It’s 3am in the darkened all-night Stardust Bijou theater. Time when the popcorn is well past soggy, the soda is quite flat, and the motionless people in the front row have stayed long past their bedtime. The projector starts, sounding like a lonely werewolf howling at the waning moon, and the images, flickering across the screen, start to come alive.
Something in Martin’s Basement
by J.M. Cozzoli
Friday 10:30am, July 8th, 1940
Ancilla Scott was typing as fast as she could. I was dictating as slow as possible. We still were not meeting anywhere near the middle so the letter was taking a lot longer than I had planned. I sipped my coffee and thought of various ways I would like to take her pretty blond head and chop it off. Then again, maybe it would be more satisfying if I took the red scarf she wore around her pale neck and strangled her with it. No. Too much effort and I liked her as a person, just not as my secretary; and trying to get her corpse down the Chrysler Building’s elevators would be a nightmare. I had enough of those to deal with already: nightmares, not corpses.
“Why don’t we take a break?” I recommended. She sighed with relief.
“I’ll file these, then,” she smiled in that soft, raspy, voice of hers that made me think she was a heavy smoker, but I never saw her light up. She grabbed the folders on her desk, got up with determination, and then walked over to the filing cabinet. I usually refiled the folders after she left for the day, otherwise I would never find anything. As she opened the top drawer I imagined I could just push her head in and slam the drawer shut real hard a few times. I shrugged and retreated from the outer office to my own desk. I read in the pulps that private investigators sat at their desks with their feet propped up, waiting for clients. At least I could do that. I could also watch Ancilla through the tinted glass, in the outer office, at her desk, imagining she was a real secretary.
The sound of the door from the hallway opening was followed by Ancilla saying hello. She walked Captain Raphael Ligotti of the NYPD into my office.
I smiled and pointed to the oaken chair beside my desk. “What can I do for you, Captain?”
“For starters, you could pour a glass of that wonderful malt whiskey you keep stashed in the left-side bottom drawer of your desk.” He loosened his tie and removed his homburg. I never liked homburgs. I am a fedora man, myself.
“Feel free to put your feet up. I read that all hardboiled detectives do that.” I pulled out the bottle of White Horse with two glasses and poured. He took a sip, savored it, then downed the rest.
I shifted in my squeaky chair to lean forward. I should add the chair is quite uncomfortable too, but it has sentimental value being pretty old and well traveled.
“I need you to tail someone. A woman, Ella Becker. Her neighbors made a complaint that some bruiser is being too frisky and is not taking her get-losts seriously. She works at Martin’s department store, Fulton Street Brooklyn. Manages the in-store displays and street events like the Halloween and Christmas parades. I tried to get her to make a complaint so I could shake him up, but she refused. I think she’s scared of what he may do if she does speak up. Big, brawny German sluggo kind of guy named Dieter Wagner. And there’s more. The kind of more that falls in your ballpark.”
I leaned back and took another sip of whiskey. “Oh? I like all kinds of more,” I said over the squeak.
“Got a call from the FBI. This guy interests them. A lot. They’ve been tracking him since he left Germany, to Constantinople, then to Hong Kong, and now here to New York. They won’t say why, but the gossip is he’s Ahnenerbe.” Ligotti noticed my sudden glow. He smiled. “I thought that might interest you. And I may need your special talents if it turns out to be more than gossip.”
The Ahnenerbe did interest me. They were a branch of the German SS. They hunted for treasures around the world. Only the treasures they wanted were religious relics like the Holy Grail or the Arc of the Covenant; and occult artifacts that were best left buried. Or needed to be reburied, there was that too, and that is where I usually stepped in.
“What would you like me to do?” I asked.
“First, pour me another. Second, make sure Ella stays safe. Third, if he turns out to be looking for something that you deem is dangerous, stop him from getting it. I trust your judgement. You know best about such things, god help us. Here’s Ella’s home address.” He handed me a slip of paper from his notebook.
Ligotti stood up, gulped down the whiskey I had poured for him, straightened his tie, and donned his homburg. I walked him out. I told Ancilla to take the rest of the day off. I had work to do.
Later that Evening
After exiting the subway, I tailed Ella from the Fulton Street train station as she headed to Martin’s, nestled inside the old Offerman Building. It was a leisurely evening walk until Wagner showed up and pulled her arm in one direction while she pulled away from him in the other. He was the kind where manhandling came naturally, for both women and men.
I quickly introduced myself and stepped in between them. He left giving me the stink eye as he held his slightly bruised elbow with some pinched fingers. His glaring eyes and choice curses told me he would be back after a few drinks so I hustled Ella to get her moving. I felt a gun under his coat as we tussled, so there was that. I filed it away as him being more dangerous than I first thought.
“Thank you,” she said, doing her best at composure.
“You’re welcome. I’m John Gothico.” I explained to her how I wound up being her sudden shiny knight to the rescue and how Ligotti had asked me to shadow her.
“Oh, you mean that nice police captain? He was so kind to me. I’m sorry I couldn’t go through with the complaint. You always think things will work out themselves, don’t you? Now I wish I had.”
“He’s the type that doesn’t give up easily,” I said. “Let me tag along just to play safe. I had nothing to do this evening anyway.”
She thought about it for a few seconds then smiled. “Okay. I’m just looking over the Halloween parade plans, but that second basement always gives me the willies and I must go down there tonight, that’s where my office is. Okay, yes. I would appreciate the company.”
So off to Martin’s we went. As we walked, I noticed she wore Joy, a pretty expensive perfume, along with a crisp knee-length A-line dress with puffed shoulders and sand-colored wedge sandals. She wore a dainty flower clip to top her perky brunette hair. She was a living store display herself.
In no time at all we were at Martin’s and stepping into an elevator. Ella said hello to the elevator girl.
“To the dank dark basement, shall we?” said the girl in a sinister voice with a wicked grin. Arch Oboler would have loved her. Ella nodded with a look of feigned despair. Abbott and Costello could not have done it better.
The girl looked at me and winked. I get that a lot. Her white-gloved hand shifted the handle to send us down. Within a few seconds we landed in the second basement. She opened the cage to let us out. “This place gives me the creeps too,” she shuddered. That was not feigned.
Commercial basements generally run to the creepy side, but as I watched her close the cage and head back up, I felt a little winnowing of my neck hairs. When I turned around and got a better look at the place that winnowing went up a notch. There was something not quite right. The incandescent lighting was minimal, so not helping, and the dampness, the quiet dust, and the size of the space, cluttered here and there but with some open spaces, put me on edge. I could not put my finger on it, but I started minding my steps and using my eyes and ears like it mattered.
I pegged the floor to ceiling height at 12 feet, give or take a few inches, and the floor space itself was almost as big as a football field, but made from concrete with massive support columns blocking any forward passes. There were windowed office doors and open hallways leading elsewhere along the perimeter, and the boilers, dynamos, engines, and elevator pumps you would expect to see in a large building like this dotted the floor here and there.
Ella clued me in with more information. “We have our locker rooms and lunchrooms down here. Over there is the timekeeper’s office. And next to it is my office. I can stand this place during the day, just barely. But at night, with it all quiet and deserted, it’s too much. Silly, I know.”
“Silly? No. I don’t work here and I already don’t like it. Biffy?” I asked her.
“Over there,” she pointed. “Behind that column and past the clothes mannequins.”
It had to be mannequins. I hated mannequins. I hated a lot of other things too but they listed among my top five hates. I sighed and headed over to the column, about thirty feet away, keeping my eyes glued on them. They were quite a lively group too, with some missing heads, some one-armed, and a few with just a pair of legs and no arms, going nowhere, posed at the awkward moment they were relegated to this place. The ones with heads were really creeping me out as the eyes seemed to follow me. I sighed again when I made it past them.
Something was different on my return trip a few minutes later from the men’s room.
I did not recall some mannequins facing the biffy, and now me, but there were those blank eyes again. One mannequin was also missing. That is right, I count them. All the time, in stores and especially when they are dumped in creepy second basements. And I can count real well. I patted the Yankee Fist under my coat for comfort and headed back to Ella. At least I now knew there was something definitely wrong in this basement.
Ella was in her office, looking over some drawings for the floats they would soon be building.
“This looks like a pretty scary one,” I said, rifling through some of the newspaper sheets filled with croquis-like illustrations that she had stacked to one side. It was the third sheet that caught my attention. The drawing was of an ugly demon surrounded by small ghosts of the white bedsheet variety. It filled the entire sheet. There was something familiar about it but an effort was made to make the face and bat-like wings more cartoonish and less sinister. The demon held a large horn as he blew into it. That is what made it familiar. I had seen that picture before.
“Who came up with this design?” I asked.
Ella glanced over. “Oh that? I asked one of our illustrators to work off an image I saw in a book from a pile of them, over by the entrance to the old train tunnel. Kids love monsters like that, you know, but we must mind their parents.
“Whose parents? The kids’ or the monsters’?’
“The kids, silly,” giggled Ella. “She did a great job, don’t you think? Do monsters even have parents?”
“Why, yes. They do,” I said. It took a second for me to decide which to ask first because my neck hairs were practically dancing the Rumba: the books or the train tunnel? I decided to save time and go with both.
“What books in front of what train tunnel?”
She tilted her desk lamp to shine its light on a small barrister’s bookcase at the back of her cramped office. My heart stopped as I saw the titles neatly, innocently, arranged in alphabetical order on one shelf. She reached over and pulled out the Compendium of Demonology and Witchcraft, an eighteenth-century spellbook.
“Here it is,” she said, opening to the original illustration. I took the book as she handed it to me, pretended to look at it, then gently closed it and put it down. My mind was racing faster than a greyhound bus to figure out the next best step. I walked over to the bookcase. The books she had found and shelved were the crème de la crème of the damned. There was Ernst Schertel’s Magic, Theory, Practice, Perrier’s Disillusion of Sinners, and then there were the really dangerous ones: De Vermis Mysteriis, Book of Eibon, Unaussprechlichen Kulten, Cultes de Goules, The King in Yellow, and grandaddy of them all, the Necronomicon. All sitting pretty, waiting for their next sacrificial mortal looking for eternity by way of Hell. At least she did not have the revised English version of the Necronomicon called The Purple Covenant. That was something at least.
“Oh, this must have fallen off the shelf.”
She stooped to pick up a thick, pocket-sized book bound in covers of thin iron. Engraved on the front were two eyes, one opened, one closed. Legend had it those eyes would switch every now and then, opening and closing; and when both were opened the apocalypse would start.
I tensed up again and took The Purple Covenant from her and gingerly laid it down. Prolonged skin contact with that iron cover, hammered from a meteorite, was known to drive people insane.
“Show me this train tunnel,” I said with a smile through the knot forming in my chest.
I followed her out of the office. As soon as I stepped past the door a sucker punch showed me all the constellations at once and sent me down onto the floor, hard, flattening my fedora along with my face. I shook the fog off and dodged the muddy boot stomping where my head rested just a second before and got to my feet. Dieter Wagner was grinning from ear to ear.
“That felt good,” he said, shaking his hand, “but you’ve a hard head.” His other hand held a German Luger. Ella reached down to help me up.
“That’s what I’ve been told.” I fully straightened and fixed the brim of my hat without taking my eyes off him. “Look sluggo, can’t you take a hint? She doesn’t want you around.”
“It’s not her I’m after,” he said. His German accent came out a little more strongly that time. “Junior, if you please.”
A second man behind me reached into my jacket to remove my gun. So, Wagner was not alone. Whatever this was it was getting interesting.
“You wanted to see the train tunnel? Come. I will show you.”
He led the way while his friend watched us from behind, holding my gun. Junior wore glasses above a thick mustache and his ears were cauliflowered from taking too many boxing punches. Odds were he would be a bit punch-drunk, which would help because I had one ace both did not know about. From experience, and some superstition, the first two bullets in my gun were blanks. When it came time to make a move I would have a second or two of surprise and confusion to exploit. A slim chance but at least something when the opportunity arose, and it had come in handy a few times over the years.
The opening to the train tunnel was directly opposite Ella’s office, obscured by a support column and partially hidden by crates, shelving, and some operable walls used for partitioning commercial floor space. I could see light emanating from down in the tunnel when we reached its entrance. A buffer with railroad tracks extending into the opening indicated the train car would be a lot smaller than those used on the IRT Subway, but still powered by electricity. Probably just big enough to haul cargo. But from where?
“These tracks extend to the waterfront.” I made an educated guess. Otherwise, where else would they lead?
“Yah, very good,” said Wagner. “When this building was erected by the Martense Family they added this rail system. It starts from a warehouse at the waterfront. It made coming and going rather easy for me. And no, I do not know why they would build it, either.”
We stopped at the tunnel entrance. He motioned for me to pick up the lantern. I switched it on and we entered the tunnel.
The tunnel itself was unusual. The ceiling height was about twelve feet and the width was fairly wide, maybe fifteen feet. The walls were carved out of the rock facing but smooth down with cement, or something like cement. As we walked, I realized the ceiling, the floor, and the train tracks we followed along, none of them were straight. There was not a straight angle to be found. The tunnel was an oval. The walls had a subtle bulge in the middle, as did the ceiling. The ground was also uneven. The tracks slightly raised and lowered along their entire length, which reminded me of the caterpillar ride at Coney Island.
“Now you will see something even sweeter than a pretty woman,” said Wagner. “I am sorry Ella, but what we have found is much more desirable than you.”
Ella gave him a pretty good stink eye.
“So, you stuck to her like glue, hoping to keep tabs on her and her co-workers to find out if anyone noticed your activities while you putzed around this tunnel?” I kept talking, looking for opportunities to not wind up full of holes. I hated buying new suits.
“Of course. But she is also pretty to look at. For years we have searched and searched, listening to every rumor, following every lead no matter where it led or what the cost. We first learned from an antiquities dealer in Constantinople about a locked trunk that had surfaced after its owner and his entire family were murdered. This trunk was rumored to contain occult items from the alchemist Osthanes and a little known magician called the Red Salamander. It was even said that it held the Holy Grail. After a time, it resurfaced and was put up for auction in Hong Kong, but two security guards watching it the night before the auction were murdered and it disappeared again. We discovered that it had, rather oddly, returned to the person who had put it up for auction, but she also, unfortunately, died after speaking with us. But not before she had it shipped aboard the Paloma Sun bound for New York City. We learned from the ship’s manifest that the trunk was delivered to the Hidalgo Trading Company. That is when we discovered it was not in their warehouse but found this unusual transport system instead. It connects from the warehouse to here. We had been searching and digging for some time, but here we are.”
“Then,” I continued, “if I’m smelling this right, you are working for the Ahnenerbe?”
“Yah. But not for: I am the Ahnenerbe,” he curtly bowed. He enjoyed playing the college professor, all pompous and condescending, just waiting to give us a killer of a final exam. Now I knew why the FBI showed an interest in him. He was more than just another goon for the group. He was its leader. After the string of murders he casually ticked off, I wondered how many others he was responsible for.
“I don’t understand,” said Ella. “What are you both talking about?” She was scared, but seemed mostly just fed up with him.
“Well, you might as well fill us in on everything else,” I said. “We are your captive audience. How did you know where to dig?”
He turned to his quiet assistant Junior. “He is something of a dowser, though somewhat lacking in accuracy. But he does find hidden things eventually, if he drinks enough.”
Junior smiled and did a similar curtly bow.
“But why did you give those very dangerous books to Ella? I presume they were in the trunk. Why didn’t you just take everything and leave?”
“But that is the mystery for us, yah? I did not give her the books. They disappeared after we had opened the trunk. First they were there, then they were not. One of my men searching the basement at night saw them piled by her office door. He retrieved them, but again, they returned to her office. Very mysterious. I was confronting her about them when you, ah, intervened, earlier this evening.”
“I didn’t take them,” said Ella. I found them stacked by my office door one morning. They were just old, weird, books with creepy illustrations. I thought someone involved with designing the Halloween floats had left them for me for inspiration. I didn’t even remember this tunnel. No one has used it for years.”
“Now that’s interesting,” I added. “If Ella didn’t know about the books, then who moved them for her to find? Any ideas, Wagner? And who moved the trunk to this tunnel in the first place? Why here?” There were too many questions. That was the problem with the occult: always questions, few answers.
He shook his head. I could tell he was as perplexed as I was. “As long as I have the books, I no longer think about it. We will fetch them from your office and be done with it. And with you.”
He showed too much happiness after saying that. Being buried in weird tunnels was not one of my life’s goals.
We had walked far enough into the tunnel to where his men were. Three more card-carrying treasure hunters stood around a sizable hole in the ground. A large Saratoga steamer trunk, propped to one side, had been roughly cleaned enough to show two inlaid gold dragons facing each other on its front and goldleaf inlays of odd-looking symbols across its sides. Odd because I could not read them. That is rare. The brass fittings were slightly tarnished but they carried the sigil of the Order of the Golden Dawn, an occult society I thought did not dabble in the darker stuff.
“Mind if I take a peek?” I did not wait for permission.
The three men standing by the hole did not move as I approached the trunk. Inside I could see a few more books, some opaque bottles, silk vestments with what appeared to be blood stains on them, an athame with an obsidian handle, and five six-inch pre-codex clay cones, which meant they were a lot older than any of the other things in the trunk. They had cuneiform etchings. That I could read. One of the cones was broken.
“Was this cone broken when you found it?” I asked.
“Unfortunately it was broken when we forced the box open.”
“This trunk has no lock.” I observed.
“The lock was not one you could see,” said Wagner, smiling.
“I see. How then did you open it?”
He pointed for me to look deeper into the hole. I raised my lantern to shine its light into it and peered in. At the bottom were two men, one atop the other. A pool of blood still glistened where it had seeped from their cut throats. The dampness and coolness in the tunnel would have kept the blood fresh for a longer than usual amount of time, but why was it not absorbed into the ground?
Blood sacrifice was needed for his spell to work, I mouthed to myself. But it is not the blood spilled in a sacrifice that matters, it is the blood taken. I learned that subtlety from Morgan la Fay herself.
Sizing up the growing danger I was now seeing I came to realize that whoever warded the trunk knew their business, but there was something else. These jokers were amateurs playing with fire. The blood was still pooled because their spell to break the warding never completed. It was not taken. They did not open the unseen lock. Something else did. Something powerful.
“Ella, when did you find the books piled up by your door?” I asked.
She thought about it for a second. “Four days ago. I remember because I spilled my coffee bumping into them.”
“And you think you cracked the lock when?” I asked Wagner. I could tell his gray cells had begun clicking as he frowned in thought.
“Five day ago. It was a stubborn arcane lock,” he said. “Even with their blood it took days to encant the spell strong enough to break it. But how do you know of such things?”
“So you opened the trunk before the morning the books piled up in front of Ella’s door,” I said. It was not a question.
“Yah.”
“From the pieces of the broken cone I see it was a trap to hold something very old and very dangerous. My guess is your spell broke open the cone before you thought it opened the trunk. Whatever was secured in the cone then started playing you. You opened the trunk when it wanted you to. Not sure why yet. It watched you for days and maybe more than just you. There must be something about the trunk that’s important. But what? It can’t be the books, only people find power in them to abuse. Wait a minute. Why didn’t you just take the trunk and hightail it instead of waiting around to open it?” I was beginning to think he did not have a choice in the matter. He was made to open the trunk in this tunnel.
Wagner was stymied by that one. I could see he was starting to look worried.
I shot a glance at Ella. She was also meant to find the books. They were bait. I looked closer at the trunk. This time I could see the velvet cloth, lining the inside, showed bulging here and there. So what I could see were not the only things in the trunk. There was more hidden from casual view.
Then it dawned on me. My curiosity had slowed down my instinct for preservation. I held up the lantern to shine its light onto the three men. They had stood pretty motionless for three strapping young Aryan men standing around a big hole in a dark tunnel. They had not changed position since we arrived. No one had even lit up a cigarette. I moved the lantern closer to their faces. Yes. You can see it in the eyes. They catch the light in a feral way when no longer human. No longer alive.
I turned to Wagner. Behind him stood the missing mannequin, very quietly, very patiently. Junior turned to see what I was looking at and let out a cry, almost, but not before many shadows peeled away from the walls of the tunnel to surround us. They were vaguely human forms, but with limbs that bent in the wrong places, and too many. They also stood very quietly and very patiently. They were just bystanders for now. I turned back to the three jokers standing by the hole. They stared. I stared back. I could feel Wagner and his buddy raising their guns. The big, tough, bad guys were getting spooked by something bigger and badder than them. What had I stumbled onto?.
“Don’t do anything!” I said. “I don’t think those things want to harm us. Not yet. Guns would be useless anyway. Sorry boys, you are not the only sharks in this tank.”
The middleman of the three dead guys came toward me. Well, actually, he floated across the hole and got up in my face. We eyeballed each other for a few seconds, like a first date gone sour.
“What be you?” The lips hardly moved. The voice came out as slightly sibilant and somewhat bored. “Not beast. Not mortal. Not angel. Not devil. Yet you stand in the light as well as the dark.” It was the English that surprised me. Usually, I had to deal with ancient tongues or dialects, which could get really annoying when you are in a hurry. The odor coming from the dead man’s mouth was a mixture of bharudi leaves, sandalwood, and screw-pine flowers. My memory jogged a little and I took a guess.
“You like to pull the strings with mannequins as well as people, don’t you, Sutradhara.”
After a long pause, the voice said, “Yes. I remember you. You are the cursed one. The immortal mortal. You owed me something, John. What was it? Or did I owe you? My thoughts are fogged. They are no longer my own.”
“Yeah. Water under the bridge anyway. It’s been what, a few centuries, right? You don’t hang around the lower levels much. Tell me, what brings you to this place? You used the mannequins to spy on the boys here and Ella. But what’s in it for you? Someone else pulling the strings this time?”
A long stretch of silence followed my question.
“No. Yes. I must do as told.”
“You helped move the books too, so Ella would find them. Why?”
“Yes. I must do as told. The release. For eons there was no fear from it. Now there is the release. She is an innocent. She is a conduit. She is… I am told to go now. The time is not mine or yours. I must leave.”
The three men and the mannequin fell to the ground. The hollow voice went silent.
The shadows remained. Mouths, where none should be, opened into grins showing sharp teeth. Whatever It was, it had a cheering section.
Anger started burning my gut. I turned to Wagner. The lantern slipped from my hand I was so ready to snap my cap. “You fool. Whatever was trapped in that cone is free and it just scared off a god. A god!”
“I don’t understand any of this,” said Ella. Her mind was starting to shut down. She was nearing the breaking point like I was, but I can channel my breaking points from experience. She was getting ready to boil over any minute. She looked as pale as much as I felt that knot in my chest go all out Gordian.
And then it happened. Junior, still holding my gun, balled into a crumpled clump like a candy wrapper crushed by two giant invisible hands. His bloody pulp of a corpse fell to the ground. Ella fainted. Wagner jumped away, looking all around him. His arrogance had given way to abject terror. the college professor was learning a new lesson. He started shooting at the shadows until he emptied his gun. They just stared back with small red eyes and those ghastly grins. Waiting.
Ella collapsed against the wall and slowly slid down, semi-conscious.
“All right. That was a show of strength,” I yelled to the walls, my voice shaky as I tried holding it together. Whatever we were dealing with it was playing with us like chew toys. I had to use the one trick in my bag with enough power to help us.
“An tasa shi Gremory on ca!” I called the demonic enn and waited. It reverberated off the tunnel walls, gaining more volume as it rolled down the tunnel. The shadows stopped grinning.
Wagner had backed up against the tunnel wall, his face filled with fear and confusion. Probably for the first time in his life he was not in control. I ran over to Ella. She was fading. I straightened her up but left her sitting.
“We need another sacrifice for a shielding spell!” yelled Wagner. He looked at Ella, his eyes wild with fear. He started chanting a spell and looked at my gun floating in Junior’s remains. He looked at me. I stared back. We both jumped for it. He got there first but his hands kept slipping off the wet handle. He finally managed to squeeze off those two blank rounds at me. I feigned being hit but slumped into tackle mode and hit him mid-center before he could nail me again. We struggled over the gun, with him blindly shooting off three more rounds, a little too close for comfort. I landed a punch to his stomach then kicked his right leg out from under him as he released the gun into my hands.
“We must sacrifice her!” he continued yelling as he fell to the ground, pointing at Ella. It wants her!”
“You know, a sacrifice is not a bad idea,” I yelled. I had reached my breaking point and figured I best channel it constructively. I shot him point blank in the head. I make no apologies. It made me feel better. One problem solved. Lesson over.
I went back to Ella. One of his wild bullets had found her. Blood trickled from a shoulder wound. She was unconscious but would be okay, if we could get out of this mess. A rumbling slowly began from down the tunnel. The shadows retreated back into the tunnel’s walls. As the sound grew louder, a blue light grew along with it. A plume of blue lightning skittered across the tunnel’s walls. She appeared atop that stupid camel she always rode, just to annoy me knowing how much I hated that beast.
“Longinus, my five degrees Capricorn lover. Why have you–is this a tunnel?”
I had summoned the 56th spirit and the Duke of Hell who commanded 26 legions, Gremory. Yes, okay, we had a fling but that was a very long time ago.
“Gem, love. I’m in a situation here. I need some help.”
She fidgeted with her ducal crown she wore around her waist. She always fidgeted with it. “I really must find another way to wear this,” she said. “My lover, why have you–is that a treasure? You know I love treasure?”
She was looking at the Saratoga trunk with envy. She did have quite a passion for hidden treasures. As I looked at her blond hair, listened to her silky, smoky voice, and glanced at her shining gold breastplate, my reminiscence was interrupted. The two dragons facing each other on her armor were exactly like the ones on the trunk. Had I stumbled into a family affair?
“Love, focus,” I said. “Forget the trunk. Tell me what you feel. Reach out. Like you did in the old days before Jericho fell and you told me to go to hell. Which I admit was a nice vacation. But focus, please. Now!”
Her eyes flamed across the tunnel walls and beyond. She extended her arms reaching through the dimensional ether. Her face grew grave and suddenly, uncharacteristically, more serious than I could remember ever seeing.
“Harkonei Arkoneai, Adonai, nostri temporis conquiescit!” she screamed, unsheathing her sword. “They are free! May the celestial spheres protect us, they are free!” Her voice rumbled through the tunnel, shaking everything. She quickly pointed her sword into the air to inscribe a flaming sigil of power.
Yellow lightning erupted from it, crawling along the tunnel walls and over the ground summoning her legions, to make ready for war. For someone who never got scared, she was well past fear. Samsa, her camel, snorted at me. The feeling was mutual. Her black-armored generals, the most efficient warriors I had ever seen, appeared by her side carrying two-handed swords forged in the fires of Hell. Her demonic herald appeared holding a brass tray. She conjured a golden scroll in her right hand and breathed onto it, sending it floating onto the tray. In a blink the herald was gone.
She turned to me. “Tell me what happened here.” Her guards remained rigidly vigilant, ready to respond to anything.
I explained everything I knew. She bowed her head in annoyance and despair.
“Damn mortals. We can never be free of them and they will never be free of us.”
“You said a name and that made you afraid.” I said.
She thought for a moment. “We all have parents. Mortals, gods, every being in between. Some are lucky to have good parents. Some unlucky. But having parents reveals a simple truth of it all. There is a beginning and sometimes an ending. But what if your parents had no parents. Can you fathom that, John? Can you think beyond today, to yesterday, to all the yesterdays before yesterdays, to before the beginning of your time and creation? Parents have parents, John. That is the order of things, no matter what forms they take or responsibilities they acknowledge. Parents with no parents have no beginning or ending, but perpetual beginnings and endings. Creation and oblivion, again and again. The parents without parents were stopped eons ago and imprisoned. Some mortal mythologies speak of this but get it all wrong. Such thoughts go beyond mortal and immortal. If not entrapped, parents without parents are more than infinity. And because of that they create and obliterate, over and over again, without sensible purpose because that is their purpose. What has been released is the threat of annihilation, John. Of everything. Again. And just when we were settling in too. Most disappointing.”
“Okay. So, if I am understanding you right, like rampant capitalism with no off switch. Maybe a bit more than I hoped to hear. They need to be stopped. Got that, loud and clear. How?”
“For now, she must die.” She looked at Ella.
“What? Ella?” I looked at Ella and back to Gem. “No.”
“She is an innocent mortal. She must die. They have already chosen her in their dreams. I can feel them clawing through her. She is now their conduit to full awakening. By chance, perhaps, but without innocence there is no bonding. She will be corrupted and become their vessel to your reality. Once they awaken here, they will awaken in all else, to obliterate and recreate, without end. You see an innocent. I see their destroyer of worlds, the unmaker of all things. Unchecked she would awaken their heralds, the Great Old Ones, who would awaken their followers, who would awaken their alien hosts, all leading to an ending for all. Insanity personified as mortals have honed to a blade’s sharpness.
“Again, no. I promised someone I would keep her safe.” I pleaded.
“You would not be the first. You will not be the last. To keep her safe, she must die. Ironic, is it not. The immortal gods needing mortals and mortals needing immortal gods.”
She dismounted and started walking toward Ella. “Still, the bond must be broken. Once it is, they will continue to dream until another mortal ensnares one of their nightmares.”
“I don’t understand any of this.” I felt completely helpless. And I was.
“You do not need to, my love. That is what I like most about you. She will accompany me. We will ride together until her journey ends. And as for you, lover, until the stars tumble from the heavens–”
Then she and Ella were gone. Everyone was gone.
No more moments to argue. No more moments to regret. Just gone. The bond had been broken but I had failed in keeping Ella safe. That would stick with me forever. I slowly walked back to Ella’s office and phoned Ligotti. I took the books back to the trunk and explored it further. I still had to complete the job. There was a second tray, underneath the first, where the books had been taken from. There were a few more items in the second tray too, but you do not need to know what they were. I did find some things hidden in the velvet lining: a gold ring with a girasol stone that flared red in the light and an amulet, also with girasol stones. Both carried the engraved sigil of the Order of the Golden Dawn. A whisper touched my right ear with one word: Take. I thought about it for a moment then put the ring and amulet in my jacket pocket and closed the lid. I had a hunch they would come in handy some day.
Ligotti and his men arrived sometime later and I filled him in on what happened. I could be completely honest with him. He and his selected team were tasked with dealing with the stranger things in life. As for the books and the rest of the contents of the Saratoga trunk, I had the librarians from Miskatonic University in Massachusetts come down to retrieve them. Our paths had crossed before and I knew their special abilities where occult artifacts were concerned would provide the best safeguards to keep those books from foolish hands. Until the next time. There is always a next time.
And what of those parents without parents? I simply do not know. Hopefully they will keep sleeping for a few more eons but you never know with gods. Only time will tell. As for gods, they have all the time in the world and beyond on their side. And we only have all the fools on ours. If I were a betting man, the match would not make a good bet at all.
copyright John Michael Cozzoli