Paula Guran - The Mammoth Book of Cthulhu

Russ and I exchanged a single glance — there was no time for words. There was nothing to do but get shed of this place, the things in it, and whatever waited for us beyond its doors.

Russell turned and slid open the door that led to the station platform. An icy wind blasted through the doorway along with a cold stream of darkness, and it wrapped Russell in its grip and pulled him into the night.

Before I could take a single step, the warehouse door slammed in my face like a guillotine blade . . . but not before another black shadow blasted into the room.

It was the dead boar, and it was coming straight for me.

The boar raged through the darkness, crossing the room like a red torrent loosed from a broken dam in hell. I leveled the .38 and put two slugs in the creature, but it plowed over me before I could fire a third.

The pistol flew from my hand and spun through the jade shadows. Hoofs scratched over hardwood as the boar turned to attack again. I hadn’t even made it to my knees, and the only thing within reach was a thick shard of broken mirror. Dizzily, I snatched it up as the boar closed on me — its face a mask of caked blood, its snout flared with exertion.

I drove the makeshift blade into the creature’s right eye. Tusks raked my belly as the glass tore into my palm but my grip held firm, and I jammed the misshapen blade deeper as the monster smashed me backward. My head thudded against the wooden door, and a black galaxy opened before my eyes. For a second I was nowhere . . . and then in the space of a single blink I was back, just in time to see the boar topple to the floor.

I didn’t wait for it to get up. The pistol lay near the door, and I grabbed it with my bloody hand. Tittering laughter rose behind me, and I didn’t have to turn around to know the dead station agent was rising again. But I’d already heard enough words from that thing’s mouth, and I didn’t want to hear any more.

A rattling shove, and I slid open the warehouse door.

Outside, the air was thick with the stink of gunpowder.

Russell’s shotgun boomed in the darkness, but my relief at seeing him alive didn’t even last a second.

Bound up in the Winchester’s echo was the unearthly baying of a gigantic hound.

The jade statue didn’t do the monster justice. Nothing could have. Its clawed feet set coal shards burning as it came down the tracks. But faster than the demon came the darkness, sweeping past the monster like a scalding wave, cascading through the tunnel of pine, filling it, and the demon’s eyes boiled in its narrow skull as it was overtaken by a night so black it might have been torn from a patch of universe beyond the farthest star.

Just ahead of the monster, my brother stood his ground. The demon paused only a moment, then reared as it closed on Russell. Its great wings spread, slicing a gap in the nightwave, and its claws drew wide as if ready to tear that piece of earth from the womb of the world along with the man who’d claimed it.

Russ fired the shotgun into the gap between those enormous claws. Again and again, as the monster’s talons raked the darkness. Blood sprayed from my brother’s chest as he was slammed backward. But the Winchester was still in his grasp, and another blast of 00 buckshot splattered the night.

Severed muscles gushed blood. The demon’s shoulder was skinned to bone and gory socket, and it howled as the next blast took half its face away. That sound couldn’t be described with words, but it didn’t defy understanding. Not if you had a something like it locked up in your own guts . . . not if you recognized the doomed tenor of it as my brother did, even with his own life draining away. Russ tossed aside the empty shotgun and struggled to his feet. The demon kept on coming, but blood no longer pulsed from its wounds. Now howls and screams erupted from each buckshot trench, as if every soul the beast had devoured was at long last free of the flesh prison housed within the demon’s body.

The sound became a roar . . . a hellish cacophony that shook the earth and blasted glass from the train station windows. And Russ screamed as the demon closed over him . . . screamed those horrible words he’d kept locked inside for so long, the gutter sacrament that had doomed him from the time he first spoke it. But now his words were black taunts meant to challenge his tormentor, and soon those words became a howl of his own, slicing through the night like a scythe.

I ran toward my brother, the .38 in my hand. Russ had drawn the Nahkampfmesser from its scabbard and was grappling with the demon, the German knife driving through scaled flesh as the creature’s great hands closed around his ribs. I was running fast, faster than I ever had. And then that black wave hit me . . . but it wasn’t anything as ephemeral as the night. In a moment I was twisting upward in a flock of gigantic bats, and their wings caught me and raised me into the pines in a boiling whirl, and the howls I’d heard from Russ and the monster and all those tortured souls were lost in the chittering screams of a thousand winged nightmares.

The whole world seemed to spin in that black whirlpool. My hands clawed out, fighting for purchase. As I tumbled through the darkness my fingers brushed the station agent’s ravaged face. Pages of the letter whipped by along with the bloodstained box that had held it, and as the demon storm churned on I glimpsed the monster’s boiling eye in the distance, much dimmer now. Tattered flesh flapped over it like a broken coffin lid. And Russell was there, too — just for a moment, like dead Ahab riding the whale . . . and then he was gone.

I dropped from the black twister’s winged embrace. Pain exploded in my ribs as I slammed down on steel rails. The night spilled past me, twisting into the pine tunnel. I watched it go. Bones cracked against pine boughs as the darkness spun into the forest, and dead wings were carved and torn by swirling eddies of broken window-glass, and gravel waves pounded all until there was nothing left but a final wisp of empty night.

Then came silence. And there I was — down on my knees, shivering against those cold steel railroad tracks. Everything was gone . . . everything except the thing locked in my grasp. At first I thought I’d managed to hold on to the .38 as I rode the whirlwind, but when I raised my hand I found it wasn’t a gun that waited there . . . not at all.

No. The thing that filled my hand was a jade statue.

I threw it into the trees, and I ran.

I must have followed the railroad tracks, because somewhere along the line I jumped a freight and headed east in a livestock car. The train rattled over Emigrant Gap in the dead of night. Nothing in the car but shadows and a howling wind that sliced the low-hanging clouds, whipping white ghosts through wooden slats as the car traveled over snow-capped mountains.

Or so it seemed to me. Except for wind and shadows and those wisps of cloud, the rail car was empty. The railroad didn’t ship livestock over the Gap once fall delivered the first heavy snow. Try that, and the company would have ended up with a few tons of frozen meat. And maybe that’s how I should have ended up, just a couple hundred pounds of not-so-prime cut ready for God’s own butcher shop.

But it didn’t work out that way.

I was still alive when the train made it over the mountains. At least, that’s what they told me on the other side.

They sliced off three frostbitten toes at the indigent ward in Reno’s main hospital. Stitched up my hand, took care of my other wounds, too. After a few weeks I got around okay. One of the nurses helped me find a job, and I worked in a casino restaurant for a couple months. When I got a little stronger, I landed a gig loading freight for a trucking company. It was a lucky break — the guy who owned the business was a casino regular.