Gaze of the sleeping god

The garish yellow Plymouth Dodge pulled into the motel car-park just before dusk.  The driver went to reception and a few minutes later came out and drove to a unit at the rear of the sprawling, one-story complex.  He was tall, skinny, face young but dark hair greying at the temples.  High cheeks and a sharp nose, a forgettable face, except for the eyes – bright green, crinkled at the corners, bright with intelligence.  He got out, squinting in the strong Wyoming sunset, and went to his room.  He came back and looked around – carefully, nervously – before opening the boot.

Inside were several thousand dollars in cash bundled up in shopping bags, a folio of shocking and physically impossible anatomical sketches, a bronze sword thousands of years older than the known history of metal-working and – securely gagged, hands tied behind her back – a woman.

She was short, slim, with mousy brown hair in a pony-tail and warm brown eyes, currently bright with anger.

The man pulled her upright and hurried her into the motel room, glancing around once more to ensure no-one saw them.

***

Clara-June had been scared for the first day after the man – Nigel – kidnapped her.  Then she’d decided to be angry instead.  Maybe anger could burn through the fear.  What was odd was that it worked.  She thought the drugs probably helped – every twelve hours, Nigel put a syringe of something into her arm.  It made her slow and weak, barely able to stand, let alone shout or fight.  She thought maybe it killed the fear as well.  Otherwise it didn’t diminish her faculties much.  For example, she was very clear that Nigel was batshit insane.

Clara-June was a waitress at a truck-stop, in the middle of nowhere, Wyoming.  She’d seen Nigel’s car when he arrived, noted not so much the garish colour as the fact it wasn’t a pick-up truck.  Nigel had come in, had pecan pie and coffee.  He’d been polite, a little diffident.  His accent wasn’t local and he told her he was from the mid-west.  He’d seemed harmless.  Then, after her shift, when she was walking the mile back to her apartment, he’d crept up behind her and clamped a rag soaked in chloroform over her face.

That was two days ago.  They’d spent the days driving, Clara-June locked in the trunk, last night in a different motel.  “Not much longer now,” Nigel said as he walked her to the bed and carefully sat her down.  “Tomorrow.  Tomorrow the stars will be aligned and we will go to the caverns of N’Kei where the god Tsathoggua will grant us his bounty and lie with you.  You will be the mother of the Tsathoggua’s heir, a half-human god who will conquer a new kingdom.  And we will be the power behind the throne.”  He blinked and ran a hand through his greying hair.  “Don’t worry,” he added.  “You’ll be safe.  I’ll look after you.”  He half-smiled.

Clara-June turned away.  All that sounded utterly horrific, she thought, but there was something about him, a mix of condescension and physical cowardness, hesitancy, in the way he handled her, that made it hard to be scared of him.  Easy to be scornful, but hard to be scared.  Plus, he was clearly delusional.  Still, this was probably going to end badly.  Clara-June resolved – again – to attack him when she could but the drugs were making it hard to sit upright.  Nigel lower her onto the pillow, sideways, with a care that would have been touching rather than deeply creepy in other circumstance.

“I’ll look after you,” Nigel repeated.  “People hurt me, you know – my tutors, my brothers.  Not that I’m complaining” he added with a smile, “it was necessary.  I had hard lessons to learn.  We all did.  I’m just saying… I won’t let anyone hurt you.”

“I have something to show you,” he added.  “These are sketches.  They were drawn over a century ago, in Paris.  The artist was taking drugs and I believe he died of a brain haemorrhage shortly afterward.”  He went out to the car.  Clara-June tried to get up.  She just about managed to roll onto her stomach before Nigel came back and mentally cursed herself as he arranged pillows, then lifted her to a sitting position.  He was surprisingly strong.

Nigel brought out a folder of papers.  From the way he handled then she could tell they were precious to him.  Even without that she’d have known they were old, fragile and yellowed.  He adjusted the bedside lamp and Clara-June frowned as she tried to make sense of what she was seeing.

They were sketches of something that looked… almost like a man.  Front views, back views, close-ups of the head and hands and limbs.  But the skin was wrong, yellow and black, patterned like some great constrictor snake.  The head was hairless and the eyes were yellow and pupiless.  The hands – palms as well as fingers – and the arms and legs bent too much, like snakes, and there was an oddly boneless quality to all of it that made Clara-June feel sick.  The artist was clearly very talented, she thought, but if these were accurate she wouldn’t want to meet – it.  Then she cursed herself.  This was the drawing equivalent of the mad ravings of a drug-addled artist, of course it wasn’t real!  It was just another fantasy Nigel had incorporated into his fantasy world.  Like that fucking sword she kept bumping her head on in the boot of the car – the sword of Athammaus, executioner of Commoriom, according to Nigel.  He said it was twenty thousand years old.  Clara-June wasn’t a historian but she was pretty fucking sure bronze wasn’t that old.  Still, she doubted it had been knocked up in Hollywood last year.  The leather-wrapped handle smelt of oil and old blood and the single edge looked to have been honed many, many times.

With an effort, she paid attention to what Nigel was saying.  “The doom that came to Commoriom, Knygathin Zhaum.  Tsathoggua’s last child.  He let them capture him and Athammaus executed him.  Cut his head off.  Three times.  It didn’t work.”  He smiled.  “You don’t believe me, do you?  You will, after you meet Tsathoggua.  And when your child is born, it’ll be like Knygathin Zhaum.  Protean, amorphous, able to heal anything.  Unstoppable.”

Clara-June managed a derisive snort.  Nigel smiled.  “Commoriom was the greatest city of the age, capital of the greatest kingdom in the world.  And the spawn of Tsathoggua destroyed it.  They couldn’t stop him, not with swords or fire or magic.  He waked through the city and killed everyone who didn’t run.  And your child will have that same power.”

Nigel rubbed her forehead, frowned in concern.  “You look tired.  I’m sorry.  After tomorrow we’ll find somewhere more permanent and I’ll be able to untie you.  Once you see the god Tsathoggua, once you’re blessed with his child, you won’t want to fight me anymore.”

Keep telling yourself that, arsehole, Clara-June thought.  Nigel quickly untied her gag.  She tried to form the word arsehole but her lips moved slowly, without sound.  Tears of impotent fury pricked her eyes and she blinked them back, not willing to let this man see her cry.

Nigel fed her – pot noodle again, patiently lifting forkfuls to her mouth – then helped her walk to the toilet.  Balancing was hard and wiping with hands tied behind her back a nightmare but at least he left her alone for that.  After that he helped her back to the bed, untied and re-tied her hands on the frame and then carefully positioned a pillow under her head.  She didn’t fight as he injected her again and sleep came quickly.

***

The next day they left early.  It was still barely dawn when they reached their destination.  Clara-June watched, eyes narrowed, as Nigel used wire-cutters to open a gap in the chain-link fence before pulling her out of the car.  Once they were through the fence, he removed her gag.

Clara-June opened and closed her mouth a few times, grateful to be able to move her face.  Nigel hadn’t drugged her again, which would have been great except he’d gone even more paranoid overboard with the ropes.  Her wrists were tied behind her back with interlocking cable-ties.  Worse, her elbows were tied together, which was a stretch – her neck was wrenched and her shoulders felt like they were on fire.  Her ankles were bound in heavy leather cuffs, attached by a length of nylon rope just over a foot long so she could only shuffle.

She blinked as she looked around and realised where they were.    There was a car-park, and then a low hillock with a plywood visitor centre beside and on it.  She’d come here as a child.  “Nigel, this is Mammoth Caves,” she said, looking at the sign.  “It’s one of the biggest tourist attractions in the state.  Thousands of people come here every year.  I’ve had a birthday here.  The caves are really, really well explored.  You said… Sa-thogga lived in an unknown cave.”  Also, you are an arsehole and I am going to kill you, she mentally added.

Nigel grinned, like a child who’d done something clever.  “The caverns of N’Kai.  I’m glad you were paying attention.  It’s nice to know something about your husband.”

“You don’t have any creepy pictures of him?”

“No.  He doesn’t look like Knygathin Zhaum though.”

Well thank fuck for that, Clara-June thought.  Wait, no, not real, remember?

“OK, going back to the bit where he sleeps undisturbed in caverns unknown by mortal men?  These caves are very… un-unknown.”

“N’Kai only intersects with this place when the stars are right.”  He laughed.  “I did the calculations.”

“Right.  Geography and space don’t work that way, Nigel.”

“Because space is fixed and parallel lines never meet?”  He smiled – proud, excited.  “But they can, in… other geometries.  I told you, I did the calculations.  I’ll show you later, if you’re interested.”

“Hard pass.”

Nigel laughed, gently, condescendingly.  Arsehole.  “It’s lucky it’s President’s Day and this place is closed… or is it more than luck?”  He smiled.  “Come on, let’s meet your fate.”

“You know, you could still let me go,” she said as he walked her towards the plywood visitor centre.  “I don’t know your last name.”

“Let you go back to what?  Waitressing at a cafe in the middle of nowhere, living in that glorified truck-stop?”  He shook his head.  “No, I couldn’t do it.  You deserve more...  This way, you’ll be a queen.”

“I don’t want to be a queen.  Besides, you don’t know me.  I like my job.  And outside of that I have… stuff going on.  I have a fulfilling life.”  OK, that wasn’t exactly true, Clara-June thought sourly.  Even Nigel didn’t look like he was buying it.

“I will let you go… afterwards,” Nigel said, face and voice suddenly hard, taking her elbow and pulling her forwards.  “After you see, after you understand.  You’ll meet the god and he’ll sire a child on you and it will be transcendent.  Your old life will be swept away like ashes and you’ll bless the day you met me.”

“That is some fucked up rape-fantasy shit, Nigel.”

Clara-June had a sinking feeling she was running out of time.  She grabbed hold of her anger, hidden – any waitress knew how to conceal anger, how to smile at an arsehole – but white-hot.  She watched Nigel carefully.  Maybe if he had to break a window to get into the visitor centre and the entrance to the caves, she could push him on the glass -

He stopped and pulled a key out of his pocket.  Clara-June sighed.

***

They were in the caves.  Nigel had a flash-light, from the pile of kit behind the reception disk.  Also, they were both wearing hard yellow plastic helmets.  The health and safety touch felt incongruous to Clara-June.  She supposed Nigel wanted to keep his sacred god-womb safe.  She glanced at him, wondering for the hundredth time how he’d react when they didn’t find the caves of N’Kai and the god Tsathoggua.  Maybe he thought he was Tsathoggua?  Then…

Clara-June clamped down on her fear, focussing her anger.  It helped that her shoulders were burning white-hot, her feet rubbed raw as they walked down the twisting caves.  She glared at Nigel.  The last traces of drug were out of her system, she thought.  She’d waited long enough, it was time.  She’d rush him, smash him into a wall, bite his throat out, do something –

“Ah!” he said.  “There.”

Clara-June stared.  She didn’t remember the caves perfectly – it had been her twelth birthday – but that opening look… wrong.  Like it shouldn’t be there.  Like it wasn’t there, like some kind of fault in her vision.  But it was.  A cut in the pale beige wall of the cave, twice as high as a man and a couple of feet wide.  As Nigel led her into the new tunnel, the sound of their footsteps changed.  It’s just because it’s narrower, Clara-June told herself.  OK, the air smells different, it’s warmer, it seems really humid which makes no sense and the walls are a completely different, much darker and rougher stone – basalt? -  but this is not the caverns of N’Kai.

The torchlight picked out bones on the floor.  Nigel quickly pulled it up.  “Don’t worry yourself about them, dear,” he murmured, looking ahead.  Clara-June swallowed, grateful he’d lifted the beam – hating that gratitude, hating him, but there’d been something wrong with those bones.  Especially the skull she’d glimpsed for a heart-stopping second.  Human, but slightly off somehow.  She tried not to hear as their feet brushed past what sounded like dried wood.  Nigel led her through another narrow pass and she realised a second too late that would have been a good place to try smashing him into the wall – OK it was a fucking bad idea but it was all she had.  And then –

This chamber was larger.   The air was even warmer and moister and Clara-June suddenly realised she could hear breathing – slow and deep, quiet but suggesting something huge.  It was almost like… snoring.  The skin on the back of her neck prickled.  Nigel’s torchlight picked out a form at the far side of the chamber and Clara-June gasped.

It was curled up, almost foetal position, facing toward them.  Lying on its side.  Its flank bulked twelve feet above the cavern floor and its – hands? Paws? – were larger than a man’s chest.  The fur was dark, glinting in the torchlight.  Its mouth was huge, flat lips wider than a tall man’s height.  Its head was shaped – in spite of the fur – more like a toad’s than anything else.  Great ears like a bat’s half-curled over its eyelids.  And, yes, it was snoring.

“Tsathoggua,” Nigel murmured.  It sounded like a declaration of love.  Clara-June stared at the impossible, huge, furred sleeping – thing.  Monster.  God.  Her mind went blank, beyond anger, beyond fear, for long seconds.  She realised Nigel was pulling her towards the creature.

Clara-June watched, too stunned to speak, or fight or run.  The god was sleeping on a mound – bed? – of some kind of vegetation.  And there were other tunnels out of there, Clara-June realised.  Some of them looked wrong, like the way the tunnel in had been hard to focus on, but even more so.  She had a sense they didn’t all lead back to Earth.

Nigel bowed before Tsathoggua, which slept on undisturbed.  He muttered phrases in weird languages that made the skin of Clara-June’s neck crawl.  He made gestures.  Clara-June watched, too shocked by the mere existence of the creature to be scared, not even thinking of escaping.  Finally, trembling, he reached out and touched the huge face.  The snoring stopped and the ears twitched back.

Mistake, Clara-June thought, with a sudden icy certainty.

Those great eyes snapped open.  Larger than a man’s head and – impossibly, even by the standard of that cave and the things they’d seen – with no pupil or iris but orange, blazing like liquid fire.  They were actually shedding light, darker than the white torch-beam but far stronger, illuminating the cave to its limits.  Clara-June’s breath caught in her throat as that heavy amber light fell upon her.  It felt wrong, toxic, like insects crawling on her skin.  She thought of radiation, the navy men  - her great-grandfather among them - who’d done the tests at Bikini Atoll and other places, burnt by invisible fires.

Tsathoggua rolled to its feet, impossibly quickly for something so huge, impossibly agile for something just woken from a sleep of aeons.  Its body and limbs moved too smoothly, an almost liquid snake-like grace.  It roared.  That sounds, like the light from its eyes, seemed to burn into Clara-June’s skin.  She fell to her knees, eyes wide in terror.  It hunched on its knuckles, shoulders and head lowered but still almost twenty feet tall, long arms and sloped shoulders like a sloth.  Then it leaned forwards, mouth opening, and a slimy muscular tongue shot out and slapped into Nigel.  It must have been sticky because when it pulled back it carried Nigel with it, into that gaping mouth.  His screech of pain was abruptly cut off as Tsathoggua bit down, chewing noisily.  Clara-June screamed in horror.  Tsathoggua swallowed and turned to her.  The terrible amber fire of that gaze fell on her, locked her gaze, and suddenly she couldn’t breath.  The light from those eyes was boring into her, like fire, like radiation -  no, she thought distantly, unaware of anything beyond the gaze of the sleeping god.  She’d been wrong.  Not radiation.  Something else, she could feel it pouring into her, not burning but changing, her body shaking –

Tsathoggua coughed, looked down and the spell was broken.  Clara-June gasped, sagging forward as though released.  Tsathoggua hawked and spat and something – Nigel’s car-keys, wet with blood – landed at the floor beside her.  The god cleared its throat a few times, glanced at her once more with complete indifference, then lay down on its nest and closed its eyes.  With that orange light obscured the cave was abruptly pitch-black.  Clara June knelt there in darkness, trembling, eyes wide, scarcely daring to breath.  She heard the god turn over rustling as it got comfortable.  There was silence for a few seconds.  Then Tsathoggua started snoring again.  Clara-June shook her head in disbelief.  Then, incredibly, she felt herself also falling asleep.

***

She came up from half-remembered dreams, of transforming orange fire and a huge indifferent god, of not-quite human limbs bending with a loathsome plasticity, and found herself in Mammoth Caves.  It was almost pitch-black but there was light coming from somewhere, from the gift-shop area.  Clara-June rolled over and, still half-asleep, wriggled and pulled until one arm slipped free of the bonds at wrist and elbow.  Then she pulled them off the other one, tugged the cuffs over her feet and walked towards the light.

Outside, in the sun, Clara-June stopped, glanced at her feet and frowned. Surely those cuffs had been too tight to go over her ankles, around her heels?  Come to that – she looked at her arms.  The skin on her wrists and elbows was mottled, bruises yellow-black and almost serpentine, like -

Like Knygathin Zhaum.  Clara-June shuddered, gripped her right hand with her left, obscurely relieved to feel bones beneath her skin.  She felt her shoulders, her ribs, the bone at the corner of her jaw.  Were they… softer, more flexible, somehow?  But she didn’t feel weaker.  Lighter, maybe, but if anything quicker, stronger.  Fantastic, actually, considering she’d spent most of the last three days tied up.

So… what had happened?  Clara-June was different, she knew that.  Changed.  She thought of Nigel’s pictures, his story about Knygathin Zhaum – amorphous, boneless.  He’d said Tsathoggua had sired the protean spawn on a mortal woman… but that didn’t seem right, she thought.  It was more like what had happened – had started to happen – to her.  Transformed by the fire of his gaze.  She shuddered.  Recalling those pictures, she was very, very lucky she’d only caught a small dose of it.  She remembered Tsathoggua looking at her, caught helpless in that amber light, until the god broke off to spit up Nigel’s car keys, for all the world like a cat with a hairball.  And then losing interest.  Going back to sleep.  She laughed, a little wildly.

She slipped easily through the cut fence, barely pausing to bend the wire out of her way.  She glanced at Nigel’s car and thought about the money in the boot.  And the sword.  The executioner’s sword.

Nigel had been crazy, Clara-June though.  Not wrong, astoundingly enough, but crazy.  She wasn’t sure if he was a monster or a victim or both.  But she thought of him talking about his order, his teachers, those men in the Midwest.  Dangerous men, who’d set someone like Nigel loose on the world.  Who knew about things like the god Tsathoggua.  She sighed.  She couldn’t go back to her life as a waitress yet.

The garish yellow Plymouth Dodge left Mammoth Caves shortly before noon.  The woman driving it wasn’t who she’d been three days ago, or even that morning – she had a mission, bad people to deal with, whatever it took.  Physically, too, she’d changed.  The only visible sign was her eyes -  an orange-brown instead of brown, shifted slightly towards the colour of Tsathoggua’s gaze.