, I’d attained middling height and shorn my whiskers daily with Da’s razor. Now, my form had reverted to that of a child of no more than five winters. My face had altered into a somewhat familiar stranger’s. Partially my grown self, partially a changeling’s. Mom would remark later that for a several moments she took me for her grandson.

Days of confusion followed. My thoughts buzzed. Waking proved difficult to separate from dreaming. I raved of centipede men and eternal darkness. Mother tended me as my strength and wits were gradually restored, and by the end of a week I’d grown fully into my father’s old logging clothes. I began to feed myself. I shaved again. She gently inquired what I recalled of the time between my murder and awakening. What she wanted to know was if I’d witnessed the afterlife, if I’d gone there and dipped in a toe.

I shook my head and claimed ignorance of aught save a smooth, formless void. How could I tell her the truth? I recalled the formless dark. Indeed, I also remembered the licks of fire shooting through its depths, the black rolling back to reveal a deathly white, an iris of bones of men fused together unto eternity. How could I speak to her of the awesome cold, or of the death groans of hidden stars? How could I articulate the sense of folding into myself, of being trapped inside an egg, drawing sustenance from its yolk as a chick does?