The grad-cultist’s scarred hide was as pale and wan as his rigid smile, but his blood was hot and bright as it spilled forth from his ritual punctures, gliding in hot streaks over the surface of the grey slate blade he chopped with.
“Phyla!” he sang, the notes turning to gurgles as Dr. Rodney Burke ducked under his swing and his pistol uttered a sharp retort through the madman’s robes and into his heart. “Phyla!” called the grad’s fellow doorman, still engaged in a deadly dance of death with Dr. Burke’s assistant, the plucky and game Head Nurse Nancy Wittling. “It comes, the hour is done. Phyla! Urk!”
“I must go!” shouted the professor at his comrade, who had her hands full of scrawny neck. “Be strong!”
“Hnnh,” grunted Nancy, slowly bearing down on the vertebrae of her whimpering foe. Dr. Burke felt shame at abandoning a woman to such frightful violence alone, but as his aching legs propelled him up the great stone steps of the Cyclop’s Staircase, slick underfoot with the rain and damp, a greater horror began to dwell in his heart. The hour WAS done; his Swiss watch told him so. At midnight precise/the sacrifice that ABOMINABLE translation they had found in Doolaughter’s half-burnt notes had claimed, and now ‘twas nine past twelve. Perhaps the ritual had run late? Perhaps a stray blow suffered during the car chase had set his watch ahead? Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps, but if wishes were fishes the world would smell foul. Fear lent wings to his feet, and those wings set him at last upon the final height of the Staircase, a blackened basalt-black plateau overlooking the sea and topped with a tasteful pagoda for the shelter of gentle tourist families during the holiday season.
It was not empty, but no innocent babes nor bawling infants nor sullen teens occupied it. No, atop a seagull-scarred picnic table, all the more ominous for its modest surroundings, lay that maddening tapestry of the perverse, the biologist’s-bane, the thing that had driven many a PhD to their demise, the Bermuus Shale. A flash of distant lightning illuminated the nightmarish forms and features whose fossilized remains lay chained within its icy grip, every shape a sight undreamt of by saner minds. Huddled underneath its hideous grotesqueries, prone upon the ground, lay the motionless form of a human body.
“No!” gasped Burke, and his weapon dropped from fingers now numb with dread. “Too late!”
“Yeh,” mumbled a voice.
Burke started so badly he would’ve dropped his gun again were he still holding it. That voice, those thick and mumbling syllables, that thick and phlegmy inflection clotted richly with the syrup of academic resentment… “Doolaughter?” exclaimed Burke.
“Down here.”
Burke looked down there.
“No. Here. Over HERE,” said the mad archivist in annoyance, and it was only when he started waving his arm in exasperation that Burke realized that the forlorn frame of what he’d assumed to be a human sacrifice was in fact Doolaughter.
“What the devil have you done?” demanded Burke.
“About half the bottle,” said Doolaughter morosely. “Want some? It’s Darcc-Ichor, from the buried vault of the Sealed Abbey. Bottled by the cannibal abbot himself, old Petrichlorias – the last of its kind. Tastes a bit like piss.”
Burke took the bottle, sniffed it, and immediately put it down on the picnic table next to the Shale. “Why give up now?” he demanded. “After the obsession, the thefts, the MURDERS, for god’s sake – you know that Chief Librarian Phillipson was like a father to us both! And now here, at the very time and place you obsessed over, equipped with every tool your madness demanded you seize, you gave up at the final hurdle.”
“Did not,” sulked Doolaughter. “Look.”
“I did, I just don’t want any of it.”
“No, LOOK.”
Burke looked and followed the long gnarled length of Doolaughter’s ink-blotted finger out to the sea, which was flat and black and strangely motionless for such a storm and oh.
“My god,” he said faintly.
“No,” said Doolaughter, bitterness in every word. “Mine.”
The carapace very nearly filled the horizon. Far down the coastline a pair of gently-wavering tendrils eddied through the gloomy clouds, sprouting from depths unknown and reaching into the blackened sky. Antenna great and terrible beyond all reckoning, gathering information and delivering them to a mind all out of scope and of an antiquity whose vastness was fit to crumble a human’s soul. The great and scuted back flexed and turned with the impossible speed of the very large, and the tides danced at its motions.
“What have you done?” gasped Burke.
“I have done as I wished. I have brought the secret phylum from the depths of the lost journals of Erasmus Darwin unto the light of the skies; I have called it with dark strong liquid and bright young flesh and offered it the earth and the seas and the sky; I have thrown into the wind the names and deeds of every secret name of every man of science and natural philosophy that had ever wished it to sleep forever, and I have bestirred the eldest deity of this world to waking life once more.”
They stood there – Burke stood there; Doolaughter remained content to slump under the picnic table.
“What is it doing?” asked Burke at last.
Doolaughter finished another gulp of Darcc-Ichor. “Eating seaweed.”
“What?”
“It’s eating seaweed!” exploded the mad archivist. “I have bestirred the eldest deity of this world to waking life once more AND IT’S EATING SEAWEED.”
“Where?”
“Down there. Look. No, LOOK. Do you need glasses?”
“It’s very dark right now.”
“And you’re not looking the right way. Down there, – no, there, next to the antennae. See?”
Burke saw at last. A myriad of tree-sized but relatively-tiny little limbs, each bedecked with soft-looking fringes, were combing through the waves like a mother her daughter’s hair before bed-time. After several passes of this, the appendage would be brought up to the rim of a seemingly small and dainty mouth adorned with several sets of nested jaws, which would shovel the rich dripping-green harvest down the god’s gullet.
“My goodness,” said Burke.
“No,” said Doolaughter, suddenly fierce as Burke had expected him to be. “My GODLINESS. I spent decades suspecting this, years preparing this – do you know how hard it is Burke, to be the only man to look the unthinkable in the eye and dare not blink from its implications? I saw what thousands of generations dared not imagine, and I acted upon it, and I gave the world what it wanted – what it needed, what was RIGHT – and now it’s out there eating seaweed.”
They watched the god eat some more seaweed. Burke watched; Doolaughter finished the bottle and then threw it onto the ground, where it shattered.
“I take it back; piss is better. Why are you still here? Go away.”
“You must be brought to justice,” muttered Burke. He was still trying to grasp the scale at work here; the horizon from this altitude should be at least –
“For what? Depleting local algae supplies?”
“You killed our mentor and six esteemed and venerable scholars!”
“And I’m pretty sure you didn’t get up here without punching the cards of a few of my guards so I’d say we’ve both got each other sewn up.”
“They were only grad students,” said Burke, defensively.
“Grad students with rich families; it’s a lot harder to convince young people to get involved with this sort of thing when they aren’t bored stiff, and NOBODY’S more bored than the wealthy.” Doolaughter rubbed his face. “Hell, maybe you’re right: you probably did them a favour more than anything. The disappointment would’ve killed them. Do you know, I really expected a new age? Old truths made manifest. All the mysteries unfurled and revealed, whatever the costs. A time when we would become free and wild and beyond good and evil, when laws and morals would be thrown aside and all men would shout and kill and revel in joy.”
“It still might happen,” said Burke. He eyed the broken glass with distaste and picked his pistol back up. “When it’s done eating the seaweed.”
“I think it’ll have a nap next,” said Doolaughter nastily. “Do you hear that?”
“Hear what?”
“That. That noise. I think it’s an airplane.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“This is exactly what drove me mad about all the rest of you – nobody pays any attention. There, see those lights? A plane!”
“A bomber,” said Burke, whose nephew was in the navy.
“An American bomber,” said Doolaughter. “And that’s a bomb.”
“What?” said Burke, and then the explosion happened. It was shockingly bright even at their great distance from it, and in its false dawn the full extinct of the being below them was – if not made clear – made more evident. Like an iceberg, much more of it was still underwater than they’d thought.
“Atomics!” shouted Burke.
“Yes,” said Doolaughter.
“Truly, the ingenuity of humanity may yet earn us a reprieve from this awful doom you have – in the name of Christ, the fiend yet lives!”
“Yep.”
“And yet how it – what is it doing?”
“Flinching.”
Indeed, the whole horizon was now a lot less chitinous than had previously been the case; much of the shell that had filled the bay was hunched in a great swelling ripple of distaste and surprise.
“Oh,” said Burke. The water was beginning to swirl against the pillar in heavy waves as the god began to beat a retreat into open water. “Wait, where’s it going?”
“Oh who fucking cares, back wherever it came from I expect,” said Doolaughter. “We’ve scared it so it’s hiding.” He rubbed his skeletal palms against his face, shoulders shaking with emotions wholly unsuppressed but too complex to express. “We’ve called it out of its nap and fed it and we’ve scared it so now it’s going back to bed I SPENT MY LIFE’S WORK ON THIS BURKE.”
Burke didn’t know what to say, so he didn’t.
“I need another drink. Do you have a drink?”
“No. But Ms. Wittling has a medicinal flask in her left boot for emergencies, and I expect she’ll be waiting at the car by now.”
“You’re just trying to get me to go to prison quietly.”
“On my honour, I am n-”
“Do you think they’ll have a drink there?”
“Well-”
“I like those odds. Let’s get the hell out of here.”
“What about the Shale?”
“What ABOUT it? Besides, the thing weighs a ton.”
***
The storm passed, the night waned, the car made several stops and turned off.
And far beneath the continental crust, in a recently-reoccupied house, a presence slept like the dead once more, dreaming of soft tasty green and startlingly bright little lights.
Waiting is more than half the fun anyways.